The American Politics Thread

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-trump-campaign-is-reportedly-planning-a-way-to-bypass-the-2020-election-results-in-key-swing-states/ar-BB19lQ4J?ocid=msedgntp 

Senator Rand Paul, if you really need an expert to tell you that testing is necessary to keep a pandemic under control you are just plain dumb.

This was based on a much longer article in the The Atlantic which is an interesting and kind of scary read. Expect chaos.

Ah, excellent. Thanks. 

Not to blame the victim, but if she knew her ex-boyfriend was a drug dealer and if she continued to "allow" him to have his drugs shipped to her apartment then she is not as innocent as the media is making her out to be.  Not that she deserved to be killed, but being involved in criminal activities does have risks.    

The whole thing is just sad and unfortunate, but I can understand why criminal charges were not brought against the police officers.  But I can also understand why that result makes a lot of people very unhappy.

In order to charge the police officers with crimes there would have had to have been criminal intent.  The grand jury did not believe that there was criminal intent.  Poor judgement and bad police work has lead to people being fired and a civil settlement of $12M is a pretty large payment for this terrible mistake. They could possibly charge them with negligent homicide, but if the boyfriend fired first as is reported, then the officers were justified in returning fire and not criminal.  The whole situation sucks. 

The police conduct thousands of these type of raids/arrests each year and my guess is most of the time they are justified, they are at the right house, and the right people are arrested, and nobody is killed.  Unfortunately, odds are incidents like this one will happen once in a while.  They go to the wrong address.  They have bad intel.  The criminal that they are looking for doesn't live at the address any more.  I don't know how that happens.  You would hope that it wouldn't happen.  But unfortunately it does.  People make mistakes.  It doesn't make them criminals though.  It also doesn't make them racist.