|
Australia |
Japan |
Mexico |
France |
New
Zealand |
Germany |
Canada |
Finland |
England/Wales |
United
States |
|
1 |
2 |
145 |
26 |
1 |
11 |
36 |
1 |
3 |
1,536 |
Four people die each day at the hands of police
in the United States. Police are smart people. They live among us. Their kids
go to school with your kids. They worship where we worship. They don’t get up
in the morning hoping to kill someone or be killed by someone. Mostly, in a
moment of crisis, they react the way they have been trained to react, trained
over and over again until the reaction is embedded in their muscle memory.
That training often saves their lives. Yet, 44 were killed in the line duty
last year.
We are a large country, but that alone doesn’t
account for the wide disparity between our police shootings compared to other
countries. Our kill rate per million people is 4.7. If Japan killed citizens at
the same rate, their police would have killed 504 people, not two. If France
killed citizens at the same rate as the US, their police would have killed 268
people last year instead of 26. Blacks are 2.5 times more likely to be shot
than Whites, and 17% of them were unarmed. Something is wrong? What accounts
for the difference?
Paul Hershfield, a professor at Rutgers
University studies policing worldwide. He suggests that there are three main
reasons why our police kill so many more people than other countries:
1.
The US is an armed camp, with millions of guns.
The police must assume that every suspect could be armed, and so they have to
be ready to take preemptive measures to safeguard themselves. They are trained
that way. Most police in Europe, for example, don’t have to make that
assumption. Many don’t even carry guns.
2.
The legal bar for shooting a suspect is much
lower in the US. Here, a police officer is trained to shoot if they have a
reasonable fear that they are in danger. In most European countries the officer
must have an absolute need to shoot, not just a fear of danger.
3.
A typical officer in the US spends about five
months in training, learning the basics, and practicing the skills they need to
do the job and survive. In most European countries the training is up to two
years, with an emphasis on communications, dealing with different cultures,
settling disputes, and some marksmanship. It is a significantly different
approach to the job.
Police Officers join the force to protect and
serve. From time to time, they only have a nanosecond to decide about the use
of force, including the decision to shoot someone. I would not want to have to
make the decisions they have to make or to live with the results. What we know,
however, is that only 27 % of police officers have fired their guns during
their career, other than on the range. A Pew survey conducted in 2016 indicated
that 85% of those who have used their gun believed that the country had done
enough to accommodate Blacks in America. The study also found that white males
and military veterans are more likely to use their guns on duty, as were those
from cities with a population over 400,000. The study also suggested that we
should be careful about how we use the results; for example, larger cities may have a
higher percentage of criminals than small cities. The real takeaway should be
that most police officers can go through a career without firing a shot in the
line of duty. And then there are those who didn’t have to shoot at all.
The nation needs to come to grips with what
constitutes a justified use of deadly force. There are 17,985 law enforcement departments
in the US, with about 800,000 sworn officers. They range from one and two-person units to New York City with about 36,000 officers. Large school
districts often have their own police departments, universities have their own
police, transit systems have their own police departments, counties have sheriffs,
national parks have rangers, and it goes on. Each is a world unto its own.
Each department has its own rules,
regulations, training, and hiring practices. Each department trains its own
standards. There is no national standard for policing, for use of force, and
for investigation of shootings, for controlling internal investigations, to
require transparency. To make such suggestions raise objections from every
direction, reminding us that one size doesn’t fit all, that each municipality
has its own needs, that one place is different from others. We know that
argument doesn’t hold water; that bucket has a hole in it. Many cities and
states are starting to change their operating standards. Some are considering
partial defunding of police departments. Congress is even pretending that it is
concerned and trying to get new standards into law. So far it is hard to
identify a holistic approach to the issue.
Where you live makes a difference. In cities like Reno, Oklahoma City, St. Louis, and Anaheim Blacks
are most likely to be killed by police than other metropolitan areas. Oklahoma,
New Mexico and DC have the highest number of police shootings per million
people, but many only lag by a percentage point or so. The data is clear. If we
cleaned up the policing practices of a few large cities and a few states, we
would have at least started working on the issue.
The smartphone is changing our knowledge of
police tactics, some of which have existed for decades. Without live filming by
stand-by-witnesses, we wouldn’t know about George Floyd. We would not know about
all the other unnecessary shootings that we witness on TV news, over and over. The
videos of people being shot by the police are cringe-worthy.
This morning I watched raw footage of a man,
who had been sleeping in his car, who failed a sobriety test, and then ran away
from the police. He was shot in the back. Another day I saw a man shot by the
police because he had jaywalked and resisted arrest. We have seen a man shot in
the back as he ran from police who stopped him because the brake light on his
car malfunctioned. The tales go on; four people a day. We have seen videos of
a police officer shooting a man in the back at a BART station, even though he
was on the ground, on his stomach, and handcuffed behind his back. Enough
already!
There is no national standard or set of
qualifications for being a police officer. Many states, counties, and states
have minimum requirements that range from a high school diploma to a bachelor's
degree in criminal justice. There is no national system for reporting the few bad
apples in the system when they are found to have violated procedures and
policies. Many are fired for cause, but just get hired by another department.
