This is important to introduce into the discussion. I have felt that in the vast majority of controversial police shootings, especially in the mistaken identity cases, they were likely the result of a hair-trigger reflex and being on high alert, with your conditioning telling you that if an adversary either gets the jump on you or even gets into a strategically advantageous position, today is the day that you are going home in a body bag.
Part of the training also drills in the fact that an untrained opponent with a sharp object like a knife is at a strategic advantage versus someone with a holstered firearm if they are closer than 21 feet away. Failure to maintain strategic dominance is a potentially fatal mistake.
Nobody is interested in empathizing with the mental state of the cop in these situations, and if you try to do so, you’ll be shouted down for not empathizing with the family and friends of the deceased. This is not only a false dichotomy, but it precludes you from arriving at possible solutions. The goal of this exercise is not to feel sorrow for the officer, but to discover the root cause of this pattern. Only after doing so can you expect to find solutions, and ultimately, save lives.
It is not acceptable to have a non-zero casualty rate, and what most people fail to understand is that the average human, even with training and experience (and often, experience is actually a liability, not an asset - people with PTSD are further compromised) cannot accurately assess and process a potential threat 100% of the time. This is the simple explanation for why these incidents seem to happen so frequently. Yet the general public thinks that police are somehow different from the average human, and that their brains do not work like their own. Or perhaps more accurately, they don’t understand how their own brain works, so in their mental re-enactment of the scenario, they make the correct decisions, and conclude that the only remaining explanation is hate, racism, or some other evil that only police seem to have.
If anyone wants to get a glimpse into what this environment does to a person, next time you go for dinner with a veteran, take note of where they sit at the table. More often than not, they will prefer to select a position that does not leave their back exposed to an entrance. Even in a harmless restaurant, their brain is instinctively on high alert for potential threats. That’s also why many of them cannot sleep.
IMHO, the way to prevent these errors is to prevent the number of opportunities to make a fatal mistake.
None of this is to suggest a complete lack of malice in all cases - but most of the time, people are people, and they will continue to do what people do, uniform or not.
"Fittingly, the most chilling scene in the movie doesn’t take place on a city street, or at a protest, or during a drug raid. It takes place in a conference room. It’s from a police training conference with Dave Grossman, one of the most prolific police trainers in the country. Grossman’s classes teach officers to be less hesitant to use lethal force, urge them to be willing to do it more quickly and teach them how to adopt the mentality of a warrior. ... In the class recorded for “Do Not Resist,” Grossman at one point tells his students that the sex they have after they kill another human being will be the best sex of their lives. The room chuckles. But he’s clearly serious. “Both partners are very invested in some very intense sex,” he says. “There’s not a whole lot of perks that come with this job. You find one, relax and enjoy it.”"
1. You do what you train to do.
2. What you look for in the world is what you will find.
Cops are not soldiers. They are not fighting a war. Look to any other western nation. America may be a little more violent, a little less stable, but the cop-citizen relationship isn't fundamentally different than in any number of other nations. There is no need for US cops to take that attitude. There is no reason for them to be killing as many people as they do.
A thousand people a year are killed by US cops. Canada, with 10% of the population, sees maybe 25 in a bad year.
Your perspective is skewed, and the example is arguably irrelevant. It’s not difficult to find examples where the situation is far worse than the US.
There is no reason for them to be killing as many people as they do.
Yes, there is absolutely a reason. There is a reason for everything. If you want to fix it, you need to set your emotions aside and get to the root cause of that reason. If you continue to deny that there is a reason, you can expect the same tragic result.
Homicide is the leading cause of death among non-Hispanic black males under 44 (taken in total, it’s not) [0]. In the same year as the CDC statistics above, 223 black men were killed by police [1].
It’s tragic, but many orders of magnitude away from your claim.
It’s not the quantity that makes it horrible, tragic, and infuriating. It is all those things because it’s evidence of a larger systemic issue which includes lots of other awful things that fall short of homocide; and it’s largely unnecessary.
Thanks, I misread the source and didn't think about it.
You're right the quantity isn't specifically important but it does illustrate that there is a problem. Even if it is not the #1 cause of death it is disproportionately higher.
