Wearing a badge today, is it a license to kill?

Although police are always complaining about the proliferation of firearms held by American citizens - even by convicted felons who are not allowed to own guns - who is policing the police? What are the standards by which they comply before using the ultimate sanction, or, firing a high-caliber firearm at someone?

According to Regressing.com, there is no database of police shootings throughout America. And there are no standardized logs of when police discharge their firearms or why they fire their guns. "Researchers, confronted with the reality that there are over 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the country, aren't even sure how you'd go about setting one up. No one is keeping track of how many American citizens are shot by their police. This is crazy. This is government malpractice on a national scale. We'd like your help in changing this," Regressing.com writes on their website.

There are a menagerie of Copblock and Copwatch websites on social media outlets such as Facebook, and they never seem to run out of material for posting daily horror stories about police transgressions and even murders involving cops. Many major cities, and even medium-sized cities, have their own cop-watching, social-media watchdogging page. One of the bigger Facebook cop-watch pages, Cop Block, has recorded 1.4 million likes and sees heavy traffic daily. On Monday, the homeless man who was shot in Los Angeles had a number of posting, but underneath this offering was another video of a Buffalo, N.Y., man and his pregnant wife being held at gunpoint by police, with a abominable ending to it all. And another posting, further down the page, was a link to an Alternative Media Syndicatearticle published March 1 of police in New Jersey roughing up a teen and throwing the boy, wearing only a tee-shirt and no shoes, into the snow. A graphic right below this posting has a link to an article about police in Cleveland, Ohio, killing a 26-year-old Tarika Wilson and her 14-month-old infant child. The Cleveland Police Department is so corrupt, according to the article, that the FBI recently released a report on vile transgressions and crimes alleged to be committed by the Cleveland Police Department. Last November, a 12-year-old boy handling a pellet gun was shot and killed by a Cleveland Police officer only two seconds after the policeman arrived at the scene where the child was standing holding the toy pistol. In late February, amazingly, the City of Cleveland responded to a lawsuit filed by the family of Tamir Rice by saying the child was responsible for his own killing.

A few years ago, writer D. Brian Burghart was asking himself many of the same questions I'm asking in this opinion piece. He was dismayed and alarmed when he surfed his computer and discovered that there was not a national database that researched and documented police violence.

"I started to search in earnest," Burghart writes on Gawker. Nowhere could I find out how many people died during interactions with police in the United States. Try as I might, I just couldn't wrap my head around that idea. How was it that, in the 21st century, this data wasn't being tracked, compiled, and made available to the public? How could journalists know if police were killing too many people in their town if they didn't have a way to compare to other cities? Hell, how could citizens or police? How could cops possibly know "best practices" for dealing with any fluid situation? They couldn't.

"The bottom line was that I found the absence of such a library of police killings offensive," Burghart continues, in the Gawker article. "And so I decided to build it. I'm still building it. But I could use some help. You can find my growing database of deadly police violence here, at Fatal Encounters, and I invite you to go here, research one of the listed shootings, fill out the row, and change its background color. It'll take you about 25 minutes. There are thousands to choose from, and another 2,000 or so on my cloud drive that I haven't even added yet. After I fact-check and fill in the cracks, your contribution will be added to largest database about police violence in the country. Feel free to check out what has been collected about your locale's information here."

There needs to be more accountability of police and their trigger-happy ways. More databases operated by independent sources - free of government control or bias - must be unveiled, implemented, and most importantly, operated responsibly and diligently over the long term. Fly-by-night websites need not even break into the scene - desperate circumstance cry out for desperate actions, after all....All this bloodletting cannot go unanswered. We live in a Post-911 society that isn't such a warm and fuzzy place to be. It looks like America's police are sticking to their guns, and the only solution, right now, at least, is for Americans to police the police, like they have been doing. And of course, if you want to help those who have built more elaborate tracking efforts, like D. Brian Burghart, you'll have plenty to keep you occupied. And you may do a lot of good for your community, too, by policing the cops who police you and your neighborhood.

Using cameras attached to cell phones to visually document such atrocities as what happened outside the Los Angeles homeless shelter is the only weapon at our disposal. If it hadn't been for a brave concerned eyewitness, this horrible act would have gone unnoticed.

It's sad to say, but there's a police state operating in today's America. Those in power have little concern with their subjugated masses and seem intent on taking away more and more of our civil rights. And if you happen to be poor, and gawd forbid, if you're homeless, or a minority, especially a young African-American or a Hispanic male, you're simply a target for the ever-expanding shooting range for John & Jane Law.

Did the police learn anything from Ferguson, Mo.? Was Mike Brown's untimely death just the advent of more societal breakdown and bedlam? When a suspect can't breathe, he most likely can't fight, anyhow, and choking the poor guy to death with an illegal chokehold is mere overkill. Did the cops learn anything from the horrid death of Eric Garner? Is crying 'I can't breathe' enough for the chance at taking another breath? And tasing a homeless guy repeatedly, is it just a way to get a nasty reaction out of him so a gun slaying can ensue? The police in America haven't learned a thing from their misgivings, and killer cops remain on the street. We have to document their draconian practices and continue to pencil in mustaches on these very dangerous dogs.

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