Lt. Ray Albers, police officer from St. Ann, Missouri who was in Ferguson to help handle the protestors has been suspended. He pointed his gun at protestors and threatened to kill them. When asked his name, his response was “Go Fuck Yourself.” CNN staffers report seeing similar death threats from officers towards protestors that have not been caught on tape. Capt. Ronald S. Johnson confirmed that there had been complaints about officers and “inappropriate behavior” on the part of the officers. He said that he has taken “appropriate action.”
This follows and incident on Sunday in which a police officer told a reporter from Argus radio to “Get the fuck out of here or you’re getting shot with this.” The peacekeeping police forces have threatened members of the media with shooting and in some instances attacked with mace and tear gas for days. Some media members are asked for identification when taking pictures.
The number of civil rights abuses in Ferguson is terrible. Bloggers and other non-mainstream media have been targeted and harassed by police officers on many occasions. While threatening and attacking mainstream reporters is not any more illegal or disheartening, it is an indication of the lengths police officers will go to prevent the dissemination of information. Leaders of police departments will say that officers threatening the media is unacceptable, but the individual officers are human beings in a position of power and not always thinking of the ramifications of their behavior. In contrast, Harrison William Rund, a Missouri man who threatened to kill police on his Twitter account was arrested and charged with “felony terroristic threats.”
The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment states that no person can be denied “equal protection of the laws.” This means that similarly situated individuals should be treated the same under the law. If death threats are “felony terroristic threats” then the police officers who issue them should be arrested for them, or alternatively the punishment should be removal from positions where the threatener can take action on the threats. That one individual gets one treatment while another individual gets the other is not equal application of the laws.
Those claiming a violation of the Equal Protection clause have to prove an intent to discriminate. In this case, the prosecuting district attorney would have to be proven to have intended to favor police officers over non-police officers when making charging decisions. A defendant must prove that “(1) ‘that he has been deliberately singled out for prosecution on the basis of some invidious criterion’; and (2) that ‘the prosecution would not have been pursued except for the discriminatory design of the prosecuting authorities.'” In these cases, the “invidious criterion” would be singling people out on the basis of not being a police officer.
Unfortunately it would be difficult to find an individual whom a court would determine has standing. Usually in equal protection cases people argue either that they were discrimatorily prosecuted (the harm) due to their status as a member of the group or that the pattern of discriminatory charging has increased the individual’s likelihood of harm as a member of that group. Anyone accused of, say, making felony terroristic threats could argue that their membership in the “non-police officer” group influenced the charging decision. The public could also file a suit based on the increased likelihood of harm. The determination of standing would hinge on whether the judge thought that those group memberships were valid and that the police officers were “similarly situated.” A counterargument could be made that someone sitting at home making threats on Twitter is in a less stressful situation than a police officer making the same threats in person, so therefore they are not “similarly situated.”
Hopefully those making charging decisions will begin to apply the laws evenly. A help would be a statute that gave individuals standing to sue for judicial consideration the failure to prosecute police who have committed criminal acts and a requirement that their treatment be considered against the treatment of non-police officers in the same locality. While I don’t consider either possibility likely, it is nice to think of a future where police are treated the same as any member of the public, and the police don’t threaten to kill members of the public, especially reporters who are acting on their right to “freedom of the press.”
While We Slept 