Apologies, I misread [1] and didn't apply the sniff test. It's the sixth leading cause of death, not the first. And it's 2.5x the rate of whites.
Regarding your second claim, I can't find those numbers. The closest thing I can find is this newsweek piece [2] with data from 2013 and 2014. That suggests most people who kill police are white. But it also includes prison guards as police.
So why is the United States police unique amongst all other developed countries for its kill rate then?
> Part of the training also drills in the fact that an untrained opponent with a sharp object like a knife is at a strategic advantage versus someone with a holstered firearm if they are closer than 21 feet away.
And yet I've seen police officers here in Europe deal with people with knives without ever pulling a gun. Why can we do this and you can't?
The idea that a man with a knife 20 feet away from a man with a gun has the advantage! - it just seems like a justification for the incompetent policing that the US is notorious for all over the world.
The knife vs gun scenario is not disputed. The police didn’t make that up. It’s broadly accepted by combat experts. Self defense classes, firearms classes, and knife combat classes will tell you the same thing, and it’s easy to demonstrate.
Being a cop is exceedingly safer than many professions where we don't bend the standard of protecting human life like we do for cops. About the same amount of lumberjacks die in the US during work as police. About the same number of toddlers kill themselves with guns every year as police die in the line of duty.
Part of the duty of a police officer is to put themselves in higher-danger situations than other citizens in order to protect and serve the public, up to and including taking physical harm or death (in fact half of police fatalities every year are in car accidents on duty).
If you train to be a hair trigger, protect-yourself-at-all-costs cop, that's how you will behave.
> It is not acceptable to have a non-zero casualty rate
Systems have both false positives and false negatives. A system with no false positives but many false negatives can be worse than a system with few false negatives and few false positives.
If a false positive in threat identification means killing an innocent person, and a false negative means getting killed because you failed to identify and mitigate a threat, it sounds like you are saying that we must accept that an innocent person will be treated like a threat some percentage of the time in order for a police officer to have any hope of surviving the job. Is that accurate?
Edit: I am not criticizing the statement or trying to put words in your mouth, I am just making sure I understood correctly. Because you may very well be suggesting a reality that most are unable to accept. I suspect if you say yes, you’ll be downvoted. But if I have that wrong, please do correct me.
The point is that the two are coupled. It is not clear why 0 false negatives is the aim. In almost all hard problems, you cannot have 0 false positives and 0 false negatives.
Normally, getting to 0 false negatives requires a large number of false positives. E.g. if I wanted a 0 false negative pregnancy test, the only feasible way would be to tell some very large proportion (maybe all) test takers they are pregnant.
If it requires 20 innocent people to be killed in order to achieve say a goal of 1 police officer failing to identify a threat, who says that is the right balance?
You want to take emotions out of it, I say the life officer of a police officer is no more important than an innocent person, and given a police officer has a) control of which situations they enter and b) presumably accepts some level of risk from the job the choose and c)
Killings by police are an externality that the police system is not incentivised to fix in a meaningful way , they should bear the burden of systemic risk from those interactions. Accepting no less than 1 innocent death for 1 police death seems like the rational baseline, and I think there are compelling points to suggest it should be less than one innocent death to police death.
I want to disengage from the false positives/negatives discussion, it’s too abstract to be relevant, and demonstrably false anyway. There exists a system with 0% false positives.
I find point (a) interesting. You posit that they have control over which situations they enter. But one of the major criticisms I hear, after abuse of force, is that “the police didn’t do anything”. It would seem that these are incompatible. They can choose, but we expect them not to. We expect them to put themselves in harms way for us. As a society, we do value civilian lives the same as police lives. In fact, we value civilian lives far more. By and large, so do they. If they did not, they would not ever put themselves in a position where they might be killed. But, we expect them to do just that. If there is a heavily armed lunatic inside his house threatening to kill his wife and kids, we get out of dodge and tell the police to deal with it. I sure as hell am not going near that.
