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‘Bob, He’s Gonna Kill Me’
As America oscillates through the recent civic upheaval in its concepts of policing, it has been hard to miss that the conversation is very uninformed. While it is imperative that the citizens of a democracy set the rules by which the laws are enforced, it is equally imperative that they understand the repercussions.
Just as football fans would ignore the opinions of TV talking heads who’ve never stepped foot in a stadium (never mind never actually played the game), citizens should be extremely wary of politicians and yaktivists who condemn police tactics without understanding their underlying principles.
I’ve written about policing issues for several publications, including the Los Angeles Times. I have attended a complete law enforcement academy and spent hundreds of hours on patrol with cops as both a journalism and concerned citizen.
But, I never pinned on a badge. So, I am equally immersed in the perspective of an average citizen who has had some very disappointing encounters with the police, as recently as last month.
This varied set of experiences informs me that most people really have no understanding of the mindset of a police officer because they lack the foundational knowledge that police training imparts in law enforcement officers.
While police academies have extensive curricula covering many topics – criminal and evidentiary law, weapons handling, first aid, and so many others – the day-to-day emphasis is on creating a mindset of self-preservation that is unlike any other occupation – even more so than my experience as an Army infantryman. Understanding this “officer safety” mindset is integral to influencing the way police work is done.
The fibers of the safety mindset were woven into cops from the first moments of the academy. Most were taught with case studies. The subject of the case was dead. Always dead. And always a specific individual – by name – who lost his life in a way that budding cops need to avoid.
These lessons formed a list of 21 Rules, each directly traceable to the experience of a cop who died exemplifying it. Two decades later the specifics have faded from my mind, but the gist remains:
#1: Always keep your gun hand free. Never have anything in your gun hand (beyond a pen for note taking), because if you suddenly need your gun you’ll have no time to empty your hands. Note pads, flash lights and coffee cups were always to be grasped in the weak hand. You never know when someone will approach you in a parking lot to kill you.
Another: Always watch people’s hands. Eyes can’t punch or pull a concealed gun.
Never stand in front of a door. That’s where an ambushing suspect will shoot through.
And: Talk to people from a “bladed stance.” One shoulder forward, gun side away, weight on your back foot. You never know when someone will throw a punch. This is intimidating, unfriendly and life-saving.
These are not tactics for specific situations. Tactics like building searches are a distinct set of instruction. Rather, these lessons are about developing safe habits for a cop’s life so it can be a long life.
This is unlike any other occupation that interacts with the public. A mechanic may learn specific steps to safely lift a car. A power-line repairman may consider all lines to be live wires. But a police officer works in a world where unseen live wires are omnipresent, and constant vigilance is required to avoid them.
It is this safety-oriented perspective that many people mistake for arrogance or bullying. And, it is true, those negative traits can also be wrongly excused away as “officer safety.” Differentiating “safe” from “bullying” is impossible without understanding the threats.
It is in this knowledge that honest police reform advocates (vice cop haters) fall short. In 2007, Civil rights attorney Connie Rice issued “Rampart Reconsidered,” a report criticizing the LAPD’s “warrior culture” which she blamed on “the myth and lore of urban policing.”
Interestingly, the report was issued hours after LAPD officer was shot and paralyzed. Rice has never said if she considers Officer Kristina Rippati’s injuries to be to be “lore,” merely a “myth” — or perhaps a lesson officers should learn.
Unfortunately, dramatic fiction and the news media have given the general public a concept of policing that is one part Cliff Notes and another a hall of mirrors. Facts like the decisive factors articulated by officers in a shooting are usually buried. Thus, many people can’t understand why police shoot unarmed suspects. But, they might had they had been in my academy class as an instructor tearfully recounted his partner struggling with a man who was trying to disarm him, and then look up and cry “Bob, he’s gonna kill me.” The instructor, instead, killed the “unarmed man.” That sort of detail is rarely gets to the general public.
