Harsh Your Mellow Monday: No Good Answers Edition
“Metropolis”, directed by Fritz Lang, 1927. F.W. Murnau Foundation
A shooting in Atlanta shows a reckoning is a hard to acquire, history lessons in governing from Seattle summer street camp, and the Republican primary heats up…for 2024. Let’s get to it in this weeks Harsh Your Mellow Monday.
The ATL, a Wendy’s, and Things Go from Bad to Worse
Atlanta Police on the night of 30 May, 2020. Photo by Georgia National Guard [Public domain]
Two weeks ago, among protests for George Floyd in Atlanta that some turned into violence and looting, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms held a press conference that included Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields, rappers Killer Mike and TI, and other city and community notables. Killer Mike’s speech was the one that garnered most of the attention, but the mayor’s strong words also got notice.
A protest has purpose. When Dr. King was assassinated, we didn’t do this to our city. So if you love this city — this city that has had a legacy of black mayors and black police chiefs and people who care about this city, where more than 50 percent of the business owners in metro Atlanta are minority business owners — if you care about this city, then go home. And pray that somebody like Reverend Beasley will come and talk to you and give you some instructions on what a protest should look like and how you effectuate change in America. This police chief [Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields] made a video on yesterday — pull it up on YouTube — where she said she was appalled to watch the murder of George Floyd. This woman did that.
You’re not honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement. You’re not protesting anything running out with brown liquor in your hands and breaking windows in this city.
Chief Shields had also earned praise for going out and amongst the protesters in Atlanta, engaging with them directly. After that first night of violence, it was Shields who admitted they had been caught “off-guard” by the looting, defended the city’s policy of tolerance — and not without sensitivity– civil rights protests before noting many of the arrests for violence were of folks coming in from other areas.
Then came the fatal police shooting of Rayshard Brooks outside a University Avenue Wendy’s. By the next evening Shields had offered, and Bottoms had accepted, her resignation.
On paper, Shields was everything many of those folks protesting would say they wanted in a police chief. By the afternoon, after footage of Atlanta police officers using force on protesters went viral, Shields had already taken administrative action on the officers involved. Before the Brooks shooting occurred, the week had seen APD fire four officers outright for conduct related to the unrest and several others in various stages of administrative discipline. Even with the Brooks shooting, the body camera footage from the officers involved was available to the press almost immediately, and the general public had it by the next day. Contrast that to the George Floyd killing where we still haven’t seen any of the footage. Or in Louisville, KY where Breonna Taylor was killed in her own bed followed by a nearly blank official incident report, and the firing of the police chief when the subsequent killing of David McAtee by two officers who magically didn’t have their body cameras activated.
Shields had been everything in law enforcement from foot patrol, to various units like narcotics and plain clothes investigations, hitting nearly every rung on the ladder on the way up. She was progressive, the second woman to lead the APD and the first to be openly gay, and as recently as two weeks ago held up by both the mayor and police union reps as an example, a rare occurrence of agreement these days. One of her most controversial things was the announcement back in January of a “no chase policy” that reads twistedly prophetic after viewing the struggle, brief pursuit, and shooting of Brooks that had started with him being asleep and apparently inebriated in his vehicle.
“Please know that I realize this will not be a popular decision; and more disconcerting to me personally, is that this decision may drive crime up,” Shields said in a memo announcing the change. “I get it.”
While she noted that “an overwhelming number of crimes are committed where a vehicle is involved” and that significant arrests often follow zeroing in on a specific vehicle, other factors influenced the decision.
“Namely, the level of pursuit training received by officers who are engaging in the pursuits, the rate of occurrence of injury/death as a result of the pursuits and the likelihood of the judicial system according any level of accountability to the defendants as a result of the pursuit. At his point and time, the department is assuming an enormous risk to the safety of officers and the public for each pursuit, knowing that the judicial system is largely unresponsive to the actions of the defendants.”
The policy was written following a spate of vehicle accidents including a chase that resulted in the deaths of two men. But the concern for how fast things go wrong in the heat of the moment is glaring.
The Brooks killing is going to be a very messy thing. Unlike the Floyd killing, which was nearly universally and immediately condemned, what happened in that Wendy’s parking lot is multiple layers of all the discussion around policing laid bare: escalation of force, use of deadly force, pursuit, what does and doesn’t constitute a threat to the officers, and the three bullets that killed Brooks at the end of it. Brooks, it would appear right now, fought with the police after a protracted and mostly calm encounter when they went to handcuff them. The body cameras aren’t very helpful past that due to the tussle. The security camera catches what happened next, with Brooks appearing to turn around and try to fire what appears to be the officer’s own taser at them before continuing to flee, at which point he is shot in the back.
Anyone thinking this is going to be resolved neat and clean are fooling themselves. The officer that fired the shots was fired almost immediately, the other placed on administrative leave. A nation already with weeks worth of heightened notice to police actions will have a very large and flammable log added to the blazing pyre of debate. Police advocates and unions who are feeling under fire will feel even more so. Most everyone will feel, rightly so, that there are no good answers coming as the incidents keep piling up.
“It is time to hold mayoral offices accountable, chiefs and deputy chiefs. Atlanta is not perfect,” Killer Mike had commented with then-Chief Shields, Mayor Bottoms, and others arms length away and the whole world watching during that press conference. “We’re a lot better than we ever were, and we’re a lot better than cities are.”
A routine stop in a Wendy’s parking lot showed just how fragile “doing better” can be, and how little “better than others” means, and how even doing most things right for an entire career doesn’t matter when one moment goes wrong. Shields held herself accountable and fell on her sword, probably for various reasons. Now the City of Atlanta will face troubled days with a police department looking for new leadership, a citizenry rightfully on edge, and no easy answers coming. We should all hope and pray Atlanta rises above, again, as it has before.
Because if they can’t, the rest of us are probably not going to fare much better.
