The police have simply got to learn that if they refuse to punish their own when officers cross the line, good cops are going to become reprisal targets. This killer ex-officer’s excuse is almost unbelievable:
The recently acquitted cop who killed legal gun owner Philando Castile at a Minnesota traffic stop last summer claimed a whiff of pot made him fear for his life.
Former Officer Jeronimo Yanez told investigators a day after the fatal July 6 shooting that he was “hit with a odor of burning marijuana” after he pulled over Castile, his girlfriend and her then-four-year-old daughter — an alleged smell he used in justifying why he’d put seven bullets in the St. Paul man.
“I thought, I was gonna die and I thought if he’s, if he has the, the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five-year-old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing then what, what care does he give about me,” Yanez told the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
So now smelling like a pot smoker is sufficient legal justification for a cop to kill you? It’s pretty difficult to generate sympathy for the murderous Black Lives Matter movement, but between the corrupt legal system that magically excuses bad shoots like this and entitled idiots like this now-former police officer digging the hole deeper, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Police must be held to a higher standard by the law, not so much to protect the public as to protect the police themselves as well as their standing with the public. A decline in discipline and accountability has never generated increased respect for the members of any organization.