2 September 2014 - shoot don’t talk

For American police, shooting is good and talking is bad. If you’re an officer and you shoot somebody, you’ll be put on desk duty until the investigation determines that the shooting was justified, which it does unless the video went viral. It is unknown how many departments set a shooting quota to keep up on their paperwork. From communities near Ferguson, we learn that posting a violent Facebook comment gets an officer suspended without pay and then fired—figuratively fired, to be sure, not the kind with bullets. Joe McCarthy got us confused about what counts as un-American, and I guess we’ve never straightened it out.