The LARPing Committee for Public Safety
I’ve been jokingly calling the CHAZ situation in Seattle various things from Lord of the Flies references to mocking them as the Committee for Public Safety. I’m not alone, and bless their hearts if they aren’t determined to get their Robespierre on…
Psst. The people who did the chopping also got chopped a few months later.
Robespierre, shot in the jaw at capture, spent his final moments screaming in agony as the executioner ripped off the bandage when putting him under the blade.
There’s a lesson there, kiddos. https://t.co/Sr2O5FVphU— Cathy Young (@CathyYoung63) June 15, 2020
Mostly I’ve grown bored with the CHAZ story. Folks, including the president, have been hyping it up as the end of the Republic that a cordoned off area of Seattle has gone all feral hippy commune. The city authorities deserve all sorts of scorn and mockery for allowing such nonsense, but slow your roll on this meaning anything widespread. We’ve all seen this movie and know how it ends. The Occupy Wall Street crew had better corporate backing and media coverage and that ended fairly quickly, as will this.
The entire reason those folks get to live action role play their new world order fantasy is they are safely cocooned inside an area under constant watch, with, the real world responsible adults only a cell phone call away when something actually serious like dumpster fires, medical emergencies, or lack of food and pants arise. This is the professional protester equivalent to announcing they are going to go live in the treehouse from now on until their despotic parents quit telling them what to do. They get hungry and cold enough they’ll be back inside, toeing the line, until the next time they feel the need to head for the barricades for whatever that reason du jour will be.
Vive la revolution, at least as long as the WiFi and free food holds up.
The Red-Hot Republican Primary. No, Seriously
Politics has taken a back seat lately but let us not forget there is fierce competition for the nomination for president…
For the 2024 GOP nomination for president, that is.
Senator Tom Cotton got an entire weeks worth of free press, two Op-Ed rebuttals, and the head of the opinion editor, out of the New York Times along with coining the phrase “Obelisk of Wokeness” that is forever in the Congressional Record now. Josh Hawley continues his perpetual campaign to make the internet safe for you plebes by punishing “the elites” that would not treat you as fairly as the elite Josh Hawley would. And Ted Cruz continues his descent from trying to ride the religious right to the presidency in 2016 after a career as a senator and constitutional lawyer of some note to having spent much of Sunday losing a Twitter spat with Ron Perlman.
What a time to be alive.
These folks aren’t just keeping high profiles for the ego-stroke of it, thought there is plenty of that to go around. No, the real driver here is all three see themselves as the next GOP presidential nominee. All three think they can take the Trumpian populist style and filter it through their Ivy League educations and elite statuses to be a more refined, widely palatable, and therefore electable Trump 2.0 in 2024.
Fine plan except for the fact it won’t work.
Cotton and Hawley in a primary are so similar in everything they will cancel each other out in an ever-tightening circle as each tries to outflank the other on the right. Their dosey-doe of bareknuckle ambition will seem like immense activity to the two of them trapped in the cloud of dust, tweets, and media attention. But to outside observers, much like the good donkey arguing with the evil donkey on the farm, all most folks will see is two jackasses braying at each other over who brays best. Cruz’s evolution from “Leave Heidi the hell alone” during the campaign — when then-candidate Trump called her ugly, threatened to reveal “information” about her, then reveled in Cruz’s father being involved in the JFK assassination — to “thank you, sir, may have another” is not recoverable. Lost in the mocking of Beto O’Rourke was the fact that such a lightweight candidate who was more caricature of a stuffed shirt than actual stuffed shirt nearly beat Cruz in Texas is not an aberration; its a harbinger. Cruz is unmoored, unimpressive, and most importantly doesn’t know what Ted Cruz is about anymore in the age of Trump. He’s gone from winning Supreme Court arguments to losing arguments to, frankly, JV level Twitter competition.
To quote the reigning, defending, undisputed Twitter troll champion: “SAD!”
So each one of these stunts, though undoubtedly meaningful to the moment, must be kept in the view that 2024 is well underway for the folks who really, truly, know that this time is their time.
Adjust your viewing and reactions accordingly.
There is Validity to the Accusation…
modern trads: pic.twitter.com/0mk74hKpVe
— Sharon Kuruvilla, Neo-Scotist At Large ↙️↙️↙️ (@Sharon_Kuruvila) June 14, 2020
not a coincidence everything went downhill after this https://t.co/4mZp36kW2R
— brent (@brent858) June 13, 2020
There is validity to the accusation pic.twitter.com/s9Sa6J1Gsz
— Andrew Donaldson (@four4thefire) June 11, 2020
My kids are watching a laugh-track sitcom about zany high schoolers comedically learning life lessons starring @TiffaniThiessen.
Because 2020 is just 1992 with Netflix.
— Alex F. Baldwin (@VerumVulnero1) June 15, 2020
Is it me or does it seem like whenever a police chief or other person in power voluntarily steps down after things go wrong on their watch, it’s more often than not a woman and/or person of color? Maybe this is selective memory or confirmation bias, but it does seem to be the case. Wonder what that’s about… if there is indeed a there there.Report
Because when you run on feelsgood instead of actual thought, your mouth tends to write checks that your ass can’t cash.Report
New Rule: If a police chief steps down as a result of officer mis/conduct, the head(s) of the officers union(s) are also immediately out of a job (as in, turn in your badge and gun and never darken the precinct doorstep again).
Perhaps if the Union(s) felt some pressure that way, they’d keep the rank and file in line.Report
I don’t think the union chiefs are usually employed by the city, though that could certainly vary. It’s like the way Ford can’t fire the head of the UAW because he doesn’t work at Ford, or a school can’t fire the head of the teachers union because the union head isn’t a teacher.
Also, the word “police chief” has just become problematic because of Pocahontas or something.Report
Maybe there was a fight, maybe he shot a taser, maybe he did this or that, but if the cops hadn’t had guns he wouldn’t have been shot by guns.
