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Those guys should be institutionalized for their repeated violations, but since they are released as soon as caught, it requires the creation of a new legal category to accommodate their deplorable presence in the public sphere: Let’s call them Prisoners on Parole.
“When robbed or assaulted by pops, citizens and cops may use all the force they deem necessary. “
So how do you define a PoP?
Someone incapable of obeying the law who nonetheless has not been incarcerated long-term.
Law-Abiding Citizens don't need to know someone is a PoP when interacting with them, but if they get in a fight with someone who turns out to be a PoP, nudge the presumption of innocence considerably in the LAC's favor.
How's that sound?
That doesn't sound like a particularly good definition, seeing as there's a lot of room for maneuvering in "incapable of obeying the law". What law? How major do the crimes have to be? Does someone with enough traffic tickets qualify? What about DUIs, those are fairly major? Failure to pay child support? More seriously, does it matter whether they're summary offenses, misdemeanors, or felonies? How many do you need to qualify? Do they expire after a certain period? How long does the person have to be incarcerated before they've paid their debt to society and are taken off the list? And if you kill someone who you think qualifies but it turns out doesn't, are you held strictly liable or is reasonable belief a defense? There's quite a lot to hash out here.
None of these questions seem to me to engage with the question at hand. It seems to me that you could yourself pick whichever answers you prefer, adding or removing criteria as you see fit. The argument isn't that a specific profile amounts to being "incapable of obeying the law", but rather that "incapable of following the law" is a plausibly-reasonable descriptor for some set of profiles of all those possible. I think we can both agree that littering once shouldn't cross the line, and that one's tenth premeditated murder certainly has crossed it, and then negotiate from there.
At no point have I argued that one should attack or try to kill people they think are PoPs, and it doesn't seem to me that @fuckduck9000 was arguing so either. In point of fact, it seems to me that you and the others arguing for the consensus here have a rather warped view of the interactions at play.
You and others frame the deceased in this situation as though they were an innocent bystander, and the LAC who attempted to subdue them pointlessly initiated a fight. For that to be true, you need to ignore the highly erratic, aggressive, and generally threatening behavior of the deceased, as though such behavior were harmless, and then go on to frame the LACs' attempt to intervene as intentional murder. Neither is true. Acting erratic, aggressive, and generally threatening in public is a fantastic way to get yourself killed in a fight, often with another PoP; this happens with monotonous frequency every day nation-wide. The absence of intervention here is not a certainty that the PoP lives to the age of 80 and dies quietly in bed; it simply allows him to go on rolling the dice with his own and other peoples' health and life.
Further, the LAC did not shoot him in the back of the head without warning, nor kick him over and stomp on his head. The LACs perceived him to be a threat to himself and others, and attempted to restrain him. That is fairly close to the optimal way for this to be handled. Unfortunately, they fucked up the restraint and didn't recognize that he was twitching in unconsciousness, not struggling, and so he died. That was not an inevitable consequence of intervening, on any level beyond the statistical: some number of interventions are going to go badly, but some number of non-interventions are going to go badly as well.
PoPs should not be allowed to menace the public and disturb the peace. When someone acts aggressive or menacingly toward others, it is reasonable to confront or restrain them. Attempting to guess whether they're a PoP or not is pointless; it is the behavior that should be targeted, not the legal status. My point was that the legal status should apply after the fact, to those who evidently acted as we wish them to: if a PoP gets in a fight with a LAC, unless there is a solid reason to do otherwise, err on the side of the LAC. Even a fatality, if pretty clearly accidental as in this case, should not change that arithmetic. There is no need for speculating on whether those around you are PoPs and thus can be victimized freely, because this rule does not allow free victimization. If an LAC attacks a PoP unprovoked, that's still a crime.
What is wrong with such a stance?
Part of the reason 'killing someone accidentally' is a crime is that, if it isn't, someone who intends to kill someone will intentionally set up such "accidents"! Another part is to discourage risky behaviors that risk killing - for instance, if it's true that the PoP could've been restrained in a way that didn't risk his death, the law should encourage that.
And part of the reason to discourage killings generally, even of PoPs, is allowing them at all will lead to individuals or subcultures who seek out said killings. And they'll sometimes get wrong who the PoPs are, causing a spiral of violence.
State-sanctioned PoP incarceration or execution doesn't have this problem! You can still have trials and bureaucracies and such to make sure you're not killing a doctor who's having a manic episode or something.
A fourth .. reason of sorts is that explicitly sanctioning 'kill homeless/schizo/criminals and get away with it' has a relatively high ratio of 'pissing off the libs' to 'making society better'. If you only kill a few, not much improves, there are a thousand of them. If you shoot a thousand of them in public, then that's a "literal genocide". Even if Bukele had the political power and desire to, say, execute all of the gang members instead of permanently imprisoning them, it might not've been worth it for the scrutiny it'd invite from foreign countries about the "genocide".
Will they? Why? Like, what's the motivation here? How many people are there in the world who are desperate to commit exactly one murder in a very public way that has a high likelihood of getting them caught and punished, as opposed to the millions of ways to do it easier, more directly, and with no chance of getting caught? Why is it so important to drop the rate of this extremely specific bad thing to zero?
It seems to me that you're still doing the thing where you assume there's no functional or perceptible difference between self defense that ends badly, and intentional murder.
That sounds good! How many net lives do you expect this policy to save? It must be quite a few, given how eager you are to trade off actual murders by PoPs, which are... a considerable portion of murders, no?
...And we're back to the presumption that significantly easing restrictions on self-defense is utterly indistinguishable from open-season murder licenses. Why is this a reasonable attitude?
Only it doesn't actually happen, does it? And that's a whole other problem, isn't it? So we are, once again, back to asking why you're confident that the existing problem is worse than the hypothetical alternative.
Alternatively, you can pretend to do that and actually just let PoPs murder and brutalize and terrorize people without the slightest restraint, and then claim the system is handling it every time someone complains, until people go insane with appalled rage at the daily injustices you cheerfully and lovingly shepherd into their lives and decide that absolutely anything is better than letting you and your pet criminals play this game forever?
If your formal systems have to compete with legitimate self-defense, there's an incentive to actually do something about the rampant crime if you value the criminals' wellbeing.
Okay. What if we just let people defend themselves, and then maybe don't crucify them if that happens to go very badly, but actually try to tell if the people involved are trying to use self-defense as a cover for murder, but don't do the thing where very obvious cases of self-defense are treated as murder because your ideology demands it?
On the other hand, if "libs" insist on treating self-defense as indistinguishable from murder while turning a blind eye to rampant violent crime, maybe the "scrutiny" is worth it.
Do you not appreciate that your attitude toward the misery of others is profoundly radicalizing? Where do you think the people who actively want to cull the PoPs come from?
I'm, at worst, neutral to 'culling them'. I just don't think it's worth throwing away 'due process' to do so. Nor do I think random vigilante encounters are a good way to do so.
Also, schizo homeless people don't murder and brutalize people that much, afaik. Homicides are usually committed either by people you know, or by, like, career criminals.
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