Supremes unanimously side with police, throw out so-called 'provocation doctrine'

For awhile there, cop-hating liberals and libertarians had themselves a loophole that made it easier to come down on cops who used force in self-defense. According to the so-called "provocation doctrine," if police had made their way into a situation without satisfying every legal technicality (such as entering a home without a warrant), then they were not necessarily allowed to use deadly force to defend themselves even if another party threatened them with deadly force. In the case in question, police had indeed entered a home without a warrant and encountered a person wielding a BB gun that looked like a real gun. That prompted police to shoot, but not kill, in self-defense, and initially a court ruled that the officers had no right to use force because they shouldn't have been in the house in the first place. But that goes against all jurisprudence on this issue, so much so that even the way-out liberal 9th Circuit found in favor of the cops, and so much so that when it got to the Supreme Court, even the liberal Justices joined in making the ruling unanimous:

In a unanimous decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court rejected the provocation doctrine as “incompatible with our excessive force jurisprudence,” including the Graham case, which for decades has set a high bar for holding law officers civilly liable in court. The provocation rule’s “fundamental flaw is that it uses another constitutional violation to manufacture an excessive force claim where one would not otherwise exist,” wrote Alito. He added that the rule “permits excessive force claims that cannot succeed on their own terms.” Alito disputed the lower courts’ conclusion that the deputies’ failure to obtain a warrant and their later intrusion into the Mendezes’ home without announcing themselves “in some sense set the table” for the confrontation that almost killed them. (Angel Mendez’s right leg was amputated below the knee as a result of the incident.) “That is wrong,” Alito wrote in the 11-page decision, which was joined by every member of the court except Neil Gorsuch, who didn’t participate in the case because he wasn’t yet a justice when his colleagues heard it in March. “The framework for analyzing excessive force claims is set out in Graham. If there is no excessive force claim under Graham, there is no excessive force claim at all.”

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There could be a lot of reasons police officers don't have time to contact a judge and get warrant before entering a home, a building or some other structure or area. There could be an imminent threat to someone, or the imminent danger of losing a wanted suspect. Cop-hating liberals and libertarians always want to throw up as many legal barriers as possible to the ability of the police to do their jobs, but actual police work is never as neat and clean as these pencil-necks would have you believe it an or should be. The principle in the law that's being applied here is that, because of the dangerous nature of police work, police have wide latitude in deciding when perceived threat warrants the use of force to defend themselves. And common sense backs this up. If a police officer enters your house unexpectedly, that would understandably be a nerve-wracking incident, but their presence logically does not automatically constitute a threat to you. Police officers are not criminals. They're not there to rob you or beat you. And if you think that's what they go around doing, it's your fault for believing far too many media and pop culture stories that have led you to that belief. This is not what happens in real life. Some of the anti-police crowd are portraying this as "making it harder to hold police accountable." But that's not really true, nor should it be our priority. If police wrongly enter your house and do some sort of harm to you, there are legal avenues by which to address that. If they enter your house and do you no harm, then what do you need to hold them "accountable" for? And if they enter your house while posing no threat, and you threaten them with some sort of weapon, they have every right to shoot you. You're not getting shot because you were just sitting at home. You're getting shot because you were brandishing a weapon in a threatening manner and you ought to have put it down as soon as you knew it was the police who were in your house. More importantly, as a society we should be more interested in supporting and defending the police than in "holding them accountable," although there's room for both. Contrary to what some people would have you believe, the police are not serial abusers wandering around looking for people to rough up. They're selfless people who risk their own lives to protect us. No one is saying they're perfect or that there's never occasion to discipline some of them, but far too much of American culture has gone Colin Kaepernick on us and forgotten that the cops are the good guys.