I understand that my comments just scratch the surface of much bigger issues, but I would say its very short-sighted thinking if you don't believe the gun problem meant changes to police behaviour which, in turn, results in citizen deaths that are very questionable. Officer safety is probably one of the most emphasized parts of police training and has been for a long time. Along with this came a movement to military-like tactics in the general policing world, but there are obviously some exceptions (ie. the 12 year old kid).
And that is
wrong! The mission of the police is to protect and serve the public, not to control and oppress it!
If the safety of officers is now prioritized over safety of the public (including the safety of suspects!), then the police are dangerously out of control and need to be completely reformed.
I'm not troubled by that grand jury's decision, other than to think it would have been wiser for the court to force a more typical proceeding. I generally think the standards of review that are applied to police actions are appropriate, and that where we fail (in that regard) is in not recognizing that the relative leniency of those standards demands a higher minimum bar for who is allowed to serve as a police officer. That would be expensive, though, and people who are largely unaffected by police abuse don't seem willing to pay for it. That's evidence of the broader societal issues that these protests are really about, in my opinion.
First, the grand jury process was an appalling travesty. The prosecutor's
job is to seek out and present all the evidence that could possibly justify a trial; instead, he suppressed all that and called in the defendant (who isn't even supposed to be part of that process!) to give the grand jury every excuse to avoid the trial. It was absolutely willful dereliction of duty.
Remember, the grand jury is not a trial court. Their job is
not to decide whether guilt was established within a reasonable doubt. No, their job was to decide whether there might be the
slightest thing fishy enough about the circumstances to warrant investigating further. It should have been blatantly obvious that a trial was warranted, except for the fact that they the prosecutor made them ignore everything that would have shown it.
Second, the standards of review that are applied to police actions ought to be
stricter than for the general public, not more lenient! Police officers are supposed to be
trained to respond correctly in stressful situations, and should be expected to behave better than some random citizen. Moreover, they are empowered with the public's trust, so when they screw up they not only break the same law as a civilian would have doing the same thing, they also
violate that public trust. For both of those reasons, punishments for police officers should be much harsher than they are for the general public.