Guardian vs Warrior
by digby
Here’s a very interesting article by a police scholar about what happened in McKinney:
An officer in McKinney, Texas, dashes down a sidewalk, losing his flashlight as he runs past a teenage videographer toward an emergency. Seconds later, the teen with the camera walks up to another officer, one who is standing with a group of kids. “I’m just saying,” the officer is saying in a calm, corrective tone that parents and school teachers everywhere will recognize. “Don’t take off running when the cops get here.”
He thanks the videographer for returning the flashlight, then listens for a few seconds as the kids around him try to explain who was and was not involved in a prior incident. “Okay, guys, I appreciate that,” the as-yet-unidentified officer says. He responds to their concerns—that the police had detained the wrong people—by saying, “Okay, that’s what I’m saying. They’re free to go.” While not casual, the officer is composed. His tone is friendly and professional as he engages with the kids.
Seconds later, another officer, Corporal Eric Casebolt, is shown interacting with some of the same kids. His angry tone and aggressive attitude stand in marked contrast to the first officer in the video. “Get on the ground,” he commands sharply while pulling on a young man’s wrist in a way that looks like he’s trying to force the man to the ground with a painful joint manipulation (technically a supinating wrist lock or, for martial arts enthusiasts, kote gaeshi).
When that proves ineffective, he grabs the back of the young man’s head and shoves him down. “I told you to stay,” he yells, pointing a large metal flashlight at someone off camera. “Get your asses down on the ground.” Like the first officer, he lectures some of the kids about running from the police, but he takes a very different approach. “Don’t make me fucking run around here with thirty pounds of god-damned gear on in the sun because you want to screw around out here.” He is anything but composed, calm or professional.
The two officers in this brief video represent two different policing styles, two different mindsets that officers use as they interact with civilians: the Guardian and the Warrior. As a former police officer and current policing scholar, I know that an officer’s mindset has tremendous impact on police/civilian encounters. I’ve described the Guardian and Warrior mindsets at some length here and here; for now, suffice to say that the right mindset can de-escalate tense situations, induce compliance, and increase community trust over the long-term. The kids interacting with the first officer were excited, but not upset; they remained cooperative. Had they gone home at that moment, they’d have a story for their friends and family, but it would be a story that happened to have the police in it rather than being a story about the police.
The wrong mindset, on the other hand, can exacerbate a tense encounter, produce resistance, and lead to entirely avoidable violence. It can, and has, caused longterm damage to police/community relations. We shouldn’t be surprised that the kids Corporal Casebolt was yelling at weren’t eager to do what he was ordering them to do—no one likes being cursed at and disrespected in front of their peers, and people of all ages, especially teenagers, resent being treated unjustly. That resentment can lead to resistance, and Police Warriors—taught to exercise unquestioned command over a scene—overcome resistance by using force.
I think everyone got so caught up in the story of military gear appearing on the streets of America that our discussion of the militarization of police got short changed. This is the big problem that stems from militarization — bad training and bad attitudes.
If you live in a big city you see police in action all the time. I certainly do. And most of the time it’s a respectful, often even friendly interaction. But it’s not uncommon to see this aggressive, hostile belligerent approach and it always seems to come out of nowhere. This author says that there should be some training for police on the scene to intervene and give cops who’ve become too wound up some space to calm down and get their act together but it’s rare. I’ve never seen that, actually. What I’ve observed is that the wound up cop is left to do his thing while other cops ignore it. In McKinney it did look as though a couple of officers intervened a little bit when their colleague pulled a gun, but it was brief and mostly worked because they took up the chase leaving our amped up officer to go back to assaulting the girl in the bikini.
There are people who are thinking about this stuff and over time this really could change. But the police have to take it seriously and the communities have to back their attempts to change. from what I’ve seen of this white community and the toxic swill that’s been spewed on facebook and blog comment sections, I’m not holding out a lot of hope for that.
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