This situation is partially the fault of police departments who feed the media sanitized accounts for investigative necessity. But rarely does the public know if a cop shoots a suspect from seven feet away (the average distance of an engagement), 50 feet away, or while physically entangled, pinned to the ground using a back-up gun.
Worse, TV drama depictions of well-rehearsed marksmanship lead to statements like “I don’t understand why the cops didn’t just shoot him in the leg,” This prima facie admission of ignorance and demand for ballistic improbabilities make cops who are interested in going home after work dismiss the discussion.
If Americans want (as they should) to dictate the way policing is done, they must understand not just that policing deserves lip service about danger, but that cops die when they give suspects the benefit of the doubt. They can be killed by “unarmed” suspects. They can die when everything seems calm. They can be shot in a fraction of a second. That even a handcuffed suspect is not safe. And that they can be beaten to death.
Because while the yaktivists will parade their signs with names like Michael Brown, Eric Garner and John Crawford, cops carry names in their hearts and in the back of their minds: Ken Wrede. Daniel Fraembs. Bruce K. Lee. Elizabeth Butler. Evan Bell. David Smith. And innumerable more. None of whom did anything to get themselves killed, except try to keep their communities safe.
Without this foundation of understanding, police reformers will be taken no more seriously than an NFL coach perceives a Monday morning quarterback who’s never set foot in a stadium.
And the cop has a lot more to lose than a Super Bowl ring.
Published in General
First of all, apologies. I misread the numbers. I was dividing 7121 by 19 to get 374, but 7121 was the number of participants in the study, not the number of deaths. So I should not have used the link and it does not illustrate my point very well. I withdraw it.
Despite my shame, however, I am going to maintain my point. All jobs pose some level of danger and it is not possible to have people employed to maintain order without taking significant risks. That means some will die. In a large population, we will never eliminate that reality for very long.
Moreover, unlike banning the use of asbestos, moving the line for where the use of force is tolerated in police/citizen interactions has consequences for more than an industrial product. It means more citizens will die unjustifiably at the hands officers who value their own safety more highly and citizen safety less. That is an undesirable outcome which must be balanced against the undesirable out come of murdered officers in setting public policy.
The problem — and it’s one we can only grapple with the best we can — we can never solve it — is that there’s inherent uncertainty in the interaction. As a officer, you never know for sure if I’m a danger and as a citizen, I never know for sure if you have an itchy trigger finger. That unstable reality, together with the size of the stakes for both of us, guarantees that some unfortunate things are going to happen over the course of a large number of interactions.
Going back to the first post I made on this thread — that’s my problem with your perspective. You seem not to acknowledge that unavoidable tradeoff and the reality that rules for the use of force have to be set that make some effort to balance the competing sides of it. I still haven’t heard from you why police officers shouldn’t just shoot everyone they encounter, on the theory that they might pose a danger. The only entirely unthreatening suspect is a dead suspect, so why not just kill them all? That’s the only guarantee you’ll go home to your wife at night alive, and upright.
Until you make an effort to grapple with the hard question of striking that balance, all you’re doing is making a cri de coeur that really adds nothing to the public policy question.
I think Gardner should unquestionably have been allowed to walk away if the only alternative (a supposition I don’t concede) was what happened. It is always wrong to kill an unarmed suspect for a non-violent crime. Whether it rises to the level of criminal or not is a harder and more complicated and fact specific question, but it is always wrong.
I think where many get there nickers in a twist on this particular case is that the police were enforcing tax law. They killed a man obviously guilty of his crime, but that crime was not seeking license from the government to sell a particular consumable product and not giving the government its cut. That this is the inevitable outcome in a state such as ours is a rather compelling argument in favor of a more libertarian (or classically liberal) construction of government.
To tie it back into the main concepts of the post, the police did exactly what was required of them, they enforced the law. Do we really want our nation to be a place where this is the tragic, yet appropriate, outcome?
