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Scaredy-cops: Should they wear badges? by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 10, 2019

Scaredy-cops: Should they wear badges?
by Tom Sullivan

Just-released cell phone video shot by Sandra Bland shows her perspective of the 2015 Texas traffic stop that preceded her death days later in police custody.

Get out of the car!” Trooper Brian Encinia shouts while pointing a Taser towards Bland. “I will light you up. Get out. Now.”

Huffington Post reminds readers:

Bland was stopped on July 10, 2015, while driving near Prairie View A&M University in Waller County, about 50 miles northwest of Houston. She was charged with suspicion of assaulting a public servant and jailed. Three days later, she was found dead in her cell. Her death was ruled suicide.

Police car dashcam video released early in the investigation captured much of the roadside confrontation, including the trooper’s threat to “light you up.” But the cellphone footage shows how the exchange looked from Bland’s perspective, with Encinia thrusting a stun gun in her face and threatening to drag her out her car.

The officer claimed he feared for his safety.

The Bland video is not the only traffic stop video released this week. Another video shows a police officer body-slamming a young woman during a traffic stop in California.

The videos raise again the question of whether the officer behavior seen in the videos is not isolated, but represents something systemic about how America selects and trains its police officers.

Zak Cheney-Rice at New York magazine adds that behaviors revealed on multiple videos and the number of deaths at police hands of unarmed black citizens points to a systemic problem. Why are so many “bad apples” bad in the same way?

Encinia did not just order Bland out of her car, threaten her, and arrest her for apparently frivolous reasons. He lied to investigators about the threat that he believed she posed. His official account of the exchange hinged entirely on the assertion that his actions were justified because he thought he was in danger. And he is not alone in pursuing this line of reasoning. Almost every prominent police killing or assault of an unarmed black person in recent years has been followed by official claims that the officer feared for his or her safety. In cases as disparate geographically as the shooting deaths of Mike Brown in Missouri, Terence Crutcher in Oklahoma, Sam Dubose in Ohio, and the 15-year-old boy attacked in April by sheriff’s deputies in Broward County, Florida, police have invoked the fear they purportedly felt to justify their violence.

The same goes for the 2009 killing in Oakland of Oscar Grant, explained in a newly released case file:

The previously sealed internal file, written 10 years ago, documented how the Bay Area Rapid Transit (Bart) officer Anthony Pirone “started a cascade of events that ultimately led to the shooting”. Pirone called Grant the N-word while detaining him, hit him in the face in an “unprovoked” attack, and later gave a series of false statements contradicted by videos, investigators said.

Pirone claimed he was “fighting for my life.” Video evidence contradicted his claim. Pirone was the aggressor, then lied about it to investigators.

Police work by nature carries the potential for bodily harm to officers. Does the profession attract cowards? Perhaps men so easily stricken violent by fear ought not to go into policing. Or perhaps improved screening could weed out recruits with short fuses? Or does the training itself instill a “warrior mindset”?

Seth Stoughton, himself a former police officer, teaches law at the University of South Carolina and is a critic of current training that treats civilians as the enemy:

Officers learn to both verbally and physically control the space they operate in. They learn that it is essential to set the proper tone for an encounter, and the tone that best preserves officer safety is widely thought to be one of “unquestioned command.” Even acting friendly, officers are told, can make them a target. But like the use of physical force, the assertive manner in which officers set the tone of encounter can also set the stage for a negative response or a violent interaction—one that was, from the start, avoidable.

That’s the wrong mental conditioning, Stoughton writes:

Our officers should be, must be, guardians, not warriors. The goal of the Guardian isn’t to defeat an enemy, it is to protect the community to the extent possible, including the community member that is resisting the officer’s attempt to arrest them. For the guardian, the use of avoidable violence is a failure, even if it satisfies the legal standard.

Cheney-Rice continues, explaining that our system of policing is geared more toward providing legal cover for officers than protection for citizens:

We can say with confidence that this is a systemic problem because letting these officers off the hook is a systemic act — enshrined in law and practice across the United States and carried out in official press conferences, departmental investigations, and grand jury proceedings. “A few bad apples” are not to blame for a system-wide mechanism which police can so reliably turn to for exoneration that they do so almost every time they are caught doing wrong. There is something fundamentally nefarious about the whole institution when so many such cases follow a familiar script: Commit violence against an unarmed civilian, then claim — often dishonestly — to have been so frightened that no other option was available.

Citing the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), civil rights activist DeRay McKesson told MSNBC’s The Beat on Wednesday one-third of all people killed by a stranger in this country are killed by a police officer:

What we have here … is failure to incarcerate.

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