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The Randomness: On David French’s Quest to De-Risk Crime
As a fellow Iraq war vet, I deeply respect the service and perspective of National Review columnist David French. He volunteered out of a sense of obligation to serve in a war he had endorsed. The man put his rear end where his mouth had put others. That he was “inside the wire” as a legal advisor should be beside the point. He risked much more than any pundit. Oh, but that he would do the same with his punditry on policing. On this Mr. French is consistently, dangerously wrong.
I have spent much of three decades observing, reporting on, and training in police work. That study is further informed by my tours as an infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the lessons I’ve learned are clear: Mr. French’s ideas will get good people killed by shifting the risk of criminality off of the lawless. Sadly, his effort to de-risk criminality hit a nadir with his column on the death of Stephon Clark.
The facts, per bodycam and helicopter video, are roughly thus: A 911 caller reported to the Sacramento Police Department “a guy going down the street breaking windows of cars” who went in the backyard of a house. A circling helicopter crew reported a man, later identified as Clark, breaking into a second house, climbing a backyard fence to a third home then walking down the driveway. Officers confronted him, ordering him to “show your hands” and “stop,” as he bolted to the backyard. Clark turned toward the pursuing officers who took cover behind the house before shooting as one cried “gun, gun, gun” and Clark continued to advance.
From the first shout to the last shot, the confrontation lasted 19 seconds. Only later did they discover that Clark merely had a cell phone and was in the yard of his grandmother’s home, where he stayed.
Mr. French believes the officers should have assumed they weren’t really at risk. His back-of-the-envelope probabilities analysis features the ultimate in armchair quarterbacking.
French ponders: “If it’s dark, police are sprinting, and flashlights are shaking, what are the chances that the cops’ first assessment that the suspect had a gun are wrong?” Not much. According to the Washington Post’s Fatal Force database (among the most reliable compilations of such information), only 7 percent of people killed by police in 2017 were unarmed (which doesn’t mean they were not a threat). And does he really mean that the more ambiguously dangerous the situation (suspect fleeing to an unlit area) the more benefit of the doubt the suspect should get?
What was the reasonable risk of backing off and continuing to give strong, verbal commands? If an armed suspect (as French concedes the officers genuinely believed him to be) ignores commands then turns and advances on two armed officers, what additional command will be effective? Moreover, would Mr. French bet his own life on those commands? And how many would he give before shooting? The officers gave at least four.
What are the possibilities he hadn’t heard the commands? Inasmuch as Clark reacted to the commands, just distinctly the opposite of what he was told, it seems obvious that the chance is zero.
In perhaps the most ghoulish thing I’ve seen written about officer safety in a quarter century covering this topic, Mr. French asserts that because no Sacramento PD officer has been murdered in 19 years, they should have assumed there was less risk. He doesn’t ponder the probability that SPD officers who have been shot saved themselves by using the same lethal force he seeks to restrict. And, as Jack Dunphy points out, Mr. French ignores the murders of other Sacramento-area officers in recent years. Might the officers’ perceptions have been shaded by the conviction the week before of a double-cop-killer? Mr. French is silent on these, the hard details that are the reality out on the street.
Cop-hating libertarians and leftists are fond of statistics that show more commercial fisherman, loggers or cab driver are killed than cops per capita. That’s true as far as it goes. We’ve gone from over 100 officers murdered by gunfire in the 1970s to 64 in 2016 and 46 last year. This year is running 50 percent over last.
But police work stands alone with critics (like Mr. French) seeking to make it more dangerous. And purely for the benefit of people who almost always hold their own fates in their own hands. Yes, there are tragic exceptions of people who did nothing wrong, such as John Crawford, Justine Damond, Tyler Finch, and (most likely) Philando Castile. But, those are complex, literally one-in-a-thousand, awful events. And, notably, the Damond case appears criminal, which is definitively unreasonable.
