I'm Just Saying...

I'm not saying that the police officers who were acquitted today in this shooting were guilty or not guilty - I don't really know the details beyond what is written in the article (and I find it generally irrepsonsible to opine on such things without sufficient information).

All I know is, beyond any doubt, had those three shooters not been police officers, and instead they were just ordinary Joes claiming self-defense because they thought the deceased had had a gun, all three of them would have been charged and convicted by the judge in this bench trial of second degree murder.

Instead, they get much lighter charges and then they got acquitted on top of that. Which annoys me more for the double standard on credibility given to police officers, which I think is horribly misplaced, particularly after you see incidents such as this, where a police officer baldly lies in court - I somehow doubt that magically the only time this ever happened just happened to be the one time a teenager happened to record a police interrogation on the sly. Officially, police officers are accorded no more credibility than any other witness. In practice, their word is basically gold and if you are ever in a case where it is your word versus that of a police officer, you will lose unless you have outside evidence to back it up. Sadly, that is not all that often.