Cops, in general, should not have guns. And yeah yeah yeah, you can point to “this guy wasn’t killed by guns”, you can point to “that guy was killing people and he wouldn’t have been stopped without guns”, but maybe the former would be less common if cops didn’t have “I’m authorized to deploy lethal force on my own recognizance” in their mindset, maybe the latter is a situation we could fix but have decided not to fix because guns are an easy answer and developing a nonlethal restraint that can be deployed at range is harder.Report
I’d modify that – Officers can not have sidearms. I’m fine with a shotgun in the cruiser, but no sidearms, and AR-15s need to be locked up in the trunk with special permission to deploy them. They get mace and tasers.
If a suspect runs, unless they are an obvious danger to the public or a complete unknown, let them run, they can’t outrun a radio signal.
Perhaps if police could not rely on sidearms, they’d pump some more incentive into the development of non-lethal tools that can be deployed at range.Report
Oscar,
Do you think it’d make more sense to have specially trained folks who are exclusively allowed to use the heavier weapons*? I believe this was the point to SWAT but that was sort of undone when we armed every cop to the teeth.
* Apologies if this is incorrect language; I’m simply trying to differentiate AR-15s from the other weapons you describe.Report
I won’t speak for Oscar but I don’t personally think there’s that big of a difference between a semi automatic handgun and an AR-15 with respect to how police are (mis)using their weapons. They both have the same rate of fire and can use high capacity magazines. From a certain perspective I actually think an AR 15 might be safer because rifles are more accurate but I could be convinced otherwise. There are all kinds of stories of police emptying their glocks and hitting everything but the target.
I don’t think the police are particularly well trained with any of the weapons they carry, which is itself a problem. My perception is that wherever they can lawfully use force of any kind they go straight to deadly while the less than lethal options are used to punish non-compliance.Report
Rifles are more accurate, but also more likely to over penetrate. That is why I’d rather the rifle stay locked up. Shotguns not only have the range, but they are much less likely to over penetrate, and they can be loaded with a variety of less than and non-lethal ammo.
Agree on your final paragraph.Report
So shotguns with bean bags or rock salt or something like that? Maybe.
I guess I wonder if it isn’t a non-starter in a world where even with very reformed police they will encounter people with firearms using real ammunition at times. I’d like to think they could be trained to much better discipline on use of force and at least stop instigating violent confrontations. But maybe one inherently leads to the other.Report
1) Police encounters with armed men that result in gun battles are very damn rare, and even more rare is the gun battle that results in police getting hit, much less killed. This is less because police are well trained, but rather because police are marginally better trained that the idiots who decide to get into a gun battle with police.
2) Usually when police are killed by a contact that pulls a gun, it happens so fast that the officer rarely has time to pull their gun before they are shot themselves (i.e., they are ambushed).
3) Typically, when police are faced with a gun, either a) it’s because they’ve allowed a situation to escalate to that point, or b) they knew going in it was dangerous. If a), they can practice keeping things cool until backup arrives, and if b), they have a shotgun.
PS a shotgun can always have the first round be a non-lethal, or they can have a KelTec KSG (or the like), or they just have two shotguns (shotguns loaded with non-lethals tend to be brightly colored green or orange).Report
I hear you on the rationality of it I’m just trying to account for the politics in light of how we got here. Part of the story is the perception especially from the crack epidemic that police are outgunned. Obviously it’s very rare that’s the case but every once in awhile it will be and the media will be all over it when it goes south for some patrolman.
What I’m saying is when (really if) we reset the table we want to make sure we don’t follow the same trajectory as before. And yes, crime is much lower now but it may not be forever and in all cases public perception seems divorced from reality.Report
I’m not interested in disarming cops, as such. There are times when they very much need to be able to bring lethal force to bear.
But it’s not nearly as often as they like to imagine and there are usually pretty clear signs things are about to go pear shaped long before they do. More than enough time to call in backup or get the shotgun from the cruiser.
That said, SCOTUS just cleared all the possible cases dealing with QI from the docket, so we aren’t getting motion on that front.Report
Edit to add it kind of reminds me of the discussion on helmets in the NFL. You’ll get people periodically who say it would actually be safer without them like in rugby because it would cause people to play differently. And hell maybe it would be. But it also seems like something that would be DOA for a host of reasons.
Though reading your responses to Kazzy and Michael I see what you’re saying and would certainly be down with it. Maybe by requiring a more conscious decision to escalate it would happen less.Report
Think of it more as removing the impulse to reach for the gun. A rifle locked in the trunk, or a shotgun clamped in the cruiser cabin mount, is not sitting on the hip within easy reach.
If you don’t have a gun at hand*, you are more likely to exercise de-escalation, or, perhaps even more importantly, not practice escalation tactics (something police often do in order to generate probable cause for a search or an arrest).
*Or know that using said gun is going to make your life very unpleasant for a while, even if you are justified in doing so – something police are not normally concerned with, but citizens are.Report
My own preference would be to have the rifle be bolt action as well. Just so there’s multiple points — work the bolt, aim, then shoot — where there’s a chance for the message “You are deliberately killing a person here” has a chance to get through.Report
And/or, civilian magazine limits apply to police as well. If 5 rounds is good enough for me…Report
No argument from me. I learned to shoot from Dad and Grandpa, both of whom abhorred semi-automatic rifles. Grandpa in particular believed they encouraged lots of bad habits.
It is routine to read about police shootouts where the number of rounds that hit the suspect compared to the number of rounds fired suggests that most of the officers are shooting without seeing a valid target at all.Report
41 shots.Report
I simply note an observation from my uncle the Green Beret colonel, post three tours in Vietnam: “94% of all rounds fired in combat are completely unaimed, with the simple hope that they will keep the other guy from aiming.” These numbers are disturbingly close.
