US police plagued by WARRIOR SPIRIT of shoot more, talk less
Play
Social change has brought blacks into police forces around the country - but that hasn't solved the problem of excessive force being used against African-Amercian
A car backfires in the streets of Cleveland, Ohio. Nearby police think it’s gunfire. Thus begins the November 2012 chase. Sixty police cruisers race at 160 kilometres per hour for more than 20 minutes until they corner the car. Police fire 137 rounds. One white officer, Michael Brelo, jumps on the hood and fires his Glock 17 pistol 49 times at driver Timothy Russell and passenger Malissa Williams – unarmed African-Americans with police records. Both are killed.
No one knows for sure how many civilians are killed every year by US police or die in police custody. The website Killed by Police has logged 474 deaths so far this year, an average of three per day so far in 2015.
The Washington Post last month examined 385 deaths by police gunshot and found 80 per cent of the victims had been armed with lethal weapons. Half were white, half black. Sixteen per cent – or 62 of the dead – were unarmed people, two-thirds of them black or Hispanics.
Blacks make up only 13 per cent of the US population.
Nearly a year since the police killings of two unarmed black males – Eric Garner in New York City in July, and teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August – questions about excessive use of force by police and racial bias have provoked not only angry riots over Brown’s and other killings but also soul-searching in the police community.
“Sometimes it seems like our young officers want to get into an athletic event with people they want to arrest,” said Dallas, Texas, police chief David Brown, an African-American, at a recent symposium of police chiefs organised by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF).
‘Don’t retreat’ mentality
“They have a ‘don’t retreat’ mentality. They feel like they’re warriors, and they can’t back down when someone is running from them, no matter how minor the underlying crime is,” he said.
Over decades, the US Supreme Court has reduced police authority.
Police must now inform suspects of their right to an attorney before questioning, and may not use deadly force in a chase unless the suspect threatens “death or serious physical injury to the officer or others”.
These days, bystanders with cell phone cameras, the post-9/11expansion of security cameras and social media have created a new round of scrutiny on how police behave.
Last year in Canada, which also grapples with the issue, 22 cameras filmed the actions of a Toronto police officer as he used three shots to down a mentally disturbed, knife-wielding Syrian man – then fired another six shots into the prone body.
Police advocates worry that the high profile films, protests and riots after the killing of Brown, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Garner and others have demonised police and threatened their lives.
Police being targeted
At least 54 officers have died in the course of duty this year so far, and at least five are believed to have been targeted killings.
Eugene O’Donnell, an ex-New York police officer and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, condemned the “great smearing” of police in his tribute to a New York officer recently felled by assault.
“Cops today find themselves challenged during routine calls, cameras thrust in their faces, accused of discriminatory treatment by many,” he wrote.
But others in the police community are equally worried about the killings of suspects, and are calling for changes in the way police are prepared for duty.
“Yes, they might be shooting too many people, but that’s a training issue more than a race issue ... We blame cops for things that aren’t their fault – society’s racism, or how they are trained,” says Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer who teaches at the local John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
In fact, three of the six Baltimore police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray in April are black, challenging the notion that excessive force is just a white-on-black issue.
Experts say training needs to include preparation for how to disengage, de-escalate and step back, police chiefs and advocates say. Training needs to give permission to back off when circumstances allow, said Cassandra Deck-Brown, police chief in Raleigh, North Carolina and an African-American, at the PERF symposium.
The concept of community policing has pushed more police back to walking the beat, getting to know the people they are charged with protecting. For Moskos and others, the push has largely succeeded and cops are using less force now than they did 20 and 30 years ago, even if it seems otherwise in social media.
Nonetheless, police officers – whether black or white – tend to be conservative, and the people who are doing the firearms training “are often the most militaristic and conservative” of police trainers, Moskos said.
“It’s the mentality side of those conservative trainers that then gets passed down to cops, and that’s not necessarily good,” he said.
“The public is rightfully upset.”
