Liberty Minute December 12 2013

In Iceland, police are mourning the unprecedented shooting death of a suspect. The fatal police shooting of a 59-year-old Icelandic man on December 2 was the first to take place in that country since it achieved independence in 1944. The head of the country?s police force expressed regrets and sent condolences to the family of the slain suspect.

Police attitudes are somewhat different here in the United States. Witness the reaction to a recent incident in which an officer used non-lethal means to subdue an emotionally unstable man.

Charles Remsberg, a columnist for PoliceOne.com news, describes how the training officer and a recruit took the armed and potentially violent suspect into custody by using pepper spray, rather than shooting him.

Rather than giving the officer a medal of valor ? as his colleagues recommended ? the chief originally intended to discipline him and demote him for setting a supposedly dangerous example. The chief?s complaint was that the officer had failed to send an appropriate message by subduing the suspect, rather than killing him.

The police chief told Remsberg that ?We have to be willing to critique non-shootings as well as shootings.? That chief would find the humane decency displayed by Icelandic police to be incomprehensible.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.