If You Just Do What The Police Tell You . . .

Unprofessional policing kills people.

Before we start: Charlie is going to have a sit-down with Paul Ryan in Milwaukee on February 23.

Lit? Oh baby, lit AF. If you’re anywhere within a two-hour radius, you should go.

It’s free and open to the public, but you have to get tickets in advance. You can sign up for them here.

Go and enjoy.

---

Police officers take cover as they clash with protesters after an officer shot and killed a black man in Brooklyn Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota on April 11,2021 (Photo by KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images)

1. Contradictory Orders

One of the arguments you often hear from police apologists is, “If Person X had instantly complied with the cop’s orders, then he wouldn’t have gotten killed.”

There are a number of philosophical problems with this posture. For instance, in American jurisprudence, the penalty for legal non-compliance is not supposed to be death. If you don’t renew your drivers license on time, we don’t execute you. We don’t put you in the electric chair for jaywalking.

And if you don’t do what a cop tells you to do, immediately, and in a way that is perfectly satisfactory to the cop, then he does not have the right to kill you except in certain extreme and legally-defined circumstances.¹

But at the practical level, there’s an even bigger problem: