Friday Round-Up
One way to reduce police shootings would be to teach cops that their number one priority should not be going home safe at night. Also, Democrats should go big when no one is paying attention.
Since yesterday’s post largely looked back at the week that was, I’m going to eschew the week in review format for something a little different.
First, I wanted to highlight contributor Ian Zimmerman’s new article on two jazz and blues legends and how the COVID-19 has taken something very dear away from us - the excitement of live music. It’s a great piece!
Second, there’s so much to be said about Ted Cruz’s really bad week but one of the interesting takeaways - and I apologize for sounding like a broken record on this - is that the media’s focus on the dumpster fire that is the current Republican Party is giving Joe Biden quite the political opening. This week the Biden administration announced they were open to restarting nuclear talks with Iran and the president’s allies on Capitol Hill unveiled an immigration reform measure that would provide undocumented immigrants with an 8-year path to citizenship. Both steps are controversial, but neither story could penetrate the obsessive media attention on Cruz’s ill-fated trip to Cancun (and I am lumping myself in here as well).
This does, however, follow a now routine pattern since Biden took office. Political journalists have devoted far more attention to Marjorie Taylor Greene, Trump’s impeachment, and now Cruz than they have Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill. It’s not news that reporters love conflict, obsess over politics, and are bored by policy. But if I were Biden and the Democrats this would be precisely the moment I’d consider being super aggressive, particularly on the legislative front. Republicans are reeling and the media can’t look away, which is all the more reason for Democrats to get COVID-relief voted on as quickly as possible, but also start pushing legislation on voting rights, immigration, student loan forgiveness, and other progressive priorities. Back during the campaign, I suggested that if Democrats won the presidency and control of the Senate they should immediately nuke the filibuster, make DC and Puerto Rico states, and expand the courts. My argument was that voters don’t care much about procedural reforms and that from a political standpoint these steps would be largely forgotten by congressional midterms in 2022.
Unfortunately, opposition to scrapping the filibuster makes my proposal something of a pipe dream. But what a missed opportunity. When you have the political wind at your back and your opposition is so divided and can’t come up with a coherent political message you need to be aggressive. I guarantee this honeymoon will not last and at some point the media will go back to focusing its scrutiny on the White House and Democrats. By then it will likely be too late to be aggressive.
Protect and Serve?
This week I’ve been reading Rosa Brooks excellent new book, “Tangled Up In Blue,” which details her experience in becoming a reserve police officer in Washington DC. There are so many policy issues that Brooks brings to fore and that are worth exploring in greater depth, but one issue in particular jumps out to me: that police officers are, through their training and culture, incentivized to shoot first and ask questions later.
I remember the great, now deceased criminologist Mark Kleiman making this point years ago when he said to me that one of the biggest contributors to police shootings is the mindset among cops that their number one priority is to go home safe at night.
Brooks’s book illuminates how this creates a perverse incentive structure for the police. “The chief lesson learned at the academy was this,” writes Brooks, “anyone can kill you at any time.” During her training she was told over and over that every police interaction could result in a dead officer and cops must remain vigilant. “Don’t let someone sit on a couch or a soft chair; they could be hiding a weapon between the cushions.” “Don’t interview someone in a kitchen; there are too many potential weapons.” “Walk up to a vehicle at night by shining a flashlight in the side view mirror to disorient the driver and also stand back from the driver’s door.”
Even the way officers stand when talking to a civilian, what they have in their hands, and how they look at people (they should be focused on hands not eyes in case someone reaches for a gun), were drilled into recruits. Brooks recounts being forced to watch hours of videos in which officers were ambushed because they let their guard down for a second. Part of this focus on potential risks is a by-product of living in a society in which access to guns is largely unfettered. But, in reality, officers in Washington DC where Brooks trained to be a cop are almost never killed in the line of duty. Vigilance is wise, but it’s simply not commensurate with the risk to police officers. It’s also not fair to civilians. Shouldn’t officers who are armed, wear body armor, and are paid to put their lives in danger be the ones taking on the greatest risk?
By making officer safety the paramount concern for cops it increases the likelihood that an officer, if they feel even slightly at risk, will discharge their weapon. Brooks recounts one story about responding to a burglar alarm call and entering a darkened apartment with the front door ajar. Suddenly, a young man popped his head out of the bathroom. Neither Brooks nor her partner raised their weapon, but as she makes clear this was precisely the kind of situation where an officer might feel threatened and inclined to use deadly force. “It wouldn’t have been too hard to justify such a shooting,” writes Brooks. She goes on to argue that “everything in police training and culture tells them to expect danger from every quarter. Officers are trained to be hypervigilant and respond to potential threats instantly. They’re told they have a ‘right to go home safe.’ Too often they forget that other people have a right to go home safe too.”
As Brooks notes, it’s one of the stranger aspects of police culture in America. The motto of many police forces is “to protect and serve” but more often than not the people who receives the most protection are cops. Soldiers would never operate under such a mindset. The idea drilled in them throughout their tenure in the military is that the mission comes first, even if it costs them their lives.
Cops are taught the opposite. Indeed, most police shootings occur not because officers are sadists or murderers but because they’ve been told that they are at constant risk of death and that their number one priority is go home to their families at night. And if they do fire their weapons, as long as they felt that they were in imminent harm - even if it turns out they weren’t - they will likely not be held legally responsible or even necessarily lose their job.
As difficult as it might sound, one key way to decrease police shootings would be to train officers to put the lives of civilians ahead of their own. This would understandably be a major cultural shift in how officers are trained, but shouldn’t that be the expectation? Why should civilians be expected to act perfectly and highly trained officers given a pass? It’s worth noting that Brooks is not a disinterested observer on this topic. She is advocating for a policy that would put her at greater risk.
Brooks and her partner didn’t fire their guns when they entered that darkened apartment but other officers might have because they perceived a threat. What if cops, however, were trained not to be the aggressor in such situations? What if they were told as Brooks suggests “that they are voluntarily taking a risky job, and that if someone dies because of a mistake, it’s better to be a police officer who is trained and paid to take risks than a member of the public?” Would it end every police shooting? No. But it likely would lead to fewer such incidents.
“Tangled Up In Blue”
Rosa’s book is titled “Tangled Up In Blue” and here’s one of my favorite versions of the Bob Dylan song of the same name.