Immunity for Cop Punching: re-working self-defense laws to prevent police brutality
Two years after the gruesome murder of George Floyd (seen above), state legislatures have passed more laws to protect drivers who run over protestors than laws who protect people who use violence to interrupt police brutality.
Oklahoma’s driver immunity law is especially grotesque. It provides criminal and civil immunity for running someone over if you are fleeing a riot and exercise “due care”. The law also holds anyone who participates in a riot in which murder, maiming, robbery, rape or arson took place legally responsible as if they had commit the crime themselves. The law is currently under review by the 10th Circuit.
Iowa, the state that can proudly boast of being the only state to try a journalist in connection to the George Floyd protests, Andrea Sahouri of the Des Moines Register (prosecuted by Brad Kinkade and Brecklyn Carey) also expanded crash-into-leftist-activist immunity.
These laws may provide a useful model for laws that protect civilians who use force to interrupt police brutality. It wouldn’t be hard to move some words around to give ordinary civilians immunity for assaulting officers if they believe they are using unlawful force, and exercise “due care”.
A few of the witnesses at the trial of Derek Chauvin, especially MMA fighter Donald Williams and Minneapolis firefighter Genevieve Hansen openly wept during their testimony because they could not, and did not, do anything to save Floyd. Police terror doesn’t only make you hate the police, it also makes you hate yourself.
Hansen was specific in what she would have done in a medical sense, and what the police who murdered Floyd could have done, besides not kneeling on his neck.
But Williams acknowledged at trial that he wished he could have attacked the officers to save Floyd, confirming that he wanted “to beat the shit” out of them. Unfortunately for Floyd, he did not act on these feelings
Anyone who intervened to save Floyd’s would be in jail instead of Chauvin. If someone had knocked Chauvin’s knee of Floyd’s neck, or better yet, punched him in his stupid face, they most likely would have been charged for assaulting an officer, and might still be in prison. Such a hero would not have received the union-funded defense that Chauvin received, and would have been lucky just to leave the scene alive and in one piece.
If someone had used violence to prevent the murder of George Floyd, I consider it likely that Chauvin would not have been charged with anything. I think, at least in hindsight, the decision by onlookers, understandable though it was, to not intervene is only justified now that Chauvin is in prison for murder.
We need laws that explicitly protect people who interrupt police brutality. They also need immunity if they interrupt an officer that they reasonably believed was using unlawful force, even if the interrupter was mistaken. This immunity will sometimes be exercised when wrong, but better so than not exercised at all.
Police are protected if they accidentally arrest an innocent person in good faith, if they injure a person in good faith or by genuine accident. But an ordinary civilian is not protected for assaulting an officer in good faith. It should be up to a jury to decide if the intervention was reasonable or not. It is important for police to understand that if they assault people, there may be immediate and violent consequences to them for it, just like how most non-police officers understand that assaulting a stranger may end badly for them.
Colorado also has a law that can be studied when considering this immunity legislation. Police in Colorado are required by law to intervene when they observe a fellow officer using unlawful force, and failure to do so is a class 1 misdemeanor, which can carry a sentence from 6 to 24 months. Any officer convicted of failing to intervene, or found civilly liable, is permanently banned from being a peace officer in Colorado unless later exonerated by a court.
One of the first instances of this new law being put into practice was when Aurora officer Francine Martinez did nothing as her colleague John Haubert drew his firearm on civilian Kyle Vinson for no apparent reason and then brutally pistol-whipped him until he bled profusely from his head(see body cam below).
Francine Martinez is due to begin trial August 17, 2022 in Arapahoe County, and John Haubert is due to be arraigned on June 13, 2022, according to court records I obtained.
This is one of the more important victories of the 2020 protests, in my humble opinion, though it is a small one. Citizens in all other states are effectively forbidden from doing what Colorado officers are required to do: interrupt thug cops from terrorizing the public. I wouldn’t require intervention on the part of ordinary civilians, but allowing it is a good start.
Like most restrictions on police power, this one begins with the abuse of police power. Such a right would have been useful when Broward County deputies pepper sprayed, punched, and bashed a teenaged boy’s face into the pavement for no reason:
It also would have been useful when Miami Gardens police officer Jordy Martel dragged a pregnant woman from her car, kneeled on her neck, and tased her stomach.
The combination of hit-and-run-if-its-Antifa laws (which should be revised if not repealed) and the Colorado intervention law (which should be universal) provide a useful framework for laws that need to exist, and would have protected bystanders if they had chosen to save George Floyd’s life, or any of the other victims of police terrorism.