He is also the one who once said, “You have a loaded weapon with a chambered round bouncing around up here with the people? Stop the car. Let me out. The kid (me) and I will walk back to town. Hell, we don’t let trained infantryman do that.”Report
Yep. That kind of shooting is fine on the battlefield.
It’s absolute crap in other settings. It get’s innocent people killed.Report
Anecdotes are not data but I admit that my attitude was largely set by an episode long ago, when I was an undergraduate.
The city police felt they were outgunned and wanted a much more potent handgun as their standard weapon. One of the university professors had collected the records that showed in the last nine times a city LEO had discharged a weapon, a suspect was hit once, no one was hit twice, and a (supposedly) non-targeted bystander was hit six times. The head of the city council said something like, “Chief, you’re not getting weapons with more punch. With that record, you’re lucky we’re not busting you back to nightsticks.”Report
Congratulations, you’re now part of the “defund the police” movement. :Report
Related:
London Breed pushes San Francisco reforms: Police no longer will respond to noncriminal calls
San Francisco police officers will be replaced with trained, unarmed professionals to respond to calls for help on noncriminal matters involving mental health, the homeless, school discipline and neighbor disputes, as part of a new wave of police reforms.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-12/san-francisco-police-reforms-stop-response-noncriminal-calls
I’ve noted before how here in LA we have unarmed safety teams from the neighborhood BID which ride around and do things like roust sleeping transients and respond to petty offenses like vandalism and deranged mentally ill people.
Which is actually the vast majority of policing, just the small petty offenses which Broken Windows tells us is actually most critical to the safety and security of a neighborhood.
Had an Atlanta safety team responded to that drunk man, he would be alive today and no one would have gotten harmed.Report
“Had an Atlanta safety team responded to that drunk man…”
Except that drunk driving is a criminal act, assault and battery are criminal acts, grabbing a cop’s taser and shooting it at him is a criminal act!
You’re not gonna solve the problem of cops shooting people if the cops still have guns! Stop letting them have guns!Report
I’m not opposed to disarming the police.
I’m suggesting that we start viewing policing as a multi-tiered system of enforcement of order starting with citizens, then unarmed officials, and only after everything else fails, employing violence.
Its useful to look at the videos of how readily the police are to use nonlethal violence, from fists to clubs to tasers, instead of conflict de-escalation and mediation, even for trivial petty offenses.Report
Sleeping off the drunk in a car is technically a criminal act, but let’s be honest, no one is being harmed by the drunk sleeping it off in the car. All the police need to do is roust the guy, take his keys, and leave him a receipt that says where he can recover his keys when he sobers up.
But no, they got to wake him and spend 30 minutes messing around with the guy before he snaps and does something stupid (which, IMHO, is exactly what the cop wanted, an excuse to arrest the guy for something more than ‘sleeping in a car while drunk’).Report
In the car Is drunk, my friend. Look further on this one. Georgia is a zero tolerance state.Report
Legally, sure.
Pragmatically? Ideally, take his keys. If you must hook him up, roust him, cuff him, take him to the precinct.
Don’t spend 30 minutes trying to hold a conversation with him.Report
HM 1: Part of the ATL problem is three days before a drunk white guy actually shot a real gun at cops coming to his residence on a disturbance call. He hit their cruiser, and its not clear from the reporting if they fired back. He was eventually persuaded to turn himself in. You can’t look at those two outcomes in the span of three days, shrug your shoulders, and say the Wendy’s incident is complicated.Report
I can’t remember where it was, but someone was talking/writing about the disparate treatment of armed white guys who’ve shown a willingness to kill (e.g., Dylan Roof, the Aurora shooter) and unarmed black guy who’ve shown no such proclivity, and how the former tends to be met with patience and the others with violence.
It got me wondering… maybe the cops aren’t treating the former group that way IN SPITE of the danger they obviously pose… maybe it is BECAUSE of the danger they pose. Maybe when cops are actually afraid for their lives, they exercise great caution. And when they aren’t, it’s guns blazing. This would really undermine the “I was afraid!” argument. And it’d show some real issues with training, that cops don’t actually feel capable of diffusing actual violent situations. I dunno… just a theory… but it got me thinking…Report
Only 5% of the people who shoot at cops are white. White folks are armed to the teeth and deep into gun culture, but outside of some pretty bad neighborhoods, it’s a very different gun culture from street crime culture where firearms are viewed as a must-have criminal tool.
Another factor is cultural differences. If your folk narratives are about how the hero always has a big shoot out with “The Federales”, who are working for the oppressive Spanish colonial governor to oppress the peasants, or perhaps employed by the local narco trafficker/governor, shooting at cops probably comes pretty naturally. If you’ve listened to 2,000 hours of gangsta rap, it probably comes pretty naturally. By and large, whites haven’t had a mainstream narrative like that since we quit watching Westerns and Godfather movies.
On the law enforcement side, one rather frequent factor in many incidents is young officers (twenty-somethings) who are both easily frightened, have high testosterone levels, who lack the life experience to read a situation or personal encounter correctly, and often know less about the law, legal rights, and accepted norms than the people they’re trying to police. A police force with a minimum age of thirty would likely have fewer incidents.
Also, what many of the protesters willfully ignore is that they’re being used as cover for the riots and looting. What they don’t know is that the riots and looting are being instigated by the OCP corporation to lower property values so OCP can buy up cheap urban real estate. Then, the quell the violence, the OCP will offer the public the future of law enforcement, robots that can handle everything from routine patrolling to urban pacification, hoping that roll lands them big military contracts. It wouldn’t take very many ED-209’s to get these riots under control pretty quickly.Report
You’re comparing vastly different sets.
One is selected AFTER something went horribly wrong when they were dealing with the police. The other is horrible people BEFORE they interacted with the police.
