Inspired by recent stories blogged here at
Reason from
Bakersfield,
Florida,
New York, and
Irvine, California, (and those are just the four at the top of
my mind) in which police attempts to apprehend people apparently
guilty of only very minor crimes that don’t involve any known harm
to person or property wind up with the suspect’s death.

Photo credit: Toban B. / Foter.com / CC BY-NC

Perhaps police should consider that if a suspect’s only
reasonable suspected crime is something very minor, not involving
harm to people or property (until compounded by their behaving in a
manner police don’t like to see when approached or apprehended by
police), as long as that behavior serves indicates no
reasonable suspicion of intent or ability to harm in a serious
fashion police or citizens (as long as the police are no longer
actively engaging the citizen), then if the choice comes between
standing down or imposing an instant death sentence, standing down
might be the regrettable but in this instant least-bad option.

Most likely, the reason why the suspect is (fecklessly)
resisting what you, the officers, are doing to him is not because
he’s guilty of mass murder or terror or a string of bank robberies
for which they can’t risk being apprehended.

Most likely, they are acting out of fear, panic, pride, and the
innate human will to self-defense. That is, all the same motives
that are leading you to beat them to death or hit them with a
deadly weapon, that is, your car.

The modest suggestion is that perhaps letting a possible drunk
or homeless nuisance or traffic scofflaw escape instant
ticketing/arrest via standing back from them and seeing how they
react for a moment is a, perhaps regrettable, better outcome than
the death of a human being.