The officer survival movement claims more victims
Whistleblower Art Acevedo, the former Houston and Miami police chief has a few words for the police in Uvalde, Texas. Officers he has spoken with are sick about the nonresponse that contributed to the deaths of children there last week. “We failed the children. We failed the teachers. We failed the families,” Acevedo writes (CNN):
In policing, we have what’s called the “fatal funnel” — the physical area where the bullets are going to come flying when an officer responds to an active shooting scene.
In Uvalde, the fatal funnel was the entryway to that classroom where the gunman was shooting those little kids. The police knew that when they popped that door to enter that classroom they would have to enter that fatal funnel. Someone was going to have to put their life on the line.
I hate to say it, but losing officers is sometimes part of the job. We take an oath to protect and serve, even if it means risking our own lives, rather than swerve from the path of duty.
After the shooting in Uvalde, police had to assume that there were a lot of wounded, innocent children inside those classrooms. Their duty was to gain access to those classrooms at all costs, neutralize the threat and take those children out of that classroom. Their task was to get those shooting victims to trauma centers and to try to save them.
In a mass shooting situation, you never operate under the assumption that everybody’s dead unless you know that for a fact. You have to assume that people are wounded and require medical attention. The only way that shooting victims are going to get help is for police to confront the threat and neutralize it.
By not going in, the police in Uvalde absolutely made the wrong call.
This Uvalde great-grandfather feels it.
Acevedo acknowledges that “some of those officers felt frustrated. They didn’t agree with the decision,” not to breach the classroom. He calls out political leaders for not doing more to restrict access to weapons of war. Nonetheless, he writes, “The epic failure by police in Uvalde to meet the requirements of dealing with that horrific event calls attention to another problem: At some point, we have to rethink our policing model.”
We’ve covered this ground before. Also, they have chosen the wrong line of work if self-preservation is a cop’s first priority:
Death and dishonor
by Tom Sullivan
No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.
– General George S. Patton
The Patton quote above gained new notoriety after it opened the movie Patton in 1970. For several years, an autograph my father-in-law got from Patton during the war has been in a large envelope on the shelf here. I never looked at it until just now. It’s on a program from the Folies Bergère. I looked at it this morning because I’m still processing the week’s events in the aftermath of the Freddie Gray homicide in Baltimore. I looked at it because it seems some of our police believe they’re fighting a war, a war to be won by ensuring the other poor dumb bastard dies first.
Six Baltimore police officers now face “a litany of charges that include second-degree depraved-heart murder, involuntary manslaughter, false imprisonment and misconduct in office.” Recent killings by police in Ferguson, in New York, and in North Charleston brought to mind another well-known quote, not from war, but policing:
Malone: You just fulfilled the first rule of law enforcement: make sure when your shift is over you go home alive. Here endeth the lesson.
– The Untouchables (1987)
Protests turned to riot and looting after Freddie Gray’s funeral last week. Whenever that occurs in a black neighborhood, pundits rush to explain it as a symptom of a dysfunctional culture in the black community. Maybe it’s time to examine whether “the first rule” hasn’t bred a dysfunctional police culture in some departments. Because it’s not just a dramatic device from the movies.
Steve Blow of the Dallas Morning News has heard that trope too: “The No. 1 duty of a police officer is to go home to his or her family at the end of the shift.” Really? he asked back in March [dead link fixed]:
If self-preservation is the first and foremost priority of a police officer, then you get what we have seen in recent months and years — a series of unsettling police shootings.
You get what we saw on that video released last week showing Dallas police shooting a mentally ill man nonchalantly holding a screwdriver in his hands.
You get the questions swirling around the shooting death last month of an unarmed man said to be approaching a Grapevine officer with his hands raised.
It would explain other such shootings in situations that seemed to pose no immediate threat to officers.
Maybe it’s time to quit nodding along and question the maxim that going home at the end of the day trumps all other considerations.
Is that how we train firefighters? Not to save people trapped in burning buildings because they might not go home to fight fires another day?
From childhood we are taught that policemen and firefighters (and soldiers) who risk their lives to save their fellow citizens deserve honor and respect. Putting others’ lives before their own is how that respect is earned. Yet “the first rule of law enforcement” is in direct conflict with that. Perhaps it is “better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.” But where is the honor in being paid to put your own safety first?
The “officer survival movement” has made it a key part of the training that officer safety is paramount. And that’s fine to a point. But combined with the military surplus gear being handed out like candy by the federal government, the “first rule” has bred an officer survival culture. It trains for a “warrior mentality [that] makes policing less safe for both officers and civilians,” writes Seth Stoughton, a former officer and professor of law at the University of South Carolina. Furthermore:
Police training needs to go beyond emphasizing the severity of the risks that officers face by taking into account the likelihood of those risks materializing. Policing has risks—serious ones—that we cannot casually dismiss. Over the last ten years, an annual average of 51 officers were feloniously killed in the line of duty according to data collected by the FBI. In the same time period, an average of 57,000 officers were assaulted every year (though only about 25 percent of those assaults result in any physical injuries). But for all of its risks, policing is safer now than it has ever been. Violent attacks on officers, particularly those that involve a serious physical threat, are few and far between when you take into account the fact that police officers interact with civilians about 63 million times every year. In percentage terms, officers were assaulted in about 0.09 percent of all interactions, were injured in some way in 0.02 percent of interactions, and were feloniously killed in 0.00008 percent of interactions. Adapting officer training to these statistics doesn’t minimize the very real risks that officers face, but it does help put those risks in perspective. Officers should be trained to keep that perspective in mind as they go about their jobs.
Here endeth the lesson.
“At some point, we have to rethink our policing model,” writes Acevedo. That point will be about the time we stop blaming the epidemic of gun violence on “doors, video games, movies, mental health, feral pigs, women’s rights and not enough guns.”
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.