For the 2nd group you’re also further selecting for being black and for the first for being white but that doesn’t change the “after” and “before” problem nor the distortions it creates.
The second group is selected for violence with the police, ergo there was violence. The first group is NOT selected for violence with the police, and since violence with the police in general almost never happens they fare better.Report
I can’t remember where it was, but someone was talking/writing about the disparate treatment of armed white guys who’ve shown a willingness to kill (e.g., Dylan Roof, the Aurora shooter) and unarmed black guy who’ve shown no such proclivity, and how the former tends to be met with patience and the others with violence.
Sam wrote an article in which he cherry-picked a couple such cases and asserted that they constituted a pattern. Here’s the thing, though. In 2018, police officers made about 2.1 million arrests of black people and about 4 million arrests of non-Hispanic white people. For violent crimes only, it was about 4800 black people and 2200 non-Hispanic white people. That latter number could be a bit low—due to the way Latinos are classified in the UCR, figuring out stats for non-Hispanic whites involves extrapolation from incomplete statistics. The broader category of arrests for violent crime falls somewhere in between; it skews more black than the set of all arrests, but less black than arrests for murder.
Anyway, in the same year, police officers fatally shot 229 black people and 454 non-Hispanic whites. Note that this is very similar to the ratio for all arrests. So, as I’ve pointed out before, the rate of fatal shootings per arrest is more or less the same for blacks and non-Hispanic whites (actually for all races, though not for sexes—men are killed 4-5 times as often as women per 100k arrests).
This would seem to suggest that cops may actually have a slightly higher threshold for shooting black suspects. If the rates of fatal shootings per arrest are the same for black and white suspects, but the rate of fatal shootings per violent crime is higher for white than for black suspects, then police are safely apprehending violent black criminals at higher rates than violent white criminals.
Police fatally shoot about 200-300 black people each year, and about twice as many non-Hispanic white people. You can cherry pick a handful of each to tell pretty much any story you want. If you want to tell a story where police regularly shoot unarmed black people and safely apprehend armed white criminals, you can tell that story. If you want to tell exactly the opposite story, you can find data points to support that story, too, but you’re much less likely to win a Pulitzer if you go off-scriptlike that.
Maybe when cops are actually afraid for their lives, they exercise great caution. And when they aren’t, it’s guns blazing. This would really undermine the “I was afraid!” argument.
The assumption here, I think, is that the perceived level of danger is constant throughout an encounter. And I don’t think that’s how it works. I think police are most likely to shoot a suspect when the perceived level of danger suddenly increases. If you’re approaching a situation where you know it’s extremely dangerous, you’re going to stop and think about the best approach. If you think you have a situation under control, and then suddenly “OH SHIT HE’S PULLING A GUN!” then you don’t really have a lot of time to plan; you either shoot or bet your life that he won’t. It’s System I thinking vs. System II thinking.
Probably better training would help here, but I think the fear is legitimate in most/all such cases. What’s the alternative explanation? They’re shooting suspects just for fun?Report
Not for fun, but because they are allowed to act on their fears in ways citizens are not.
I can not get into an altercation with a person and see them reach into their coat, decide that means they are pulling out a gun, and use that as a pretense to draw first and kill them.
As I’ve said before, the race angle is, to me, a problem (I think police get much more keyed up when dealing with black people, and are more likely to use force, even non-lethal force, more quickly), but ultimately, it’s about the lack of accountability. If you shoot someone who was not a clear threat, you need to be indicted.Report
There’s also the stat that whites are only responsible for 5% of shots fired at police. Combined with that statistics you provided, that heavily implies that white suspects are much less likely to to escalate a police encounter into the realm of deadly force.
Second, the goal isn’t to make these situations fights with 50/50 odds of either side winning, all in the name of “fairness”. A serious criminal will only have dozens of interactions, and even drug deals will probably only be in a dangerous arrest situation a few times. But a policeman has to safely get through hundreds or thousands of such encounters and still go home to their family – because they’re not special forces soldiers or fighter pilots who knowingly signed on to a job where the training instructor says something like “in a major conflict, half of you will die in combat.”
If violence does ensue, the police need the odds stacked heavily in their favor because they need to show up for their shift the next day. They’re not there to prove their manhood on their great gettin’ up day, they’re doing the job that we pay them to do, day in and day out.Report
How many encounters with the police did that entire area have during those three days? A million? Ten million? More? Why is it valid to narrow the field to those two points and those three days?
One guy won the lottery, the other didn’t.Report
HM1: I agree with what Philip said. I did not know about the drunk white guy before but you can’t square the disparate outcomes between whites who commit very violent crimes and seemingly get treated well upon arrest/coaxed into surrendering vs. what happens to black people.
A big problem is that the United States never adopted Peelite principals and our officers are trained to use deadly force. I know someone who attempted to be a cop in SF. He did not make it past orientation day in police academy because he said it was too militaristic. Other nations have police training that lasts for a year or more, often requires or ends up with the equivalent of a degree. Our police training is very short, done locally, and ends up being all about cop safety first. We need to complete over haul the system but alas Americans are cheap about such things and have short-attention spans.
The police now seem to be an insular force without regard for how the public views it. A lot of the decisions police forces have made around the country in the past few weeks are gobsmacking because the actions make it clear that the police see themselves as above the law or as the law. Also they are out of control.Report
AFAIK, most police academies are treated like tech schools. Only the biggest departments have their own, publicly funded academies, so it’s not really about the cost, but (IMHO) more about the mismatch between those who can successfully complete extensive training that involves difficult things, like de-escalation training, and those who do well in police culture.
Obviously, exceptions exist…
No, the problem is that a large enough percentage of people still want to be able to see the state violently cracking down on whatever demographic they deem undesirable. If the police are seen to be handling said demographic with humanity and empathy, that population that wants beatings will get very vocal.Report
“No, the problem is that a large enough percentage of people still want to be able to see the state violently cracking down on whatever demographic they deem undesirable.”
