Cory Maye

While libertarians and American liberals spend a lot of energy disagreeing, we actually agree on most things, some of them intensly.

The Cory Maye case is one of those.

A mirror of this case happened some 20 years ago in San Jose. The police had obtained a drug warrant on a house, but decided to exectute their search by crossing the neighbor's back yard. Perhaps because the neighbor was black, he wasn't trusted to be in on the bust.

However, the police were apparently none too silent as they crossed the fence into the neighbor's backyard. The neighbor armed himself with a shotgun, and went to the back door to confront whatever was going on.

Pointing his shotgun toward the unanounced intruders resulted in the usual "hail of gunfire", and the neighbor died.

As sympathetic as I am toward the police and the need to cut them some slack while dealing with violent people, in this story, as well as the Cory Maye story, we don't have a story of the police and the criminal. We have a story of the police and a well behaved citizen.

I suggest that we, and the police, need to put a clear line separating such cases from the usual cases where an uncooperative, violent criminal is killed by police. No beef from me on those, good riddance.

But when a citizen, in his own house, behaving non-violently, encounters an intruder, that citizen should be expected to defend his house, and we need to see who is the aggressor in that story: the police.

These days, those stories all get treated the same, very confusing to both citizens AND the police.