But Mr. French’s worst transgression is to imply there’s predictability in the truly random nature of the risk of policing. Take, for instance, the 21-officer police department of Clinton, MO. The only two officers killed in its 150-year history were slain in the last nine months in separate incidents. Rookie Gary Michael was shot during an August traffic stop. Bizarrely, his replacement, Ofc. Chris Morton was recently slain after being sent to the wrong house on a 911 call, where he was ambushed by a drug dealer.
I have studied this issue for years. I call it “The Randomness,” and there is little predictable or probable about it. I learned this as a kid. In my hometown of West Covina, CA, the only two officers murdered on the job in the city’s history both died within five years. Ken Wrede was shot dead by a naked man. How’s that for unarmed?
Cops are murdered on the first day on the job and in the last weeks of a four-decade career. They are murdered stopping for coffee. They are murdered while handling the most minor of car accidents, by kids stealing beer before Christmas, and by people who call the cops on themselves. And they are killed in foot pursuit of suspects of minor crimes.
For those who don’t click, the latter incident, the murder of rookie Pomona Police Department Officer Gregg Casillas at the hands of a reckless driver, happened just days before the Clark shooting. Given that Mr. French wrote nothing of Casillas’ murder, we must conclude the probability is that his outrage at senseless killings has a finicky predictability.
Bizarrely, Mr. French argues it is problematic that police officers are shown videos of other cops’ deaths. It seems he prefers cops who are unaware that they can be shot dead by a man they’ve been talking to for 10 minutes, or shot in the face by a man who, like Clark, ignored commands to stop. Or even shot by handcuffed suspects.
Imagine declaring it’s dangerous to show videos of industrial accidents to fishermen and loggers.
The fact of the matter is, American police officers rarely use force of any kind, especially deadly force. There were 1.2 million violent crimes in the US in 2016, about 17,000 of them murders. Police officers made 50 million contacts with citizens, resulting in about 57,000 assaults on officers in this country with hundreds of millions of guns. That just 967 fatal shootings resulted is remarkable.
To be sure, policing in a democracy (and common decency) requires that police use lethal force only under the direst of conditions. Cops cannot and should not treat every person they meet as immediate threats. But some certainly are, and being prepared for those threats is why 597 people with guns were killed by cops in 2017, and only 51 cops were killed by criminals. It is fair though to ask: exactly how many of those 597 would Mr. French shift to the dead-cops column in order to ensure Stephon Clark can resist arrest without fear of harm? 5? 50? 500?
Of course, Mr. French will claim he simply wants to save the Stephon Clarks of the world and wishes no harm on cops. But that is not the reality. The more police procedure is shaped to give suspects the benefit of the doubt, the more that doubt will be leveraged by would-be cop-killers to lethal ends.
Of course, there are methods by which Mr. Clark may have been arrested under less dangerous circumstances. That would have involved sending numerous additional units to lock down the neighborhood and employ a variety of force options.
But if you want to do that for the Clark call, then you have to do the same for literally every domestic dispute, beer run, reckless driving, and vandalism call. Practically all 911 calls would generate a massive, costly deployment of resources that will severely impact response times.
That is the nature of The Randomness. A small but omnipresent possibility that the worst moments of one’s life have already begun without you knowing. The only remedies are the instinct and tools to quickly identify and neutralize fast-evolving threats, or flood every situation with extensive, redundant resources.
All to ensure suspects can refuse to comply without worry.
It is very sad that someday someone will have to explain to Stephon Clark’s young children why their daddy died. The fact that he made a series of bad decisions that created danger for all involved under particularly volatile circumstances will provide them little comfort. But, the responsibility for the consequences of his numerous reckless and criminal actions lies with no one but himself.
I wonder if Mr. French would rather explain to Gregg Casillas’ kids why he is more worried about Stephon Clark’s right to resist arrest than the life of their father and every other cop who lives with The Randomness.
