"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Another police shooting. They just keep coming.
Twenty-five year old Ezell Ford was shot by Los Angeles police during an “investigative stop” in South L.A. on Monday. Relatives on the scene say Ford was cooperating, and was actually lying on the ground when he was shot. This just after the controversial shooting in Ferguson, Missouri of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who witnesses say had his hands in the air at the time - and may have had his back to the officer. The second shooting happened while I was deciding what I wanted to write about the first one, and in the time since the second one, the case of the first one has gotten worse.
Read on . . .
”When he came up, I looked him in the eye, and I saw ‘shoot’, and there wasn’t shoot in nary other eye in the crowd.” – Russell Bean, on why he surrendered to then-Superior Court Judge Andrew Jackson after successfully defying the sheriff and his entire posse.
Police have the authority to use force. It’s necessary that they do. We
want them to, because ultimately the worst elements of society submit only to those that do. When some crazed thug is rampaging through the public square, or some well-oiled gang of thieves is clearing out the local bank, you want them to be met by someone with a badge on his chest and “shoot” in his eye.
I have seen, in my life, armed crazies stopped from murderous sprees only because a lot of brave men with a lot of bullets ended them where they stood. I have seen a drunken abuser stopped from pummeling his wife only when a bystander twisted his arm until it bent in ways nature never imagined. A legal and mental health infrastructure and a healthy societal ideal of relationships and self-worth and ethics are all important, and all save a lot of lives, but sometimes, in the moment, the only thing that stops force is more force.
But something has gone very wrong. It’s not new – though for someone protected by the Awesome Power of White, like myself, it might seem to be – but it is getting worse. The power to use force carries a certain trust, a certain faith in the sane and sensible use of that power by those to whom it’s been granted . . . and I admit, I’ve lost my faith.
“It’s comin’ right for us!” – Jimbo, “South Park”
It used to almost be cliché for a retired police officer to talk about never having had to fire his weapon outside of a practice range. I’m sure there are still plenty that get to say that, an unseen majority that never make the news, but I have to think that number has dropped. Today, it seems that police are drawing more readily – and shooting more readily – than ever before.
Case in point: Clover, SC, February 25, 2014 – Seventy-year-old Bobby Dean Canipe was shot by a deputy on Highway 321 during a traffic stop. Stepping out of his truck, Canipe, who had difficulty walking, reached for his cane, which the deputy allegedly mistook for a “long-barreled weapon”. Canipe, happily, survived the shooting.
Warrington, FL, July 27, 2013 – 60-year-old Roy Middleton walked out to his own driveway to fish around in his mother’s car for cigarettes sometime around 2 am. A neighbor, seeing Middleton, assumed it was some kind of break-in and called the police. When officers arrived, they called out to Middleton and fired some 15 rounds when he turned to face them. Miraculously, he was struck only twice, in the leg. Accounts in the aftermath varied, though police have claimed the law-abiding citizen standing on his own property and breaking no law “lunged” at the officers.
Park Forest, IL, July 26, 2013 - Ninety-five year old WW II veteran John Wrana died from internal bleeding after being shot with a bean bag round by police. Wrana had allegedly been threatening staff and paramedics with a cane, shoehorn and butcher knife (which the family attorney later denied, at least the last one). Staff had called police to help transfer Wrana to the hospital for evaluation (they suspected delusions brought on by urinary tract infection). They pleaded with officers to let them calm Wrana down, but police raided his room and - allegedly mistaking Wrana’s shoehorn for a “machete” - shot him five times with bean bags from a 12-guage Mossberg shotgun.
Detroit, MI, May 16, 2010 – Seven-year-old Aiyana Jones was struck and killed by a police officer’s gun when policed raided the apartment where she lived, believing a murder suspect, Chauncey Owen, may have been hiding there (he was not, though Aiyana’s father had supplied him with the gun used in the murder). Officer Joseph Weekley claimed that his weapon had fired accidentally when Aiyana’s grandmother, 50-year-old Mertilla Jones, grabbed for it as he entered the apartment. Jones and the second cop to enter the apartment, Officer Shawn Stellard, both disputed that account.
