I have been somewhat surprised that no post here that I can find in the last two weeks has discussed the July 30 fatal police shooting of Richard Black of Aurora, CO. Maybe because it didn’t get a lot of media play. It should have, but since it complicates some of the narratives around officer-involved shootings we usually follow, it didn’t.
To recap: Early that morning, Black’s house was broken into by 26-year-old Dajon Harper, who apparently was naked, on drugs and accompanied by an unidentified woman. He began trying to choke Black’s 11-year-old grandson in the bathtub; the woman woke up the child’s father, Black’s stepson, who interrupted Harper. The two began struggling and the sound of Harper hitting the stepson over the head with a vase awoke Black, who then got his handgun out and shot Harper twice in the stomach, killing him.
So, so far we have an actual instance of a home invasion, a crime that happens far more in fear and handgun and security-system advertising than it does in reality, committed by a suspected local gang member with a lengthy arrest record who looks like a racist nightmare in his mugshot. The homeowner takes out his gun, which I don’t think any of us here would begrudge him doing so, because the intruder was not just on the property but within his house and actively endangering life and limb.
And then it ends the way the NRA always tells us it will. The intruder is shot dead; the family is safe again.
Unfortunately there’s a post-credits scene. The police had understandably been called when the neighbors heard the ruckus, and shortly after they arrived the 73-year-old Black, a disabled, decorated combat veteran of the Vietnam War who had later served as an IRS agent, walked out in front of the house. The responding officers had a report that there was possibly an intruder at the property and violence associated with it; they had no idea what that intruder might look like because nobody had seen that person.
The officers, their guns drawn, saw an old, perhaps somewhat dazed, white man holding a gun in their lights. They asked him four times to put it down, with no result. So, one of the cops, who as it turned out had been involved in another questionable shooting a month earlier, shot Black dead.
Oops. That wasn’t how the story As one commenter noted, this will probably not make the NRA’s “Armed Citizen” page.
And it also complicates the usual narrative around police shootings, as Black was white. And visibly armed.
At first when I read this story, I looked around to see not only if it was getting any attention here, but on the right-wing sites that might take notice. Would they express more sympathy for Mr. Black, and less for the police, because he fit into the Trump voter/Fox News demographic so neatly? Perhaps then I could post some of those comments here and point up the hypocrisy.
I would be disappointed; beyond some somewhere wondering why Black Lives Matter wasn’t getting involved because the guy was, well, Black, to which I’m not linking, most comments generally agreed, as I think most of us would, that at least on the face of things it’s hard to say a guy holding a gun who does not drop it after armed police officers a short distance away ask you to do so four times is a completely blameless victim. But at the same time I should note that Black’s family said he had hearing problems in one ear as a result of his service, and even if that was not an issue I can’t imagine his state of mind after what had just happened in the house was completely normal, combat experience half a century ago and half a world away notwithstanding. To say nothing of staring into blinding headlights and flashers.
However, in the course of doing so I found something else that I thought should be brought into the debate … this comment on Reason’s coverage, which I reproduce in full:
I am retired LE and I came to feel that "realistic" shooting scenarios, training videos, and "haunted house" set ups where you have to go through and clear the house, only makes cops more trigger-happy. (That's because you die so much in these things after innocent-looking people pull a .44 mag out of nowhere and bushwhack you.)
At least, it did me. I became a notorious cop-killer at the training facility because inevitably I would be the one who shot some plain-clothes cop who runs into the scenario with gun drawn and I would plug him.
Then the instructors would try to shame me: "What are you going to tell that officer's widow?"
"The flat truth," I would respond, "just because he made detective he shouldn't have stopped wearing the Kevlar vest merely because it was uncomfortable and made his sport coat fit funny."
When I read that my mind went back about 20 years, to when I was a reporter, covering some municipalities in the Cleveland suburbs.
As those of you who have that experience know, a lot of the job is going to meetings of local governments and writing about what happens at those meetings.
One night, at the end of one township board of trustees’ meeting, we all repaired to a nearby garage, where one of the police department’s sergeants had set up an early version of something like what the commenter describes. It was a wall-size projecting video screen, with similar screens slanting outward on either side and the ceiling. Basically, anyone standing in front of it would get a 180-degree immersion experience that was sort of like a first-person shooter video game on steroids since it was real size.