Published in Policing
I think the philosophic principle should very strongly inform the utilitarian training and principles. Officers don’t rely on the philosophy in the heat of the moment but on the training. What is being asked for is more/better training on contextualizing each individual encounter, at least that is how I read French’s original piece on it. Or, as summarized in his latest:
No one here (save maybe Fred) wants to restrain police in the appropriate use of their authority. If someone needs killing we want them killed without hesitation and with conviction. We only want to restrain the inappropriate use of that authority. They act in our name. They ought to do us honor rather than disgrace. The very vast majority of times they do. We get that [expletive] happens. It should happen less. We do neither them nor us any good if we don’t always try to make it less.
I know. You are awfully complacent about the risk to the broader community of a dangerous person being given more space. And it stinks.
Was that helpful?
That isn’t inherently an injustice. It could just be a tragedy. The question is: were the police negligent or even intentional in their misinterpretation? If the answer is “no” then I agree that officers shouldn’t be punished even if a tragic death results. If the answer is “yes” then there should indeed be consequences. Of all cases of misinterpreted intentions arising from intent or negligence. how many resulted in minimal or no consequences? That’s the operative question. Assuming, of course, that we could agree on what counts as negligent or intention. Even that is assuming that we can agree on what the citizen’s intentions were and that they were indeed misinterpreted.
All true. Which is why we invest so much in police training that these types of incidents are a small proportion of all citizen contacts. Even considering all 967 fatalities – what proportion of those arose from a civilian’s misinterpretation of the circumstances like “doesn’t recognize them as police, doesn’t hear/understand their orders, fails to comply with impossible contradictory orders, makes a mistake under stress, doesn’t understand the stakes, or God forbid fires in self-defense”?
These situations like Castile and Clark make it appear (and appearances are often deceiving) that police too easily find a branch that leads to belligerent confrontation. In the writings of French and others there’s a whiff of accusation that some officers seek those branches.
Your description of it as a decision tree is very helpful in visualizing encounters. Sure, it’s Monday morning quarterbacking, but can you see a point along the trunk or branches of this encounter where a different decision could have/should have resulted in a different outcome that didn’t endanger the officers or end with a dead unarmed citizen?
The topic at hand is not “how do we punish more police for these shootings?”. It’s “how do we train police to commit fewer of them by using more conservative tactics?”. I wasn’t complaining about the inherent asymmetry, I was stating it as a reason that we can’t simply equalize the risk allocation between civilians and voluntary state agents.
I have no data, but my gut guess is that it sorts in this order by likelihood:
This is one of teh major points I disagree with. When taken in context of a percentage of all contacts or even of all confrontational contacts, the bad ones really aren’t on an easy or often frequented branch. Which is good. If we can make that branch harder to get to without doing more harm to other branches then ok.
I don’t know about this specific example. I was being general. However, I think the answer is likely to be “yes” in most of these encounters. Does that mean that should translate into a policy change? That is probably less clear.
Huzzah! We are agreed! Sometimes it just takes some whittling to force the shape out of the wood.
Not to be flippant (though I often am), but it seems the Happy Gilmore excuse is often given for questionable police shootings.
In 2017, 68 of the 987 shot by police were unarmed. More conservative tactics would save the lives of some fraction of those 68 people, while potentially letting escape some fraction of the remaining 919, as well as letting escape some smaller fraction of other suspects who are apprehended without a shooting due to less assertive tactics.
Since you seem to be making a utilitarian argument rather than the rights-and-duties argument I made previously, you would have to make a case that the subsequent crimes committed by those uncaptured suspects prior to their next arrest outweigh the deaths of the unarmed people shot by police. Is that what you’re arguing?
For the most part. But but but….
But: of the 68 unarmed who were shot – how many were justified regardless of being unarmed? How many were both innocent and mistaken?
But: depends on what you mean by “more conservative tactics” and the trade offs involved. I’m not convinced that there’s much room to move that wouldn’t cause more harm via subsequent crimes and victims.
But: How big is the problem really and would the solution be a net improvement or a net setback?
We agree on the place of #1, but the rest is just guesses on my part too. I’d be curious how Robert would rank these based on h is experience.