And in recent news, we had John Crawford shot dead by police in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio while apparently carrying a pellet gun sold in the store. One witness, in a 911 call, said Crawford had been brandishing the weapon (which looks eerily real) and pointing it at other customers, including children – though, oddly, no other customers called 911, and there seems to have been no evidence that customers in the store were in a panic about a gunman when police arrived. The current claim is that the pellet gun had been removed from its packaging, and that Crawford did not comply with orders to put it down.
And this is on top of numerous cases of police shooting pets. In West Virginia, police searching woods near Ginger Sweat’s property in West Virginia shot Willy Pete, her six-year old beagle-basset hound as it was running away from them. Two officers in Baltimore slit a seven-year-old Shar-Pei’s throat. Police in Hawthorne, California allegedly shot a dog in front of its owner because the owner was recording them. Estimates are that a cop kills a pet every 98 minutes in America.
And in each of these cases, against either humans or animals, the defense was the same: “I felt threatened”. It is the default explanation for every use of force, no matter how obviously unjustifiable, encapsulated in this statement from a CNN interview by Escambia County Sheriff David Morgan, speaking about the Middleton shooting: "There was nothing glaringly apparent to us that the officers did that was out of the ordinary in the given set of circumstances as have been given to us."
With that definition of “out of the ordinary”, it’s small wonder there are often no real consequences for the officers in cases like these. You can call anything “reasonable force” if you’ve psyched yourself into a world where Shar-Peis are potentially deadly attack dogs, and a 60-year-old man in his own driveway is going to lunge at armed police officers because fuckin’ YOLO.
“There is no racial bigotry here. I do not look down on n****rs, kikes, wops or greasers. Here you are all equally worthless.” – Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, Full Metal Jacket
This is not purely about race. Yes, Michael Brown and John Crawford and Ezell Ford were black, but Bobby Dean Canipe and John Wrana were not. The institutional racism that has long existed in law enforcement, that has excused policies like Stop and Frisk and shaded almost every interaction between police – even black officers - and the black citizens they ostensibly serve and protect, is definitely a part of it, but not all.
This was all first apparent (and is still most apparent) in how police interact with the black community – that’s undeniable. I remember, years ago, a story in the news about a police raid of a frat house which involved using an armored vehicle to batter down the front door. There was a stir of controversy about it, even though such vehicles had been used in raids for some time. This time, though, one had been used against a house full of white kids from good families, and that was “different”.
Even today, my odds in any given encounter with the police are way, way better because of my Irish ancestry than they would be if my family had come from the Ivory Coast. But as some of the above cases point out, that’s no longer as true as it once was. The issue now is a mentality which, at its core, has nothing to do with race. Rather, it’s in how police see themselves (constantly in danger) and how they see the community at large (the reason they’re constantly in danger).
Police have gone from being members of the public – and guardians of the public – to being an occupying force. I’m not the first or the best to have noticed this – Joan McCarter has an excellent diary on the Front Page today about it – but I don’t think it can be said enough times. Our police forces, across the country, have become militarized. With that comes a certain way of thinking – a survival-based mindset of “us vs other”, and if you’re not wearing riot gear and carrying a badge, you’re “other”, no matter what race you are.
“Vae victis.” – Brennus, chieftain of the Senones
It is not possible for an occupier to serve and protect the occupied. It just isn’t. The feeling of being constantly under threat, constantly despised by some and possibly
all of the people whose homes and business you move through on patrol, ultimately robs you of the empathy you need to function as a true public servant. The occupier expects to be hated; he inevitably hates in return.
Whatever company slogans you hear at work, imagine getting this one every day instead: “Today may be the day you have to kill someone to go home tonight.” I don’t know about you, but if that was the message drilled into us at my office, the copier room would look like a scene from The Shining.