KP, I am entirely sympathetic to the argument that what Garner did shouldn’t have been a crime to begin with, and that by geometrically multiplying the list of petty and victimless crimes that the police are expected to intervene in, we magnify the number of adversarial interactions in which a tragedy — on one side or the other — can occur. In my mind that’s a perfectly good (but not the only) argument for paring back the criminal law to govern only acts that violate person or property.
But there really is an entirely separate question presented by the Garner situation. It is not the case that prohibiting an act necessarily means you are willing to kill to enforce that prohibition. It is possible to both prohibit selling untaxed cigarettes and put in place enforcement rules that do not permit this level of violence to enforce that prohibition. Obviously it will undermine the prohibition somewhat but going back to the point I’ve made over and over on this thread, in this area all we can do is make imperfect tradeoffs. We must make them the best we can, and accept the fact that despite our best efforts, there will be some consequences we wish could be avoided.
Theoretically I can agree with you. However, the state always falls back to the position of having a monopoly on violence. It is what separates us from them and creates the us/them duality in the first place. It is an imperfect trade off with a state of nature/war of whichever variety you subscribe to philosophically.
I think people can appreciate the need for cops to be safe, on the other hand it is not like incidents of police using deadly force on civilians who turn out to not have been carrying weapons or being threatening do occur. The cops safety mentality plays a large role in these deaths. The victims are perceived as being a threat because the cop fails to correctly assess the situation (ie. he is holding a toy gun in stead of a real one).
I wonder to what extent the “safety” training can induce a level of paranoia in cops that can lead to poor decisions? Perhaps approaching every situation as a possible life or death struggle tips the balance in an unfavorable way for these civilians. And while cops may be able to justify their actions to their department and court of laws I hardly think this is of any comfort to the relatives of these victims.
Furthermore one of the over looked parts of these incidents is that while cops are trained to deal with potential threats from civilians, civilians are not trained to deal with cops. So the man holding the BB gun in a Walmart might not know how to react when a cop comes barring down on him with a gun. It may seem logical to say that he should do what the cop says, but being nervous, scared, and confused makes people behave in less than optimal ways, which can further add to the sense of peril of the situation.
A lot of surprising comments in this thread-a lot of antagonism towards the police, it seems-so I have to ask, “What is the citizen’s responsibility in this interaction?” I regard the police with great respect. I understand the stress under which they work and live. I consider it my job, as an average civilian to first let the cop know that I am on his side. He is human and under certain situations might be experiencing fear. I don’t want him to fear me. Sure there might be an occasion when a cop gives me a ticket or a fine type violation and I get pissed off. I might even let the cop know I am unhappy. But never would I behave in a threatening manner. I was stopped once a number of years ago because I had visited a woman who ironed my clothes. She lived in a not so good hood. But unbeknownst to me, a drug house was operating just down the street. After I dropped off the clothes and headed home, I was stopped by two cops in a plain car. I asked why they stopped me and they claimed I was speeding. They had no radar and I had only been on that boulevard for one block…not enough time to track my speed manually. Then they asked me to exit the car and allow them to look in my briefcase which was on the front seat. I knew they had no “right” to do this, but I quickly assessed that to not allow them access could mean a trip to the station, so I unlocked my briefcase and let them look. They made me stand spread eagle with my hands on the rear of my car and then asked me to recite the alphabet. It was a bit unsettling, but I was no worse for it, and I drove home and have lived my life. I hope they have lived theirs as well. Every day we interact with other people in other jobs, most of which are not nearly as dangerous or helpful as law enforcement. We often have the misfortune of experiencing rude or unhelpful behavior. Police can have bad days also. A few cops should seek other employment. They are unsuited for the job. For the 95% or better of cops who are good people, I say thanks for your service to my community. We need you.
I completely disagree. You present a false narrative of the events of Garner’s death.
He was not killed (read: executed) for the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes. You make it sound as if the police saw the cigarettes and opened fire on him. The seriousness of his crime was irrelevant.
