It’s been made clear over the past year or so that groups like Black Lives Matter and the political left, in general, are out to abolish nearly all forms of law enforcement. As a result, cities have cut police department budgets, laid off hundreds of workers, and basically decried everyone with a badge to be racist, evil, and the ultimate bad guy.
And as a result, the criminals have been given a free ride to do as they please, whenever and however they see fit. And if a police officer tries to stand in the way of their plans, well, it must be because that officer is doing something wrong, racist, or flat out breaking the law.
Or at least that’s what has happened in two separate cases involving police officers and excessive force that have been taken to the Supreme Court.
In one California case, officers responded to a call from a 12-year-old girl claiming that she and her sister and mother had been forced to barricade themselves in a room to prevent becoming injured by Ramon Cortesluna. He was going through the house with a chainsaw and destroying things. Officer Daniel Rivas-Villegas and his partner arrived on the scene and promptly took action, shooting Cortesluna with non-lethal bean bag rounds. Then, as Cortesluna continued to resist arrest, Rivas-Villegas knelt on his back to take possession of a knife on the suspect’s person.
After the incident, Cortesluna sued Rivas-Villegas, claiming he had been treated wrongly while breaking the law.
In a similar incident in Oklahoma, a woman called the police after her ex-husband, Dominic Rollice, showed up at her home angry and refused to leave. When law enforcement arrived, Rollice was in the garage wielding a hammer as a weapon. After asking him to drop the hammer, he refused and came towards the officers with the tool raised over his head.
Naturally, and within the bounds of the law, police shot and killed him in defense.
And just as naturally, police were sued for ‘unlawful conduct.’ If this were indeed the case, the qualified immunity granted to police in most instances would be denied.
Initially, both officers were found guilty by lower courts. But after going through the appeals process, they were brought before the Supreme Court, where both verdicts were overruled and reversed.
According to the high court’s ruling, “not one” case came even “close to establishing that the officers’ conduct was unlawful,” let alone unwarranted. Both suspects were visibly angry, verbally making threats, and clearly capable of harming either the women involved or the officers responding to the calls.
Officers were well within their rights to exert force, even excessively, to get their jobs done and get these women and children out of harm’s way. Hell, one guy didn’t even have actual live rounds fired at him. And yet, he still thought he was justified one, after going through a woman’s home and life with a chainsaw, no less.
I mean, seriously? What did he expect?
I’ll tell you what. Thanks to groups like BLM, the political left seems to think that because a person is a minority, police are extra rough on them, even murderous. And that belief leads them to feel that their skin color entitles them to kid-glove-like treatment, even in the middle of an evident crime they are committing.
But the fact is they aren’t. If they are clearly performing “unlawful conduct,” as these officers were wrongfully accused of, there’s no reason that law enforcement should treat them as innocent children.
Yes, there is a fine line between upholding the law and taking justice too far, and unfortunately, some officers undoubtedly cross it. However, that doesn’t mean that police as a whole should be punished for the selfish actions of a few.
In these cases, police were simply doing their jobs. And they did it well, I would say. The threats were eliminated and peace restored. If a criminal got their feelings hurt or felt they were unjustly treated, maybe they should have thought about the consequences before engaging in criminal activities, to begin with.
