Extended Practice Research: Vice: When cops can legally shoot people

Vice: When cops can legally shoot people

An interview with Paul H. Robinson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School whose an expert in criminal law and a former federal prosecutor.

What laws give cops the ability to use force, up to and including deadly force?

• If a police officer shot somebody in order to arrest them for a misdemeanour they are not authorised to use lethal force.
• If the person who they are arresting resists and threatens them with serious bodily injury, they are not limited to the force that is authorised by the law. They then have the same right to self-defence as a citizen.

• A cop can subdue somebody by grabbing them and throwing them to the ground, they cannot then shoot and kill them.
• You cannot anticipate that someone's going to attack you, you have to wait until they do.
• Before 1985, if you ran from the police they could shoot you. Now they cannot use deadly force unless there is a danger that if they are not arrested they could harm someone.
• If you make a reckless mistake that a reasonable person would have not made, you're not liable for murder, but you are for manslaughter.

Why do you think prosecutors so rarely charge cops in cases where they've killed someone?

• Most jurors are aware that police officers are out in sometimes dangerous circumstances and have empathy for their situation.
• There are cases where a prosecutor knows that he's not going to get a conviction but there is public demand that the case be publicly investigated so it at least needs to go to trial.
• Very few cases actually get convictions.

How helpful are videos in building cases against cops for police shootings?

• It's a mistake to think videos that capture shootings tell you everything. 
• You don't see the judgement of the cop.
• It won't tell you what the perpetrator did before.
• It's ridiculous to think they give all the answers.

(This is very helpful knowledge for me to know because in my animation, how Lucy finds out that her father shot an unarmed man was by reading it in a newspaper and then having it proved to her by watching the shooting caught on tape on the internet. Before I read this I had assumed being caught on camera was the most reliable thing that could happen but now I realise that camera footage cannot always be entirely trusted, there is often more underneath the surface. That being said, while it doesn't entirely prove that the Cop being caught on tape shooting the unarmed man makes him entirely guilty, in her head it does.)