The officer being trained would stand there in full kit, with a cap gun substituting for his real one, or one that at least allowed us to see where the shots were being fired … if the officer fired shots. The sergeant stood in front of it to show us how this worked in one scenario where it was inevitable. Perhaps because we reporters and trustees watching knew this, it didn’t scare us.
“While on routine patrol” the voiceover said, as the camera’s POV headed for the door of a small shop in a small strip mall, “you stop at the video store to return a couple of movies you rented.” (yes, kids, this was the 1990s)
And then, as the camera goes in, “you” walk into a nightmare scenario, or one that would be a nightmare if I didn’t know that America is a big country, and things like this can happen, and very likely have happened, to cops on the job. Someone was robbing the video store, and as they saw the “officer” come in, they began taking the clerk hostage. The sergeant, who had been through this one before, calmly fired at the robber’s image, hitting “him” twice.
All well and good. Then he put on another scenario (he had actually scripted and shot some of these himself, with other cops from the department in the various roles, though I don’t know if either of the two we saw that night were among them). This one started with an in-car view, as the voiceover set the scenario up: “you” have witnessed a vehicle doing something that constitutes reckless driving, and initiate a traffic stop. The vehicle in question, a black pickup truck, duly pulls over in a deserted industrial-looking area in daytime.
As the camera’s POV moved to suggest the “officer” getting out of his/her cruiser to walk up to the truck, the driver’s side door opened and a 20s-ish white male in a tank top, shorts and a baseball hat with sunglasses gets out and starts moving toward the camera, waving his arms and loudly complaining about being stopped. “Why you bothering me? What’d I do? Why are you guys always picking on me?”
The sergeant visibly had one of his hands on something at his belt—his gun or his spray, I could not tell. “Sir, please return to your vehicle!” he said, in that authoritarian, stentorian voice we hear at least once on every episode of Cops. “PLEASE … RETURN … TO … YOUR … VEHICLE!!!!”
And then he ended it. Mercifully, because my entire abdomen and rectum had tightened as much as it might have if this had actually been happening and I’d been in exactly the same position relative to the sergeant. Every neurotransmitter in my body was screaming “Shit might go down!” even as I hoped it didn’t.
I wasn’t alone, apparently. “I’ve seen guys sweat” when doing these, the sergeant said, and not just rookies but veteran cops, cops who’d worked tough city beats for years. And ironically enough, as we wound this demonstration up someone told us that the sound of the “shots” fired during the first scenario had led some nearby homeowner to call 911 (this was during evening hours, when the police didn’t normally do this).
When I recalled this experience after reading that comment, I began to think: if that was my experience one time, what, as the writer asked, does it do to cops when they’re exposed to it dozens of times, perhaps even in a single year? Especially when they get “killed” during these exercises, more than once, something they have a credible fear happening for real out on the street.
Leon Neyfakh in Slate also wrote an interesting article a while back about the videos cops watch in training that show real cops getting killed during traffic stops, something the commenter is also, I think, alluding to. One of the cops he talks to admits, in fact, that “We don’t show an overabundance of [the violent videos] because we don’t want [recruits to think] this is what’s going to happen in every situation, because it doesn’t 98 percent of the time”. Another officer admits “[s]eeing videos like this one … leaves an imprint on most of us.”
“Cowards die many times before their deaths,” Julius Caesar observes in Shakespeare’s play, about a scene or two before his own demise. “The valiant never taste of death but once.” What does it do to a human being if you regularly make them experience simulated scenarios of their very real fear of death, or near death, at the hands of another on their jobs, as part of their training for that job? I mean no disrespect to anyone in law enforcement when I say that I have to ask, are we not making cowards of brave people this way?
Has any psychiatrist or psychologist ever studied the effects of these training methods on police officers, both as recruits and as veterans? Getting “killed” down at the training facility because yo dropped your guard for a fraction of a second doesn’t strike me as something that you and the boys can easily get over with a couple of beers afterwards (unfortunately, given the alcoholism rates among police officers, that probably doesn’t stop people from trying). I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t see some PTSD symptoms among some of the officers/recruits, at least for a short while afterwards (especially given that one theory about PTSD, as I understand it, is that it’s what happens when you have fully expected to die, but don’t).
I think we should consider the role this may play in promoting police shootings. I’d be particularly interested in any comments or observations from people who may be or have been in law enforcement, or are closely acquainted with someone who is.