This is one reason why I don’t think “End Police Unions” is That One Weird Trick To Solve Things that some libertarians and right-leaning people have jumped on. As I’ve said before, I think the most likely result of police unions being banned in Mary, who largely does some paper pushing in the back office has a worse health care plan and less sick days, while Jimmy still gets off when he kills an unarmed black kid.Report
I can see reforming the scope of what police unions can do and removing the ability to assert into disciplinary and review matters. Sill, the police unions have provided a remarkable and discouraging armed wall of resistance against reform and oversight. So much so that reformist Police Chiefs don’t seem like they are in control but heads of police unions are.Report
say what you will, but it wasn’t some random dude telling cops in San Jose to quit as a protest against pension reform, it was the head of the police union there.Report
I agree that ending police unions won’t fix things all by itself. Although Police unions are the poster child for the problem with any public sector union (that the union is negotiating with management that is interested in the votes the union can provide), fair is fair and if we are willing to tolerate public sector unions, police get to have one. I do think a lot can be done to limit said unions to only dealing with workplace concerns.Report
Nobody is arguing that “End Police Unions” will solve the problem by itself.
They argue such things as “there is a suite of things we need to do. A. B. C. D. And E.”
And people argue against this statement by saying “B? I know you think that B will work miracles but it won’t solve the problem!”
The argument isn’t that B will solve the problem, Jesse.
Anymore than Minnesota finally deciding to vote for Democrats will solve the problem.Report
I mean, here’s Yud:
*23* point plan!
I’ll go through and give you the list:
1. Completely disentangle punition from revenue, including outlawing forfeiture, by requiring all punitive revenues to be refunded to tax-filers yearly.
2. Delegalize police unions.
3. Require body cams with teeth.
4. Nationwide zero-tolerance for death of unarmed persons in the course of law enforcement.
5. Demilitarize the police at a level short of automatic weapons.
6. Abolish qualified immunity.
7. Separate oversight from policing.
8. Separate investigation from policing.
9. Establish state procedures for disbanding and rebuilding local police forces.
10. Comprehensively de-privatize police, courts, and prisons.
11. Outlaw all quotas for fines, citations, or arrests.
12. Don’t elect prosecutors; elect a Superintendent of Trials.
13. Value the time of people dealing with courts.
14. Decriminalize victimless offenses.
15. Outlaw all mandatory minimum sentences.
16. Outlaw plea bargaining.
17. Restore speedy trials.
18. Outlaw bail.
19. Restore disparate enforcement as reason to strike down laws.
20. Establish a federal exchange for liability insurance.
21. Outlaw chokeholds immediately.
22. Reform carceral systems to be less hellish.
23. Suspend driver’s licenses only for offenses about driving safety.
And people read this list and say “This is one reason why I don’t think “End Police Unions” is That One Weird Trick To Solve Things that some libertarians and right-leaning people have jumped on.”Report
2 – Ain’t happening unless all public sector unions are disbanded as well. But Police unions should be limited in what they can ask for or accept in a contract (i.e. no more negotiating special rights).
12 – What is that?
16 – So what happens when someone wants to plead guilty?
20 – Huh? Officer liability?Report
Governments already have liability insurance and do settle abusive officer suits (and other liability suits) all the time.Report
If we want to argue over whether any of these are likely… man, we’re going to get depressed. That said, there are a handful of things that would fix the problem and, unfortunately, none of them are silver bullets.
His essay goes into each of the bullet points in depth. Here’s how he defines a Superintendent of Trials:
an official who is reported-to by prosecutors, but does not themselves perform any prosecutions. It seems like, in practice and in actual observation, a major fault of the current system is that prosecutors think their function is to successfully prosecute, and that they should appeal to voters by showing a quota of successful prosecutions. Since voters don’t have infinite attention, they may also, in the moment, fall into the fallacy of thinking that a prosecutor is like a gear of the machine whose function is to successfully prosecute as many big criminals as possible. So do not elect any official whose job title or job function is “prosecutor”; elect a Superintendent of Trials instead.
It may seem like a minor change, but poor incentives for prosecutors, including elected prosecutors, seem like a very large part of the in-practice problem; we have a police-prosecution-prison complex.
What happens when someone wants to plead guilty? I imagine that they still can.
(I got a ticket about a decade ago for something or other… “careless driving” (as opposed to “reckless driving”) and I showed up at the court to make my case for myself along with a dozen other people and she just handed us all paper packets and said “we’ll accept a guilty plea for driving with a broken taillight and we’ll lower your points by two and increase your fine by $100.” And I paid the fine and walked home on the sunny side of the street. Drove home. Tail light intact. This was convenient. I’m not sure it was Just. I’m not sure it was Justice adjacent.)
As for Officer Liability, the idea is that you get the police department to have a downside for screwing up. Make the police liable instead of shuffling the costs for screwing up off somewhere else.Report
I can’t wait to see their suggests for brain surgery reform. “Let’s have a panel of citizens decide when to clamp an artery.”
Instead of relying on the legal wisdom and precedent that’s accumulated over centuries of handling legal disputes day in and day out, let’s just have some guy who sells surf-board wax in a mall kiosk come up with a new system that will be a gazillion times better!Report
While I appreciate that support for the status quo is tempting, the status quo got us here.
Our choice seems to be between “setting shit on fire and hoping for Locke (but getting Hobbes)” and “maybe reforming shit for serious this time”.
I’m not sure that the status quo won’t result in more, and worse, riots.Report
It doesn’t matter what reforms you do, you’re still going to get riots because criminals will still get shot doing stupid things, and those criminals have a huge fan base.
Now, in theory there would really harsh states like Kentucky or Texas where judges have told juries not to convict anyone who shoots an evil-doer, and instead vote them public funds so they can buy more guns and kill more evil-doers. Yeah, a Kentucky judge really issued those instructions.
