When Officer Wilson asked Michael Brown to move from the middle of the street to the sidewalk and Brown refused, Wilson was faced with the dilemma all cops face when a suspect refuses to comply: back down and thereby lose both the monopoly and the legitimacy of law enforcement, or ratchet up the intensity of tactics to achieve compliance. Though much remains unclear about what happened in these situations, Weber can also help us understand how a seemingly innocent encounter between a citizen and a police officer could escalate into lethal violence. Though Brown’s and Garner’s families may choose to pursue civil cases, only the state can say - or, as the case may be, not say - that a crime has been committed. Something similar happened in New York when Eric Garner died at the hands of the police - was it a legal “grappling hold” or “headlock” or an illegal chokehold? Even with video evidence the grand jury voted not to indict the police officers. Was his use of physical force legitimate or not? A grand jury determined that it could not make such a determination based on the conflicting eyewitness accounts, and so Wilson’s actions will not be considered criminal by the state. 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo., when police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed teenager Michael Brown. This theory is important to keep in mind when thinking about what happened between 12:01pm and 12:03pm on Aug. That trust is lacking for many black communities in America a 2013 Gallup poll, for example, found that 25% of whites but 68% of blacks believe that “the American justice system is biased against black people.” That’s why people sometimes take the law into their own hands, via vigilantism or protest, when they do not feel that the law is fair to them: because the criminal-justice system acts on behalf of only the state, rather than on behalf of individuals, it requires trust in the state in order to work. ![]() In late December 2014 he filed another motion to have all charges against him dropped, and the woman in question has even offered to testify on his behalf, but the state of California is unlikely to drop the charges because that would show weakness in its commitment to the rule of law. California, for example, continues to pursue charges against the filmmaker Roman Polanski, who pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with an underage girl in 1977, even though she-a woman now in her 40s-has requested that the state drop the charges. Jane Roe: the state is the injured party. This is why criminal cases are labeled The State v. Civil justice deals with disputes between individuals or groups, whereas criminal justice deals with crimes against the laws of the land that are punishable only by the state. Today the state’s justice is conducted through two systems: criminal and civil. This is why Justitia-the Roman goddess of justice-is often depicted wearing a blindfold (symbolizing impartiality) and carrying a scale on which to weigh the evidence in one hand and a double-edged sword, for her power to enforce the law, in the other. States, for all their faults, have more checks and balances than individuals. In Mexico, for example, the high incidence of violence can be traced in part to the inability of the state to enforce its drug laws, leading gangs to settle their differences themselves. Human communities such as drug gangs and mafia syndicates use physical force, but it is not legitimate and they do not have a monopoly this leads to higher rates of violence because there is no strong state to act as an objective third party to oversee disputes. Over the course of many centuries the criminal justice system, with its armed police, replaced self-help justice conducted by gangs and individuals. ![]() ![]() In 1919, with the smoke still clearing from the battlefields of the First World War, the German sociologist Max Weber began a systematic study of the nation-state by defining a state as any “human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” But what constitutes legitimate force? We should keep this question in mind when considering the run of recent events involving conflicts between police and citizens, from the killing of two unarmed black men by cops in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island, N.Y., earlier this year, as well as the murder of two police offers in New York City this past weekend.
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