Don’t pay much attention to the new police shooting law signed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom. It is pointless.
That’s because it will not functionally alter the criminal liability of police officers who use lethal force. The new standard means that police officers may only use lethal force (discharge their firearms) if they can show such force was “necessary” to defend against an imminent threat to life or serious injury. The “necessary” qualification replaces a previous standard of “reasonable.”
But while the new ruling is likely to affect police use of force inquiries in professional accountability investigations, it is unlikely to make criminal prosecutions of police officers more likely or more successful.
After all, any able defense lawyer will present necessary use of force as the same as reasonable use of force. Before this law and after it, police officers are excused of criminal liability if they can show a credible belief that their lives, or the lives of others, were endangered at the moment they employed lethal force. That is why prosecutors rarely bring criminal charges even where a shot individual was shown to be reaching for a cell phone or non-weapon when officers fired at them. The prosecutors know that the court will regard the police officer’s judgment in the moment of crisis to be justifiable by the full circumstances of the incident and the apparent necessity of using force. To convict an officer in a shooting incident, the prosecution would have to prove that the officer acted without credible justification or with gross disregard for the situation at hand.
That is, rightly, much harder to prove than it is to say on cable television.
In essence, the change from a “reasonable” standard to “necessary” standard for use of force is not a change so much as it is an alteration of the language defining what remains, in effect, the same legal standard.