And then there should be lily-white states and cities that bend over backwards to avoid policing the streets, basically handing the keys of the city to shop-lifters, drug dealers, and homeless heroin addicts.
The violent protests are in those tolerant, open-minded, liberal, criminal-friendly cities. You know, the ones that have been run by Democrats forever. For example, Atlanta’s last Republican mayor was born during the War of 1812.
Are the riots really the result of massive police abuses (which seems to be a feature of Democrats), or the result of a massive amount of disrespect for the rule of law, which might be a logical consequence for undermining the rule of law and respect for law in every way imaginable?Report
Perhaps we will get riots with reform.
But we sure as hell will get them without them. Additionally, the cops are burning goodwill not only with Team Good but Team Evil as well. Reform might be their only chance to avoid some serious top-down stuff.
Or some even more serious bottom-up stuff.Report
“…criminals will still get shot doing stupid things, and those criminals have a huge fan base…”
Neither breaking the law nor being stupid — or doing both simultaneously — negates one’s right to life. So, yes, the folks being unjustly shot by the police DO have fans: people who respect human life.Report
Unless of course they’re whites or Asians getting shot. Those folks never develop a fan base because their cultures don’t elevate career criminals to sainthood.
Bonnie and Clyde, perhaps the closest whites to achieve that status in some quarters, were killed in a police ambush where their car was riddled with machine gun fire. The car became a tourist attraction because everybody wanted to see where the two criminal psychopaths got blown to pieces.
We see the inevitable result of lauding criminal behavior in Mexico, which has 13 cities in the top 20 for worldwide homicide rates. Tijuana’s homicide rate is over 130 per 100,000. Boise Idaho’s homicide rate is 0.89 per 100,000.
As long as you laud criminal behavior, you’ll have lots of criminal behavior, and then your choice is either between stricter policing or skyrocketing homicide rates – among the people you claim you’re supporting.
For example, the current US homicide rate is 5 per 100,000. In 1980, not long after Biden decided to team up with Jesse Helms to keep his kids from growing up in a “racial jungle“, the US homicide rate was 10.2 per 100,000.
Currently the 5 per 100,000 represents 16,214 homicides a year, and we have about 260 blacks being killed by police every year, of which about a dozen are unarmed blacks (the rarity is why we generally know all their names).
If you do a ham-handed, feel-good effort to eliminate those 9 shootings, or the 260, will you end up letting the homicide rate return to 10.2 per 100,000, which would be 33,371 homicides a year, or 17,157 more than we currently have?
Most of those will be homicides of poor blacks in the inner cities who are trying to get to work or go to school. So you’d be looking at maybe 9,000 extra victims of color, to save 260 people, most of whom had been shooting those “victims of color”. For total homcides of black people, you could be looking at a decrease of 5 a week from police shootings, from an aggregate of 350 black homicide victims a week at a 10.2 per 100,000 homicide rate.
It seems to me that such a policy would just amount to killing an extra 8,740 people of color a year (the increase from 5 to 10.2 per 100,000, adjusted ), as if the goal is to eliminate black people. Of course as the homicide rates start swinging way up, the narrative changes and the people getting victimized start screaming for increased law enforcement and zero-tolerance policies.
And indeed, that’s why all those liberal Democratic cities, even ones that are majority black with a black mayor and black police chief, with black city councils, had their existing police policies.
And that math creates a problem for the moral argument that everyone has a right to life. You’re trying to save the 18,000 lives (at 10.2 per) by having encounters that, at present take about 260 lives, which might be saving half of the 18,000 (to give us our present 5 per 100,000). Are you willing to sacrifice 260 to save 9,000 or are you willing to sacrifice the 9,000 to save the 260?
Sure, we’d like to rig this Kobayashi Maru test so we can just cheat and avoid making the hard choice, and maybe morally preen and pose and make all the right noises, but we’re not the ones who’ll have to pay the price of a wrong answer.Report
Once again, it’s not about the justified killings. You wave a gun around, it’s play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
It’s about the cops who kill people who are not a threat, and the cops are almost never held to account in a manner anywhere close to what a private citizen would face.
It’s not about the race, or the numbers, it’s about accountability; and even one case of an agent of the government being able to violate the rights of a citizen (any citizen, regardless of guilt, or character, or whatever justification/rationalization you can dream up), even unto death, and that agent does not feel the full weight of the law* pressing down against him, that is tyranny.
Just as a reminder, the definition of tyranny is:
I’m not upset over the deaths nearly as much as I am upset about the cops killing with impunity and (to hear their union bosses talk) a very clear conscious.
As I’ve said before, if the police want to exercise the ability to have that kind of violence at their disposal, I’m fine with it. They can be judged under the UCMJ, with Army or Navy JAG Corp running the cases (and see how much the JAG gives a shit about those union contracts).
* Given that police are afforded all manner of special privileges (I don’t care if they call them rights, they are fecking privileges!) through law and labor contract, so that they are shielded from feeling that full weight, except in the most egregious of cases.Report
23. The problem with 23 is that this means people can’t get to work which means they lose their jobs which leads to, more problems.
17. Define speedy.
14. Who and how do you define what is and what is not a victimless offense. I know lots of libertarians like to mention drugs here but drugs often play a part into stories of childhood abuse and neglect which lead to defense attorneys presenting mitigating factor evidence to make sure their clients avoid the death penalty later on. For a recent example: https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/andrus-v-texas/
This guy is an autodidact when it comes to artificial intelligence. He hasn’t gone to high school or university which I am sure strikes a lot of libertarians with warm yays. He is not an expert on law, criminal justice, constitutional rights, sociology, racism, or the myriad of other factors that make this a problem.Report
The problem with 23 is that we’re not only doing it for driving safety, we’re doing it for a lot of other things.
