And another one:
An unarmed man was shot by a Virginia sheriff’s deputy about an hour after the same deputy gave the man a ride home, Virginia State Police confirmed to CNN.
Isaiah Brown, 32, was shot while on the phone with a 911 dispatcher, according to authorities and 911 audio released Friday, as the deputy returned while responding to a “domestic incident.”
Brown was 50 feet away from the officer early Wednesday morning. He is in the hospital with serious but non-life-threatening injuries, CNN reports.
“After viewing the Spotsylvania County Sheriff’s deputy’s bodycam video and listening to the 911 call, it is evident that the tragic shooting of Isaiah Brown was completely avoidable,” David Haynes, an attorney for Brown’s family, said in a statement. He said Brown was “on the phone with 911 at the time of the shooting and the officer mistook a cordless house phone for a gun.”
Police shootings of unarmed Black men are an epidemic all its own.
A police veteran from Savannah, Ga. considers the Derek Chauvin conviction a wake-up call for him and his profession. Several things need to happen now, Patrick Skinner believes. The first is what needs to not happen: for police to circle the wagons. “’Not all cops’ is exactly the wrong reaction,” he writes. And irrelevant. So Chauvin was convicted. The system worked. Also irrelevant (Washington Post):
Here’s the second thing that needs to happen: We police need to fight the destructive reaction we have resorted to before in places like New York, where members of the police union had an unofficial but announced slowdown in 2019 after the dismissal of an officer implicated in the killing of Eric Garner by police in 2014. We have to stop saying, in effect, that if we can’t do our job the way we have always done it, well then, we won’t do our job at all. We might still collect a paycheck, but we will stop a lot of work because of an exaggerated fear of running afoul of the “new rules.” Rules such as “Don’t treat your neighbors like robots of compliance,” “Don’t escalate trivial matters into life-or-death confrontations” and “Treat your neighbors as if they were your neighbors.” That anyone would consider these rules “new” is a problem in itself. Few police officers reading them aloud would take issue with such anodyne statements, but put accountability behind the statements and now they’re an attack, not just on all police but the very foundation of American policing. The truth is that we do not get to tell our neighbors — those whose communities we police — how we will do our job. They tell us.
Faced with criticism that perhaps police should not be turning a traffic stop over an unarmed person’s vehicle registration sticker into something to be resolved at gunpoint, some will say, “What are the police supposed to do, let all criminals just run away?” There is a lot wrong with that reaction. To begin with, let’s slow down on calling someone with registration issues a criminal. And then let’s slow down everything, because we police are rushing to make bad decisions when time is almost always our friend. Tamir Rice most likely would not have been killed for having a toy gun if the Cleveland police officers had not rushed right up to him and shot him. There was no violence going on; the 12-year-old was alone in the middle of a park. Slow down, I tell myself in almost every police encounter. The risk to my neighbors in my rushing to a final judgment in very uncertain and fluid situations far outweighs the risk to myself. I’m often wrong in the initial assessment of chaotic scenes, and so I try to be wrong silently, allowing my judgment to catch up to my reactions, to allow my perception to catch up with my vision. Slow down.
Dismissing criticism of police because he wasn’t personally responsible is the wrong approach, Skinner now believes:
I think I have to take it personally: I have to be offended, I have to be outraged, and I have to act. That means I need to understand the goal of every 911 call, and that the compliance of those I encounter is not a goal; it might be a path to a goal but it’s not the goal. It means putting my neighbors first at every instance. It means often to act slower, to give my neighbors the benefit of the doubt because they are the point of my job.
“Warrior cop” training instills a “We have met the enemy and he is You” mindset that turns every encounter into a potential ambush and every civilian into a potential enemy combatant. It pits cops against the people they are supposedly there to serve and protect. Intrinsic bias or outright bias does the rest when it comes to ethnic minorities.
Add to that inadequate training. Budgets are slim and training lopsided towards violence, writes Olga Khazan at The Atlantic:
Police in the United States receive less initial training than their counterparts in other rich countries—about five months in a classroom and another three or so months in the field, on average. Many European nations, meanwhile, have something more akin to police universities, which can take three or four years to complete. European countries also have national standards for various elements of a police officer’s job—such as how to search a car and when to use a baton. The U.S. does not.
[…]
American police training resembles military training—“polish your boots, do push-ups, speak when you’re spoken to,” Brooks told me. In an article for The Atlantic last year, she described practicing drills and standing at attention when senior officers entered the room. “I don’t think I’ve been yelled at as much since high-school gym class more than three decades ago,” she wrote. Reformers worry that this type of training teaches recruits that the world runs on strict power hierarchies, and that anything short of perfect compliance should be met with force and anger.
Though he generally agrees with the push toward less militaristic police academies, Slocumb thinks the stress of military-style drills can be a useful proving ground for new officers. “You don’t want the first time that you have to make a decision while people are screaming in your face to be out in someone’s living room,” he told me. “It needs to be something you’ve been accustomed to during training.”
“Soft skills,” emotional intelligence, stress management, etc., take a back seat to having to “win” every situation. That way leads to excessive use of force.
There is much to do to end the epidemic rebuild confidence. Even after all the killings and shootings, the country and police are not there yet.