Nor was he executed because he resisted arrest. His resistance was met with some degree of force, which, to my eyes, seemed reasonable, although I see where others might disagree. The police waited until they had a sufficient number to bring him down without having to resort to a baton or taser (Rodney King?). The confrontation was forceful enough, however, to trigger a heart attack in this extremely unhealthy man. No one wanted or expected this outcome. Still, such things can happen when one resists arrest. I don’t think I’d resist five cops trying to arrest me, no matter how minor my offense.
Let him walk away? You must be kidding. This means that the only people who would get arrested for minor crimes would be those who meekly submit. Your rule seems to be that all one has to do to avoid arrest is to resist it. How long until every scofflaw realizes that this is the new rule? How long till the city becomes a cesspool of illegal behavior? Not long. There goes your broken windows policing.
One more point. I suggest that defanging the police in such confrontations will lead to more, not fewer, civilian deaths and injuries. When the perp knows of a certainty that the cops can use force to apprehend him, he is more likely to submit. When the perp thinks that there is a 50-50 chance that the cops will let him go if he resists arrest, he’s more likely to resist in the first place. This will lead to many more confrontations than we would get if everyone knew that resisting arrest is a really dangerous thing to do. An analogy: A policeman signals a driver to pull over for a stop-sign violation. If the trooper is banned from chasing him if he drives away at high speed, then everyone will speed away.
Resisting arrest should be a very dangerous thing to do.
I spent a little time taking Army ROTC courses. One of the officers taught that the top two priorities of an officer are:
In that order.
I have friends who are Police officers and fully support their rights to protect themselves. I give them the benefit of the doubt.
I do however relate to those who have mentioned negative experiences during stops for traffic violations. I personally believe most traffic violations are a thinly-veiled “tax” on otherwise law-abiding citizens. It annoys me when a Police officer tries to tell me that I was threatening anyone’s safety by driving 45 mph in 35 mph zone with light traffic. Please.
I work for an electric utility, and attend the weekly safety meetings. Electrical workers talk like that. I was a volunteer firefighter for 25 years. They talk like that.
You’ll find that anyone who works in an industrial occupation (in the U.S. anyway) with an elevated chance of injury if the safety rules aren’t followed, talk like that.
(redacted)
The only time they’ll pull you over is when there’s light traffic. It’s safer that way.
Getting serious, that’s a fundamental problem with the political class, not the police.
Should all just meekly submit to the armed state even when clearly within their rights? What would have happened if cdor had refused voluntary search of his briefcase? Should we even be arresting for minor crimes? An arrest, regardless of the level of the offense, can be extremely costly to the individual and bears a considerable cost to the taxpayers.
We want the police to use the force necessary when warranted. The trouble is getting them to rightly judge the warrant of that force. It is exceedingly difficult to find the sweet spot on which to balance liberty and security, but siding with the state against the citizen by default strikes me as profoundly wrong.
Al Sparks
The only time they’ll pull you over is when there’s light traffic. It’s safer that way.
Getting serious, that’s a fundamental problem with the political class, not the police.
True – and in a way it goes back to the larger point that we are asking officers to enforce too many “laws”. Let’s focus their efforts on serious crimes and do away with laws that make it illegal to sell single cigarettes or drive 10 mph over a posted limit.
I have 100 times more respect for a Police officer arresting a murderer or drug dealer than I do for an officer running a speed trap in a low-crime neighborhood.
You’re talking nationwide, right? Out of how many police officers? That number doesn’t alarm me. As someone else pointed out, there are occupations with higher risks.
Even the peacetime military has significant training deaths.
In general, the safety culture in this country has gotten oppressive. The police is just one aspect of that.
Yes, it’s not just black folk who are losing respect for police. There is a problem. Now, I believe the police were justified in the Eric Garner case. Sadly they had to arrest him for a minor crime, and apparently they were tired of him, and vice-versa, leading up to the confrontation. If you are in frail health, or even in good health, it’s wise to cooperate with police.
