We spend a lot of tax money on training and equipping police officers to protect us from crime and deal with dangerous situations. It’s not asking too much to expect them to use these resources to resolve potentially violent situations in a peaceful manner if at all possible. That’s why they’ve historically been called “peace officers.”
As the lawyer representing the family of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy with a toy gun who was killed by a trigger-happy cop last week, told the media today, “Police officers are supposed to deescalate not escalate situations.” It sounds like that’s going to be a key issue in the family’s civil rights lawsuit against the police department.
But policing isn’t peaceful anymore. Recent events create the impression, whether justified or not, that we have as much to fear from the police as from criminals. What seems to be happening is that police are using force as a first (and, often, only) resort in situations where force should be a last resort. In particular, several recent high-profile police shootings of civilians have prompted mass demonstrations in numerous cities, including Seattle. These incidents have become a political issue in blogs and media forums. And why wouldn’t they, given the obvious public policy implications?
This weekend, I posted in the comments under a Seattle Times article about the protests. (Under a pseudonym, of course; I don’t crazy people throwing bricks thrown through my windows or dumping manure in my driveway.) The subject of the article attracted dozens of comments, often heated, with reader opinions split along the usual conservative/liberal lines.
There’s always a baseline in any discussions involving hard-right ideologues, because their minds are closed to both new information and logical argument, stemming from an unshakeable allegiance to their belief system. You can’t really engage them; they’re a brick wall. On this specific issue, you get responses like, “Eric Garner had it coming for breaking the law” (i.e., selling loose cigarettes on a street corner) and “resisting arrest” (i.e., verbally arguing with the cops when they confronted him). It’s hard to convince the self-righteous minds that these aren’t good reasons to kill someone.
The cops have taken a somewhat different, but parallel, line. The cop union’s spiel is that Garner killed himself. Really. Literally. Their “reasoning,” if you want to call it that, is that by being overweight and out of shape, and having asthma, Garner set himself up for his own death. You know, in the event a rogue cop came along and wrapped a brawny arm around his neck and squeezed his windpipe with a chokehold that is specifically prohibited by his department’s use-of-force policies — and then half a dozen cops stood around picking their noses and scratching their asses, leaving Garner unconscious and dying on the sidewalk without making any attempt to render first aid or resuscitate him.
Like the crazy rightwingers who blindly support cop violence against citizens, the sentiment underlying this view of what happened on that New York street corner is that police have a difficult and dangerous job (they do; no one, including me, argues otherwise), and therefore cops can do no wrong (I find myself struggling with the logic of this).
Under the circumstances, the cop union shouldn’t be terribly shocked if public respect for cop unions collapses, and comments like this aren’t helping their cause. Nor is demanding the NFL punish (black) players for expressing sympathy with (black) protesters against police violence against (black) citizens.
The crazy rightwingers who go around saying people who verbally dispute being arrested deserve to be killed don’t have to worry about losing their credibility or our respect. They lost that a long time ago for other similar offenses against reason and decency.
Basically, what I posted in the Seattle Times forum is that America is experiencing an epidemic of cop violence and this is why protesters are taking to the streets. I got the usual rightwing blowback. One guy disputed my use of the word “epidemic” and denied that hundreds of civilians are killed by cops in the U.S. every year. In fact, no one knows what the body count is, because there are nearly 18,000 state and local police departments in he U.S. and reporting police shootings is voluntary, but the Department of Justice’s incomplete figures put the number of civilians killed by police in the U.S. above 400 per year. Some private groups who attempt to track police shootings think the actual number may be two or three times that much. So, yes, I think it’s fair to call that an “epidemic.”
If you think about it, over the roughly 10 years America fought a war in Iraq, probably more Americans were being killed by own police on our own streets than by the enemy our troops fought in Iraq. I think that’s remarkable.
You can’t really dispute there’s an epidemic of police violence against citizens in our country, if you’re at all honest about what the statistical evidence, such as it is, shows. So it’s reasonable to ask why so many cops are killing so many of the citizens they’re supposed to serve and protect. Let’s start with Britain. In 2012 and 2013, a total of 3 people were killed by police in all of Britain. If you conservatively estimate U.S. police-inflicted deaths at, say, one thousand in the same time frame, then the next question is, are Americans really that much more violent than their British cousins?
I doubt it. I think something’s going on in our police practices that we need to take a hard look at.
While the protests have focused on the spectacular failure of our criminal justice system to provide a deterrent against unwarranted cop violence against unarmed citizens who are guilty of only minor or trivial offenses (and, in some cases, were entirely innocent), there’s another issue we need to look at, which goes to the heart of how our police forces are recruited, trained, and supervised.
