Democrats Seek to Curtail Police Use of Force After Sacramento Shooting

The Left doesn’t trust the police, though they also want them to be the only ones armed. While they’re looking to strip citizens of their Second Amendment rights, they also want to curtail law enforcement’s ability to respond to threats.

The Police Accountability and Community Protection Act proposed in California seeks to change an officer’s legal use of a firearm from a “reasonable force” standard to a “necessary force” standard.

This comes following an incident where a 23-year-old man was shot and killed by police who believed him to be armed. After the shooting, all that was found on the man was a cell phone.

In a statement, police practices director of the ACLU in California Peter Bibring said: “While our hearts are broken by tragedies such as these, our resolve to fight for change will never be. Now, more than ever, we must change state laws to ensure that police are held accountable to us.”

The new bill would require that “police officers only use deadly force when it is necessary to prevent imminent and serious bodily injury or death.” It would also add transparency to police departments in the state.

Restricting when officers can use deadly force could have deadly consequences. If officers are tentative when drawing their weapons in fear of prosecution, they may well find themselves and bystanders dead before they have a chance to use deadly force to “prevent imminent and serious bodily injury or death.”

Time will tell, but this isn’t something to be thrilled about. My father was a police officer throughout my childhood. I can’t help but imagine men like him being injured or killed because they couldn’t react fast enough under these restrictions.

The flip side of this, however, is that the new law will change nothing. Under a “necessary force” standard, the police in Sacramento still had plenty of reasons to believe the man they had just chased was about to kill them.

The Democrats are grandstanding, as usual, following a tragic incident. And their solution is to further put our heroes at risk while accomplishing nothing.