This is probably the crux of the disagreement right here. We should all be appalled, outraged, righteously indignant, etc. any time an innocent citizen is killed erroneously by an agent of the state. There is likely very little we can do to reduce further the number of such occurrences without negative consequences. For a lot of people (or me at least) these exercises after the fact amount to a lot of screaming futilely at the sky. How do we get less injustice without creating other — possibly more — injustices? It never sits right to conclude that we simply must accept a certain number of fellow citizens being killed by the state without cause, but that’s likely the hard truth in a fallen world with imperfect institutions staffed by all too human people. That screaming sure feels good though.
I’m glad we are at least converging on the same questions.
In my opinion, intentionally killing a legally innocent person is the worst thing the state can do (excepting cases of obvious self-defense by police). Thankfully this is almost unheard of in the United States.
The second worst thing the state can do is inadvertently kill a legally innocent person. This is what we’re talking about here.
Far down the list of bad things the state can do is “failing to capture criminals as efficiently due to conservative police tactics”, for reasons I stated earlier related to duty to protect and individual responsibility.
Sounds like we’re agreeing after all then?
Likely. There’s probably some trifle left of whether the answer is zero or near zero but worth the effort on further reductions.
From the LA Times:
This may indicate the level of resistance, and the demeanor Mr. Clark was exhibiting in the back yard of his grandmothers home. Obviously he’s been arrested before, but for whatever reason he was not going to cooperate in this incident.
I wasn’t in the backyard that night, and neither was anyone else that has commented here. I prefer to wait for a pdf of the Grand Jury report, or a trial pdf, if there is a trial.
Yet again, French displays his Frenchness.
Okay on everything you said, but in your expert opinion, is there any innocent explanation for why Clark was shot mostly in the back? Maybe there is…I’m just asking.
Some fuzzy thinking going on in this thread. I’m going to quote some examples here, just for context.
If that’s true, Americans don’t understand the issue. Shooting unarmed people is not always wrong. There will be times when people, even if they don’t have weapons, can pose a lethal threat to armed police officers. To use one very high-profile incident as an example, the shooting of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. That was a justified shooting.
Instead of “innocent people,” I think what you really mean is “people who didn’t actually present an immediate threat.” I don’t think anyone familiar with the case believes Clark was entirely innocent, but that doesn’t tell us whether the police were right to shoot him. Conversely, police (or private citizens) could conceivably be justified in shooting an innocent person, due to a reasonable misunderstanding.
This comment makes it sound like a lynching. Even if the police were wrong to shoot, that doesn’t mean they were trying to pull off some kind of extrajudicial execution. Nor did they deem him deserving of death, so far as we know. Even if the police were wrong to shoot Clark, even David French acknowledges they were responding to what they saw as a threat. Shooting to neutralize a threat is just that – shooting to neutralize a threat. It doesn’t mean that anyone decided Clark should die. It just means that they stopped him by any means necessary.
While I think Parry makes some good points, the post seems unnecessarily hostile to French, who also makes some good points. I’m not sure who has the right of it on this issue, though. I think French’s article was meant in good faith, and I wish it were taken that way.
I’m not aware that anyone has claimed Clark was actually an immediate threat. I thought the whole point of French’s article was that it was a tragedy he mistaken for one and shot unnecessarily — though not unjustifiably.
Like others, you have veered slightly off topic. We are not debating whether the police did anything illegal or unjustified. We are suggesting they should change their approach to prevent situations like this from occurring in the future, namely, misjudging a threat and reacting with lethal force that is, in hindsight, unnecessary. And yes, being unarmed doesn’t always mean someone is not a threat, but in this case he was shot precisely because they mistook a phone for a gun.
Your last section about lynching and extrajudicial punishment is missing the context of my remark. I was replying to Mr. Parry’s assertion that “Clark wasn’t innocent, that’s the entire point.” In addition to being false, it is a non sequitur with respect to French’s basic argument.
I’m not disputing whether the shooting was justified based on the reasonable perception of a threat. I’m trying to articulate French’s view that the the police could have been trained in a way to make that misjudgment less likely.