Are police escalating normal encounters until they become deadly encounters?
This is a difficult question to answer, given the complexity and fluidity of human interaction dynamics. It’s important to begin by remembering that most people that police are likely to encounter don’t have great human relationship skills to begin with. So cops need to be, and supposedly are, trained to deal effectively with people who may be intoxicated or high on drugs, belligerent or excitable, or acting emotionally (as in a domestic conflict situation). We want cops to have the skills to defuse these situations. We don’t want emotionally unstable cops blowing people away on slight provocation. Especially if it’s the cop who provokes or escalates the situation.
It’s hard to say how much that factored into the Brown and Garner situations. But it’s inarguable that those situations escalated out of control, and there are legitimate questions about who escalated them. In the Tamir Rice case, even before the official investigations are completed, we know that an emotionally unstable cop who was essentially fired by his department because he was deemed unsuitable for police work was promptly hired by another police department that either failed to check his background or didn’t care about the red flags in his background. What followed was that this cop, when dispatched along with his more senior partner to a call involving a kid waving a toy gun in a public park, leaped out of the patrol car and, within 2 seconds of arriving on the scene, shot the kid dead. This incident has very much of a “shoot first, ask questions later” flavor to it.
That’s exactly what we don’t want our police to do. We do not want to entrust our lives and safety to knee-jerk, trigger-happy, shoot-first-ask-questions-later cops. We, the public, want cops who think before shooting. That’s why we pay taxes for their salaries and training, to provide them with equipment, and backup cops — so they can respond to threatening situations (or situations that appear threatening) with non-lethal outcomes. We don’t want our cops to be executioners. We want them to be peacemakers.
If you go on the internet and view You Tube videos involving cop-vs.-citizen confrontations, you can find plenty of examples of belligerent cops threatening citizens and escalating trivial situations into incidents with a potential for violence. Clearly, we have people wearing badges and guns who are temperamentally unsuited to provide the kind of policing we want in our communities and neighborhoods. Therefore, at a minimum, police departments (and those who manage them) need to do a better job of screening applicants for police jobs, training officers, and then properly supervising them. In some cities, at least, this system appears to be breaking down at every one of those levels.
A very specific problem, needing urgent attention, is the practice of some police departments (usually smaller and underfunded ones) of picking up other departments’ personnel castoffs to saving on training costs. A cop who has been fired by a police department for performance issues is not a suitable hire for another department, and that should override any budgetary considerations — by a long shot. Unfortunately, it does not, and so we get bad cops bouncing from one police department to another in places like St. Louis County, which has nearly 100 separate municipalities, most of which have their own little police departments. As the Tamir Rice incident shows, a cop who is fired for bad performance or unsuitability for police work should stay fired. He shouldn’t be allowed to be a cop again; he should get into some other line of work.
But, more broadly, there needs to be a fundamental rethinking by police department managements of the general cop mentality in this country. There’s nothing wrong with the slogan, “To Serve And Protect;” it’s a great expression of what the mental orientation of our police should be. The issue is that this ideal isn’t being implemented enough. In too many places, too much of the time, it’s empty words.
Police training, policies, and practices must, of course, fit the realities of the streets. There are times when dangerous people must be shot down. We all recognize that. When people resist arrest, it may be necessary to use some level of force — perhaps a lot of force — to effect the arrest. We know that, too. Police work, by its nature, isn’t pretty and can’t be turned into a sweet-smelling rose. As New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton said on the CBS network’s “Face the Nation” show on Sunday, “policing involving use of force always looks awful.” We understand that.
Reasonable people should be able to come together on the idea that police should try to de-escalate situations, should be careful about using force, and when force is necessary should use only the force necessary to resolve the situation with minimum harm to everyone involved. That’s not radical.
Meanwhile, Ed Mullins, head of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, called New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has a black wife and biracial son, a “moron” for acknowledging the concern of groups representing minorities, many of whom are now participating in the protests, about how police treat minority people. If the police unions can’t do any better than this, they aren’t part of the conversation, and deserve to be ignored.
Update: CNN posted the following story Monday afternoon:
“As Tamir Rice’s 14-year-old sister rushed to her brother’s side upon learning he’d been shot, police officers ‘tackled’ her, handcuffed her and placed her in a squad car with the Cleveland officer who shot Tamir, her mother and a Rice family attorney told reporters Monday. The mother, Samaria Rice, was threatened with arrest herself as she ‘went charging and yelling at police’ because they wouldn’t let her run to her son’s aid, she said.”
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/08/us/cleveland-tamir-rice-mother/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
Comment: Are cops escalating situations? Sure looks like they did this time. If this is what passes for professional police work in Cleveland, maybe Cleveland needs an all-new police force.