The Ferguson case is completely without merit. The cop was fully justified in that instance from what I know. I stand with the cops in NYC in condemning the rhetoric De Blasio indulges in.
Unfortunately a great majority black folk have their motivation-radar locked on one setting: Racism.
The problem isn’t racism. It’s authoritarianism. That and too many laws making virtually everyone some kind of law-breaker, which to a lot of cops, means “criminal”. When police are given tremendous leeway in how they interact with citizens, combined with a culture of us vs. them, there are bound to be thousands of cases of abuse of authority. You shouldn’t be so surprised that ordinary citizens are not especially supportive of police.
You were targeted and compliant, once. But what if you had many occasions to drop off your laundry and this same thing kept happening to you? Would you start to become annoyed? Angry? Might you at some point express mild aggravation and then the cop decides he doesn’t like you and keeps harassing you? That happens you know. Will you continue to consent to a searches when you know you are innocent and have other things to do than watch coips rifle through your belongings, intent on finding something – anything, they can use to incriminate you? By the way, if you happened to have cash in that briefcase, they can, and probably would, confiscate it.
Have you ever had your car towed because of a lapsed inspection sticker? Not a warning, not a ticket with a work order…towed. BTW I was not disrespectful or in any way confrontational. Cost me about $400. (New Jersey) Have you ever had your car’s engine sabotaged by police who were angry they didn’t catch you with drugs? (New Mexico)That was $4500. Have you ever called the police and had them act like YOU were the criminal? (Philadelphia) Have you ever told a policeman sitting in his squad car, that you saw teenagers a block away clearly casing cars with lookouts at each end of the street, and have him tell you to move along or he’ll arrest you? AFTER you have had your own car broken into numerous times?
I had a business in an”enterprise zone” (read: high crime area ,Philadelphia). I didn’t come to a complete stop at a stop sign. Ticket. Were more severe crimes going on while they were filling out the paperwork? You betcha.
I’ve been a crime victim enough to know the police arrive after-the-fact and often aren’t at all sympathetic or interested. They were somewhere else writing some poor schlub a chickenshit ticket before you bothered them with your petty inconvenience.
I happen to be privy to information from police reporting corruption of their fellow officers. Rampant and systematic thievery is going on in a particular jurisdiction and I’m sure it’s not only there.
So our responsibility is to be respectful and comply. However it is our right and responsibility to deal with these issues elsewhere, and point-out problems, like here.
There are many cops who have performed heroic actions, but being a cop should not automatically come with hero status or special sympathy for their job.
I think something that grates is in all this talk of officer safety, it seems like much of the onus on how to behave to ensure officer safety is on the private citizen. I’ve got a Facebook friend who is a police officer who, post Ferguson, has approvingly posted every “If you don’t want to get hurt, just do exactly what I say” essay by clueless police he ran across. He opposes requiring cameras because “they might be on when I’m off duty” (I’m negatively paraphrasing him, but that’s the gist). The temptation to tag him on every anti-police article run by Reason magazine is almost too much to bear. And he’s a believer that “officer safety is paramount”. It’s apparently the citizens job to do everything in his power to make the police officer feel safe, while the police officer has no concomitant role in de-escalating interactions. This isn’t a war zone, outside a handful of neighborhoods, current police serve in the safest, most crime free environment that any police has every enjoyed. Yet some of them talk like this is the mean streets of post apocalyptic New York depicted so ably by John Carpenter.
That being said, my last interaction with a police officer in a professional capacity left me with an extremely high opinion of that officer and the local force. I was reporting stolen property; he was very professional, both in how he did his job, and how he handled my emotional distress, and later, when my property was found later dumped in the yard of a house a few blocks down, dealt with the homeowner in a non presumptive, non threatening manner that got a homeowner that quite properly might have felt like they were being accused of a crime (Hi! We found stolen property in your yard.) at least temporarily on his side. No one was threatened. He didn’t put on airs. He did his job, competently and cheerfully, and his comportment was the best part of the whole ordeal.