That quote was from an article published in S.W.A.T. magazine in 2008, written by Sheriff’s Deputy (and firearms instructor) Erick Gelhaus, of Sonoma County, California. He also made this statement on Firing Line Forum (a gun enthusiasts’ network) in 2006, on the use of lethal force against someone armed with a BB gun:
“It’s going to come down to YOUR ability to articulate to law enforcement and very likely the Court that you were in fear of death or serious bodily injury.”
Gelhaus later achieved notoriety when he shot and killed 13-year-old Andy Lopez Cruz, who was carrying a toy assault rifle, on Oct 22, 2013. Exiting his car, the deputy had yelled once for the boy to drop the rifle before firing eight shots, seven of which struck Cruz.
Modern law enforcement, increasingly, fancies itself as a military force – and there has never been a military whose directing power did not have, or create for itself, an enemy. Good leaders of civilian law enforcement seek to control crime. Leaders of occupying military forces, inevitably, seek to control populations.
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." - Dwight D. Eisenhower
You weren’t kiddin’, Ike.
Section 1033 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 1997 allows the DOD to supply surplus military hardware to state and local law enforcement, including weapons, body armor, surveillance equipment, vehicles and even aircraft. The provision is why the fifty-person police department in Oxford, Alabama has a Puma armored vehicle. Why the fuck does a town of just over twenty thousand people need a Puma armored vehicle? Beats me. But they’ve got one.
This began with the War on Drugs, and escalated with the War on Terror, and is quickly becoming the War on Oh Just Every-Damn-Thing. Some of the architects of all this are well-meaning, if misguided, people. Some of them are authoritarians who just think a more stormtrooper-y police force is the best way to keep crime down, the streets safe and the hippies quiet. Some of them are the greedy, pursuing a vested interest – i.e, "contractors".
It’s easy to point to War, Inc., as the source of our ills in places like Iraq, or in the endless arming of pretty much everyone, on all sides, of the various socio-political brush-fires around the world, but the pernicious influence of the Eisenhower’s M.I.C. is here at home, too.
When your police are in a “War” they need weapons, and body armor, and armored vehicles and night vision goggles and whatever else. A lot of it filters down through 1033, especially as we’ve drawn down in Iraq and Afghanistan, but some of it has to be bought. The more police are militarized, the more opportunities there are for contracts for anything that militarized police force "needs". There are a lot of cultural elements we need to dissect and rewrite in order to return law enforcement to something our grandparents would recognize (and not from the countries they fled in WW II), but we can’t ignore that one of the things keeping us on this police-state course is that someone has the chance to make a lot of money from it.
"There is not one single police officer in America that I am not afraid of and not one that I would trust to tell the truth or obey the laws they are sworn to uphold. I do not believe they protect me in any way." - Henry Rollins
Michael Brown was stopped for walking in the street, something which I do all the time. Sidewalks are sporadic where I live, sometimes only on one side of the street, sometimes only running a few houses down and then stopping. Where there
are sidewalks, you have to periodically dance around the cars parked in people’s driveways (which could be seen as suspicious in itself).
Bobby Dean Canipe was getting a cane so he could stand. Roy Middleton was searching for cigarettes. These are simple, innocent actions, the kind anyone should be able to do, even in front of a police officer, without risking their lives.
The problem is that some police are hopped up on a kind of perpetual fear, seeing only enemies and threats, while they patrol a world of people who have no idea they’re seen that way. If you’re walking on the street and someone behind you says “Stop” or “Hey you”, you will likely do what 99% of all people would do – you would turn around to see if they were talking to you, and what they wanted. And then, especially if you have something in your hand, you could very likely die if the person behind you is a cop who is wondering if “today may be the day he has to kill someone to go home tonight”.
People – at least most of them – still trust police. They act naturally around them, oblivious to the red flags the simplest of gestures can send up in the mind of someone who’s been trained to live in an ambush mentality. We do not, by instinct, drop spread-eagle on the ground as soon as a cop speaks to us. We move and act and speak like what we are – free American citizens, being questioned by the law officers that protect – and work for - us.
And, unless we figure out how to change the mentality that’s overtaking US law enforcement, that will become increasingly deadly.