We need a nationwide system that sets hiring qualifications and monitors
compliance. We need a nationwide system for tracking the very few who violate
the public trust.
When a police officer discharges a weapon, most
departments will conduct an investigation to determine if the shooting was
justified. They very seldom, until the last few weeks, found that the officer
violated procedures or was guilty of any crime, because of a law called implied
immunity. When an airplane crashes, for any reason, the National Transportation
Safety Board sends in an investigation team. We need a National Police Incident
Board to investigate police use of force. The investigation teams should never
be from the same department that is being investigated. That will be a hard
pill for many departments to swallow. In Sacramento County, the Sheriff refused
to let an investigator enter department headquarters.
There is a national movement to defund the
police departments and direct the money to programs that deescalate violence
and riots, improve housing and schools, and other programs to reduce crime and
racism. On the surface, that makes a lot of sense, but with the current level
of crime across the country, why cut police budgets? We need the police to keep
order, on a daily basis. There are many things that police departments can do
to use their funds more efficiently and effectively. Europe trains its
officers to be a lot better at communications, understanding different cultural
issues, handling domestic squabbles than in the US. We need to change the way
we train officers and demilitarize the policing process.
So, what should we expect from those who are
sworn to protect and serve, and what should they expect from us? Those questions
are why people are in the streets protesting. To start the discussions, we
might consider the following:
- ·
Police officers should be better trained to not
use their guns except as a last resort.
- ·
Every police officer should be able to use a
gun to protect themselves from someone who threatens them with deadly harm,
obviously.
- ·
Police officers should not use a gun if they
are not being seriously threatened, unless the suspect is known to have killed
someone and is actually carrying a gun
- ·
Police should use stun-guns or batons if they
are threatened by a person who isn’t threatening to use a gun
- ·
Police should be better trained to “talk down” threatening
situations, as many other countries require
- ·
Traffic violations, property damage, bank
robbery, car theft, bad tail lights, and a list of several hundred other
violations are not worthy of the suspect being shot even if they are fleeing
arrest.
None of those suggestions deal with the other
issues that cause so many shootings, the systemic racism that permeates our
history as a nation and that exists today. Racism is built into our culture,
and as far as I can tell is built into the general police culture. It is
important to keep in mind that although most of us would deny being a racist,
racism is systemic in the country. We see it in the red-lining that still exist
in the real estate and banking industries, we see it in the dilapidated school
buildings in poor neighborhoods, we see it in less well-trained teachers and
outdated textbooks in schools of poor areas. We see in the lack of good grocery
stores in poor areas. We see it in the lack of well-kept parks and playgrounds
in poor neighborhoods. We see it in the lack of job opportunities for minorities.We
see it everywhere, but in many cases, it doesn’t register with us that there
might be a problem, because we don’t live in or experience the racism first
hand.
I had never seen anyone actually die until I
watched the death, on camera, of George Floyd. His death is resulting in calls
for rapid change that was inconceivable only a couple of months ago. My fear is that too many politicians feel
there is only a short time to get change started and that they need to do as
much as possible in the shortest time possible. Knee jerk reactions aren’t
often the best solutions. What can we do?
We can do the obvious quick fixes: stop the use
of knees-to-the-throat techniques, stop shootings as a first resort, eliminate
implied immunity protection for rogue police officers, assign different
officers to the training cadre, get police into the neighborhoods, demilitarize
the police forces and eliminate the use of war machines. None of those quick
steps will result in an increase in violence in our towns.
The long-term changes need to be thought
through thoroughly. Police officers aren’t racists by nature; they have to be
carefully taught to survive in a systemic racists organization. The police,
like the rest of us, need to understand the difference between personal racism
and systemic racism. One is personal, the other cultural. So, we must change
the culture, and that takes time, it takes new laws, and it takes affirmative
action.
One place to start is the schools. We are all
familiar with the Pygmalion effect, where our expectations for kids lead them
to behave in a way that meets our expectations. Do our schools ensure that the
young scholars have a good breakfast and lunch, that their eyes are checked
regularly to ensure that they can see well, that they have regular dental
checks, that they have books at home, that their parents know how to read to
them, take them to the library? Do the schools make sure that each child has a
connection to the internet and the means to access it? We know these things can
be done because many schools already do them. When schools closed early this
spring, there was suddenly money to buy thousands of Chrome Books for the kids
along with hotspots so that they could attend school online. Failure to do
these things is, in many ways the cause of systemic racism. Do all the schools
have quality teachers, books, and facilities? Treating everyone equally isn’t
good enough; we must ensure that everyone is on a level playing field.
Cities can negotiate better contracts with the
police unions. Rather than simply grand-father in everything negotiated at the
last negotiations, maybe it’s time to start from scratch. Cities can make sure
that the police department knows that it reports to the civilian leaders of the
community and that they are not a government unto themselves. Cities can ensure
that “bad” police officers are dismissed from the force quickly. The other
99.99% of the police department will take more pride in their work knowing they
are not being dragged down by the few.
This is a seminal time for our country. We have
the opportunity to change for the better. Changing the culture and outcomes of
our public safety institutions is one of many first steps that we can take. The
will to do the right thing seems to be prevalent. If law and order is our goal,
we need to satisfy ourselves that those who serve and protect our safety are
using the best practices that we know about.
