Make Fearless Fosdick Fiction Again

 

Probably few people remember or know of Fearless Fosdick.  He appeared from time to time as a parody of Dick Tracy in a strip within a strip in  Al Capp’s L’il Abner as Abner’s comic strip  hero.  Among other quirks and shortcomings, he had the unfortunate habit of randomly blowing away innocent bystanders in his pursuit of the villains. It was good, silly, often black humor, and Capp ran the gag for years.

In real life careless, trigger happy cops are not funny at all, but rather a menace to the lives and property of people around them.  On the evidence there are plenty of them out there and plenty of cases where they behaved badly. We hear more about it in the news when the victim black, but that is because such shootings are exploitable politically. It is an equal opportunity problem.  Whites, blacks,  Hispanics Asians, American Indians, men, women, and kids have been gunned down unnecessarily.

The case of Breonna Taylor has been in the news recently. She was an innocent bystander killed by cops who broke into her apartment in the middle of the night and got in a gunfight with her boyfriend who is said to have assumed he was facing a home invasion from criminals.  She was shot five times, while her boyfriend was only wounded. (He was charged with assault  and  attempted murder of a police officer, but all charges have been dropped.)  Several shots from the cops went into an adjacent occupied apartment. It was a drug raid, but no drugs were found in the apartment.

It is hard to see how Taylor’s killing was not at least negligent homicide. It is a rudimentary rule of basic training in safety with guns that one does not fire until one has identified one’s target.  Parents teach it  to kids learning to shoot with their first .22s or BB guns.  Yet a group of professionals with years of training and opportunity to practice forgot or ignored it, and seemingly blasted away like Fearless Fosdick.

At a time when leftists are encouraging looters and rioters and spreading false claims that all or most policemen are trigger happy bigots, it is appropriate to  “back the blue” and oppose  the crimes and nonsense.  However reforms are needed.  The United States should ban Gestapo and KGB style middle of the night raids, whether no knock or not, as unnecessary and too dangerous, both for the raiders and the victims. (There might  be a case for well defined exceptions for a Ma Barker or a Baby Face Nelson, but the exceptions should be rare, and even then care should be taken not to harm bystanders.)  Cops should be held to at least the same standards and requirements as the rest of us for using guns safely and for demonstrating that a use of force was appropriate. As a small practical step, it might be a good idea to switch officers back from large magazine semiautomatics to five or six shot revolvers as sidearms.  It is surely a good idea to train officers to understand that policemen and soldiers in combat  are different things, operating in different environments and  under different rules and to behave accordingly.

Fearless Fosdick should be only in archives of the funny papers, not on the streets.

Getting Less Trigger Happy

In the last few years there have been  a number of stories of policemen shooting people who did not need to be shot. The shootings  have ranged from panicky overreactions to criminally negligent mistakes to murders.  In some cases  officers have fired as many as fifteen rounds at unarmed suspects.  Training cops better and holding them responsible for their actions  in the same way a civilian would be held responsible for his are obvious things which could help make bad shootings  less likely.  So, I think, would changing the way policemen are armed. I would like to see police give up their large magazine semiautomatics and go back to revolvers. With a fifteen round magazine  in a semiautomatic, there can be a tendency to bang away as fast as one can pull the trigger without much thought.  Target shooters talk about seeing people  going trigger happy with  semiautomatic pistols (or rifles) at public shooting ranges.  With a six shot wheel gun, particularly one  fired single action to increase accuracy, there can be a tendency to think and aim before shooting and between shots. Revolvers are perfectly adequate sidearms that served police well for many years. For those who accept the claims that the .38 special round is not powerful enough for police work,  there are  the .357  and  .44 magnums which surely have adequate stopping power. Making this change seems a minor thing, but it would not hurt and could help some.

Citizens and Cops

“If you don’t like the police, the next time you need help, call a hippie”

                       -bumper sticker circa 1970

The remaining  real hippies and ex-hippies  are  past sixty now, and the millennial wannabes  are weak epigones,  but in the case of one unfortunate   woman from Minneapolis,  it might have been a good idea to take that rude, old slogan literally.  According to reports Justine Ruszczyk  called the police to report a fight or assault in her neighborhood.  Two cops arrived with their the body cameras turned off in violation of their rules, and one of them shot and killed her.  Months before a policeman in the same city shot and killed Philandro  Castile, a law abiding citizen,  during a traffic stop when Castile mentioned he had a legally allowed gun in his possession.  The cop was acquitted of manslaughter on the grounds  the news his victim was armed frightened him. ( Since millions of Americans legally carry firearms in their cars, one can  hope this does not establish a precedent.)    There have been other well publicized cases in various places  of policemen killing people without good reason and getting away with it. 

In a free society the citizens have to keep officials and policemen under strict control and require  that they stay within the constraints of the law. It is not only permissible to second guess the police, it is mandatory to do so.  Policemen at all levels of government have lots of power, and that power must be kept in check. There is a reason the term “police state” is  used as a synonym for a  tyranny or dictatorship.

One may accept that police work  is stressful and sometimes dangerous without believing that gives cops a license to shoot people who don’t need shooting.  (We certainly demand better of everyone else.  Being a policemen is nowhere nearly as stressful or dangerous as being a combat infantryman, for example, but the services require enlisted men, including very young and only recently trained ones, always  to follow rules and orders about when and at whom to fire.)   One may understand  that many people have difficulty making good, quick decisions when scared or under pressure without believing that  absolves officers  of liability for  fatally bad decisions. One may agree that these killings occur rarely without believing assertions that  that makes them insignificant.  One may understand that police are often victims of false and politically motivated charges from political hacks on the make without believing that every charge against a cop is bogus.

The need to keep the police under control and within the law should not be controversial, but often it is – usually because of politics.  Too many conservatives ignore it or make excuses when the officers or state or local, and the victims are lower class blacks or Hispanics who have had earlier trouble with the authorities. Too many leftists ignore it or make excuses when the cops are federal, and the victims are  white hicks who are not  too fond of the federal government.   Both should know better.