If your criticism of 23 was that we shouldn’t be doing it at all, I mean… okay? But his suggestion is that we do it less than we’re doing now.
As for defining “speedy”, I’m pretty sure that he’s echoing the Sixth Amendment which opens with “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial”.
You know the thing where a guy who can’t make bail is stuck in lockup for months? That. He’s being denied his right to a speedy trial. Have you ever heard the phrase “justice delayed is justice denied”? Well, they’re not talking about guys on death row keeping kicking the can down the road with another appeal on some obscure technicality. They’re talking about a guy held and can’t get a trial scheduled. Which is his right, according to the Sixth. (Which also fails to define “speedy”.)
Well, I think that we can define a lot of victimless offenses by defining whether there is a victim. A guy smoking pot? Victimless. A guy smoking pot and then abusing his child? Suddenly: A victim. It’s the abused child.
He is not an expert on law, criminal justice, constitutional rights, sociology, racism, or the myriad of other factors that make this a problem.
I wasn’t using him as an expert on law, criminal justice, constitutional rights, sociology, racism, or myriad other things.
I was using him as a particularly strong example of someone giving a list of solutions rather than saying “We just need to end police unions and then we’ll live in Utopia!”Report
People are weird and complex and you are quite possibly right but there also seems to be a real tide change and polling indicates that the public sympathies with police reform and the protestors even if the “defunding” is not popular.
I think you are correct in your observation that there is a difference between those that can do things like de-escalation training and those who do well in police culture. The person I know would have succeeded really well in de-escalation based on his current career path.
Your second paragraph is also correct probably and sadlyReport
In many countries, officer ranked police are required to have a university degree.Report
My inner-ring suburban city (pop ~120,000) requires all sworn officers to have a four-year degree.Report
“To avoid hiring just any thug or goon to be an officer of the law, we require all candidates to have a college degree. Oh, I see you have a degree from University of Tennessee College of Law. Who was your thesis advisor?”
“Professor Glenn Reynolds. The thesis was “Vehicle Code Regulations re: Political Protests: The Case For RUN THEM ALL DOWN!!”Report
I don’t understand that TikTok video. As someone born in 1980, I do get frustrated that it feels like the Boomers take up all the oxygen in the room when it comes to politics and people my age are still stuck at the political equivalent of the kids’ table despite having jobs, mortgages, children of our own. I’ve seen people argue that Boomers did not really become the political majority until 1992. This might be true but the Boomers are such a large cohort that the youngest of them are still going to be around in 10-20 years. They will be old but still around. The youngest boomers are currently in their mid-50s. The oldest are in their early to mid 70s.Report
No Good Answers, pandemics and universities. A lot of colleges and universities sure do appear to be working with a lot of fantasy and wishful thinking regarding school this fall. There are two kinds of fantasy:
1. Students will willingly play tens of thousands of dollars for Zoom classes. This is the decision of Harvard Law and it appears to be backfiring. The elite schools are just as much, if not more, about networking and zoom learning makes this hard.
2. They can reopen and students, especially undergrads, will be as good about social distancing and not have fun.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/opinion/coronavirus-college-safe.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
“My pessimistic prediction is that the college and university reopening strategies under consideration will work for a few weeks before their effectiveness fizzles out. By then, many students will have become cavalier about wearing masks and sanitizing their hands. They will ignore social distancing guidelines when they want to hug old friends they run into on the way to class. They will venture out of their “families” and begin partying in their hallways with classmates from other clusters, and soon after, with those who live on other floors, in other dorms, or off campus. They will get drunk and hang out and hook up with people they don’t know well. And infections on campus — not only among students, but among the adults who come into contact with them — will begin to increase.”Report
Harvard Law not only wanted people to pay full price for zoom classes, they made the outrageous suggestion that students should rent out office space for maximum studying. That would make Online Harvard Law much more expensive than Campus Harvard Law and without the social benefits.
For number 2, adults aren’t proving good at social distancing and not having fun. From what I can tell, New Yorkers are using the nice summer weather to take what is happened in bars and restaurants and two the streets. A poster on another blog said that Tompkins Square Park was a crowded outdoor cocktail party over the weekend. If adults can’t do it, I’m not sure why we expect young people to maintain proper social distancing.Report
That was one bar to be fair, not every bar.Report
come to the French Quarter. Or the Mississippi Coast where regulations are nowhere near as strict. Its not just one bar in New York.Report
And it’s many bars in NYC.Report
Let’s talk about what it means to be a Republican. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bUwzgIt4ywReport
Gun-toting Trump supporters attack George Floyd protesters in rural Ohio town
“Around 3:30, the… counterprotesters?, started walking down on the other side of the street from up town, yelling obscenities and threatening us,” wrote demonstrator Abbi Remers, whose brother was punched and knocked to the ground.”A few started coming over and ripping signs out of our hands, ripping the hats and masks off of our faces, ripping things out of our pockets. Then they started surrounding us.”
The counter protesters assaulted some of the demonstrators and screamed at the group to go back to Cincinnati, which is about 30 miles west of the rural Clermont County village.
…
Police stood by as the protesters interfered with the demonstration, which ended up drawing up to 800 people, and demonstrators felt threatened by the armed group.
Police stood by.
This is one thing we don’t talk enough about, is how it is the police themselves who decide when a crime has occurred or not.
The decision whether or not to confront a citizen, whether or not to arrest them, is an arbitrary decision that the officer gets to make.
In this case, the officers decided to allow crimes to be committed, but not act. So therefore the police blotter for this day will forever record that no crimes occurred.
The very basic raw data of policing- “How many crimes occur?” is itself polluted by racial bias.Report
That police department needs to be disbanded.Report
As does San Jose’s.Report
How many times have I talked about how the police can oppress through inaction just as effectively as through direct action.
“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
H. L. Mencken’s 1919 PrejudicesReport