One Cheer for Maine’s Task Force on Police Killings
An overdue attempt to study the use of deadly force underscores the role of mental illness in such incidents, even as it falls short in other respects.
In Maine, police officers who use deadly force on the job are always justified in doing so—or at least that’s apparently the official position of the state attorney general’s office, where every deadly police shooting for the past 28 years has been dutifully reviewed, and the cops have always been found justified in their killings. Does that seem plausible?
Last year, after a spike in police killings, the editorialized that “this 100 percent justification rate rightly raises a lot of eyebrows,” and commended Maine Attorney General Janet
