New Orleans housing authority cop shot, killed

[RiverNoord]

14. It's easy to speculate on peoples' motives, but

I'm not 'crying out for justice' because:

1) Threat to life or limb are risks that all law enforcement officers must accept when they take on the job. The job is, in fact, largely about neutralizing evident threats to the public peace, and these evident threats are sometimes people deploying firearms.

2) It is an injustice when a law enforcement officer is killed, wounded, or otherwise harmed in the faithful conduct of his/her duty. It is an injustice which is, however, inevitably predictable, in the sense that some law enforcement officers who are entrusted with and assume the role of protection of the peace will be violently harmed by those whose violence they are tasked to stop.

3) This injustice is not somehow a lesser injustice than, for example, violent harm unnecessarily caused by law enforcement officers who abuse their unique authority. However, it is different in nature. Law enforcement officers must accept risk as an essential part of their jobs, much like those who take on the job of a member of the military. When a law enforcement officer is killed or wounded in the line of duty, we grieve, but we also generally regard the loss as a sacrifice made by the officer, who worked under the assumption that such a sacrifice might result from his or her commitments to his or her job and its duties.

4) We do not assume, on the other hand, that people not tasked with this job accept that, due to the fact that there are people who disturb the public peace, sometimes violently, being killed or wounded in the course of their regularly daily existence is a sacrifice made on behalf of others and in the conduct of their role as a citizen. There is no duty conferred upon people who are not law enforcement officers to act similarly to them and possibly bring an end to violence by employing violence of their own. They do not receive sanctioned equipment and training in order to carry out such tasks. It is generally the case that threats to public peace that a private person is not intimately associated with should be avoided by non-law enforcement officers, and that attempts to act similarly to law enforcement officers in such circumstances are extremely undesirable, that they may lead to exacerbation of the original problem, and possibly the greater endangerment of law enforcement officers and others. The injustice of a person who is not a law enforcement officer being harmed by another's violence is therefore different. Such a person has not voluntarily assumed such risk as a condition of the person's occupation.

5) In this case, the closes approximation to justice that we have devised is almost certain to come - the killer has been identified and apprehended.

I've lost a sheriff's deputy friend to death in the line of duty. He was a good man and a good law enforcement officer. He left behind a cherished family. It was an injustice. However, I, and his family, will always recognize that he died doing something that he believed in, and that he understood and accepted the risk that ultimately cost him his life.