So there’s that.
I generally agree although I think you have grounds to be a bit more discomfited by the stop you describe than you appear to be. I probably would have done the same thing. But my internal monologue would not have been so nonchalant about it. When it was over and they were satisfied, I might well have ask for a badge number and filed a follow up complaint. Unless there’s something you’re not telling us, those officer’s behavior was entirely unjustified.
I agree with you and yet I think MWTA makes a fair point as well. Obviously these problems can be minimized if we stop criminalizing everything and that may be why so many people in the Garner case jumped to the question of why this is criminal anyway. If Eric Garner had been running with a snatched purse, or lighting a house on fire, or assaulting a fellow citizen, or even throwing a brick through a jewelry store window, I would have felt very differently in watching the video of what happened to him. The fact that the precipitating offense was malum prohibitum rather than malum in se, for me at least, kind of invariably colors my view of the event.
I work for a steel company and that is definitely the mindset of the workers in the mill, and of the executive and management staff that supports them.
As the CEO puts it, if the ton of steel isn’t a safe ton, he doesn’t want it.
He didn’t die because the police were enforcing tax laws. He died because he resisted arrest.
This happened 25 years ago and I am glad I handled the situation as I did. My life might be a whole lot different now if I had allowed my internal monologue to become visible.
For Franco I do not know what to say. You seem to have some kind of a black star hovering over your head. I am very sorry. Good luck in the future.
You are right that your behavior may have been wise under the circumstances. It almost certainly was. That does not mean that what you were subjected to was justified or that, as a matter of public policy, police officers should be taught that subjecting citizens to what you were subjected to is ok. It is not.
For Franco I do not know what to say. You seem to have some kind of a black star hovering over your head. I am very sorry. Good luck in the future.
No black star. I’m 61 years old. I have had a lot of experiences in my life, perhaps because I travel a lot I have had several businesses I have two wonderful daughters and I been both rich(mildly) and poor (mildly) and maybe because I lived in Philadelphia, a corrupt city if there ever was one. So I don’t take or need your sympathy, although I appreciate the well-wishing if it’s sincere. I’m only reporting.
I can’t help but think the statement may be a subtle dig at me, as though I somehow attract the negative attention from police and that somehow I must be different than others.
I’ve actually had positive interactions with police as well. Oh my, even more encounters? Yes. However they were almost all in the 1970’s. So I have a standard that’s fairly objective. It’s getting worse.
Oh yeah, and one time I took my raging alcoholic friend to rehab where he was inadmissible and we had to call the police. They came and he cursed them out horribly. The next day he looked like Harry Reid does now, even though I begged them and told them he was out of his mind. I don’t really fault them though. But make no mistake, police beat people up when they want to.
Actually, causation is a complicated question and in this case, both were “but for” causes of his death. Some combination of his resisting arrest, the officer’s decision to use very severe force, and his impaired health, were the proximate causes of his death. We could probably argue all day about the relative contribution of those causes, but simply to ascribe it to his resisting arrest is to ignore many of the facts.
Nonsense.
If the police say “you’re under arrest” and he turns around and put his hands behind his back to be cuffed, then there’s no reason for the officers to need to make a “decision to use very severe force”, and his impaired health then has no role (unless his health was so impaired that he couldn’t survive having his hands behind his back during the ride in the squad car to the precinct.)
It was solely his decision to resist arrest that led to his death.
The problem is that the cops can say this with impunity. It will cost them nothing. It will cost the arrestee thousands of dollars, many hours of time (a few of which absolutely without liberty), public humiliation, social ostracism, etc, etc. Sure, there is legal recourse to “make it right,” but that’s thousands upon thousands more dollars spent. How is it so hard to see that we have bartered away our liberty for the sake of ephemeral security?