Quote:
Originally posted by Dreamer128:
You Americans don't know how good you have it. In The Netherlands, Two employee's of a local supermarket caught a guy stealing some stuff. He drew a knife on them, threatened a woman and ran out of the store. After a wild chase, they caught him and planted a few punches. Next, they got fined for unnecessary violence.
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Ahum - you forgot to mention that they planted those "few" punches (or actually kicks) when the guy was already caught and lying harmlessly on the ground, complete with hand-cuffs; the main captor also reportedly hit the thief repeatedly and broke his nose in the process long after he was already captured, neutralized and harmless. And, in the light of how it was dealt with later on, you also forgot to mention that the main captor already had a criminal record beforehand (for acts of - surprise surprise - violence
).
There are many instances in which I can understand an excessive reaction, in which (personal) physical and/or psychological harm has been done or threatened to be done by the offender, and in result "snapping" is almost to be expected in the "good guys'" struggle with the criminal; and in many of those cases, I wouldn't even
begin to think about defending the criminal in the matter. Unfortunately, it's not a black and white thing; there's a large grey area with the line of moral judgement, of the whats and whatnots on how to deal with a criminal without acting like a one yourself, somewhere hidden in there. And I think that in both the supermarket case and the event described in the first post, that line had been crossed.
Standing up for one another is definitely a good thing, but it's
not a carte blanche to act like a violent criminal yourself in the process - taking advantage of the situation to play your own violent judge, vent all of your bottled-up frustrations and anger on an already captured and neutralized thief - frustrations which may not even have that much to do with the thief himself, but are based on paranoia and earlier experiences - and later refer to it as "self-defense" or "just" is what I refer to as "excessive".
It's not that I necessarily want them to go to prison for this; but the complete other thing - calling them "heroes" and "examples to the rest of us" is just insane. The last thing we need is people starting to act as their own judges en masse and actually pee on the long and difficult process of trying to build a judicial system and trying to have everyone abide by it. Sure, there are always those who feel the need to ignore it, you can't stop that from happening; but the rest of us shouldn't feel as if we automatically have a "right" and think that it's okay within the law to respond with excessive violence to those judicial-system-ignorers they're trying to "correct", while a lot less violent reaction would have sufficed just as easily.
It may not seem fair, and especially with serious crimes in which people are psychologically and/or physically harmed or assaulted I can't always shake the urge of having to clutch my fist in frustration over my helplessness to do anything about it, having to reassure myself that violence isn't the answer; but in the afore mentioned cases regarding the humvee and the supermarket, cases involving crimes of a materialistic nature, I don't have a lot of respect for the overblown reactions of those who tried to overtake the thieves (or after they'd overtaken them).
[ 06-18-2003, 07:10 PM: Message edited by: Grojlach ]