Jack Dunphy, a police officer for more than 20 years, has a column in PJ Media about a proposed law in California that would give prosecutors more leeway in charging police officers with crimes as a result of confrontations with armed suspects.

Dunphy, not surprisingly, usually supports officers who find themselves in impossible situations where drawing their weapons and firing them is justified. But he draws the line when it comes to officers whose actions prior to the shooting could have resulted in a non-violent outcome.

Specifically, he thinks the shooting in Baton Rouge in July of 2016 of Alton Sterling fell in that gray area where officers handled the confrontation badly and ended in a needless shooting. Dunphy believes that the prosecution of the two officers involved is political but that some disciplinary action should have been taken against them.

Another recent shooting in Sacramento of Stephon Clark has now led to proposed legislation in California that is, as Dunphy describes it, "harebrained."

Here in California, the home of bad ideas, lawmakers are considering legislationthat would make it easier to prosecute police officers under similar circumstances. “We have been deeply saddened and frustrated by the killing of black and brown men by law enforcement,” said Assemblywoman Shirley Weber (D-San Diego), the bill's author. “It seems that the worst possible outcome is increasingly the only outcome that we experience.”

The proposed law would change the legal standard by which police use of force is judged from one of reasonableness to one of necessity. It would also allow prosecutors to consider an officer’s efforts -- or lack of effort -- to deescalate a situation in determining if the officer had violated the law, and it would mandate that prosecutors evaluate an officer’s actions that led up to a shooting.  Thus, if officers make a tactical blunder like those in the Alton Sterling incident, and after that blunder shoot a suspect, the officers could conceivably be criminally culpable even if defending themselves against a deadly threat.

The proposed law is harebrained for many reasons, primarily for the fact that it doesn’t define, as most criminal laws do, any prohibited or mandated act. For a successful prosecution, district attorneys must be able to prove each and every element of a crime. In a robbery, for example, they must prove that a defendant took property by means of force or fear. For a burglary, they must prove a defendant entered a structure with the intent to commit a felony or a theft. Take away any one of these elements and the crime has not occurred.

But in Weber’s proposed law, police officers won’t know with certainty which acts are prohibited or required, only that if they find themselves in the center of controversy for having shot someone, their actions will be scrutinized by people who a) have no experience in police work, and b) may be more concerned with political ramifications than with protecting a community against crime.

Violent crime is already on the rise in California. This proposed law won’t help.

It's not hard to imagine how this law will tie the hands of police officers and expose them to grave risk. At the very least, it will cause some of them to hestitate. And that could lead to tragedy every bit as painful as an officer shooting a suspect.

We pay police officers to take those risks. But we don't pay them to needlessly expose themselves to danger. If there was a chance that the law could reduce the number of casualties on the streets of both officers and suspects, it might do some good. But as I see it, officers in a confrontation with an armed suspect (or someone they believe to be armed) will now be sitting ducks, at the mercy of a potential cop killer who doesn't have to worry about whether his shooting is legal.