Just look at the outrage and protests every time an innocent man is killed. When is the last time anyone rioted, protested, or even remembered when an innocent police officer was killed? Never going to happen. By and large, we don’t give much of a shit about their lives. Most of us don’t even seem to consider them human. They know that, yet they do the job anyway.
Do you know how many police have been killed so far during the riots? One of them was just gunned down in cold blood in Oakland while guarding a federal building. He wasn’t doing any crowd control or engaged with protesters. A white van drove past, stopped, opened the sliding door, gunned him and his partner down, and drove off.
Another police chief was found dead outside of a looted pawn shop last night.
> But one of the major criticisms I hear, after abuse of force, is that “the police didn’t do anything”. It would seem that these are incompatible. They can choose, but we expect them not to.
I can't parse what you're trying to say here, which prevented me from responding to the main body of your post, unfortunately.
> Nobody is ever going to protest this.
What would you suggest we protest? There are many dangerous professions. Law enforcement isn't even the most dangerous. They're not even in the top 10. Should we protest car accidents that lead to the death of professional truck drivers?
"Police" is an institution. It has norms and is governed by rules. Police officers are meant to protect and serve society. When they fail to do that, that should be protested. I don't see the value in protesting the fact that law enforcement careers carry risks. Yes, it's true that there are bad people in the world. That doesn't give law enforcement carte blanche to abuse their power, nor absolve individuals or institutions from protest of abuse of that power.
(There's also a relatively snarky response here: Yes, it's regrettable that these officers died in the line of duty. We should dismantle the US police institution in its entirety, which would solve both the concerns of BLM protestors and largely address your concern. While I don't share that view, I do know many people who do.)
> When is the last time anyone rioted, protested, or even remembered when an innocent police officer was killed?
When I lived in the United States, on the very rare occasion that a police officer was killed, our community would memorialize him.
But the fact is that police officers kill others at at least _twenty times_ the rate that police officers get killed by non-police officers.
More, if someone kills a police officer, they are almost always caught, and then gets decades in jail. When a police officer kills someone else, nothing happens to them, even when the police officer.
I lived for thirty years in the United States, and I saw the most terrible behavior from police officers - not just brutality, but gross incompetence and corruption (as in "bundles of cash being handed to cops").
Now I live in Europe, and police here are competent and friendly (and also very effective at dealing with violent drunks, I actually laughed to see someone just lifted up from behind by two cops struggling away in midair, hurting no one, not even himself). It's like night and day.
> Another police chief was found dead outside of a looted pawn shop last night.
I wasn't able to find even _one_ police chief who was found dead.
I did find a story about a retired police captain who was found dead, but no one else.
I'm suggesting that optimizing for officer safety at all other costs may result in more overall death (/injury) than if more emphasis were put on civilian safety as well. I very much don't have any particular data to back that assertion up in this case, but often such things are true.
anecdotally, my family is full of vets and no one cares where they sit at any table, in any room. not sure that is very true, unless they were active combat and might have some PTSD.
I think this is touching on a key point about militarization of the police. I'm a non US veteran who went to Afghanistan.
The police in the U.S. seem to think like they are in the military , in their training and tactics. One big problem is the U.S. military is not exactly well regarded for is nuanced handling of conflict.
I once spoke to a marine who was involved in the invasion of Bagdad who describe their rules of engagement as "shoot any man woman or child holding a spade, a mobile phone, any kind of parcel or anything that might be a wire". These ROE are almost certainly a war crime, but the US is special so it gets away with it.
Now in the military you have a bunch of guys who actually have to deal with very dangerous, fluid situations that have a high likelihood of death. They mostly operate in areas where you have little room for anything other than binary control (obey or get shot). Whatever the details of the culture that was set down by the high ups before the Iraq invasion, I can somewhat get onboard. Casualties in a war zone are logistically hard, getting effective treatment often means at least some part of running them on a stretcher, potentially strapping them to the back of a vehicle and driving for an hour. If you aren't conservative in how you instruct people to respond, the effect can be highly non linear. One casualty take a 3 others out the fight, meaning casualties become more likely etc.
How police respond simply should not be modelled on the military. I entirely disagree with the idea that they are constantly primed to consider themselves one stop away from a body bag.
They almost certainly interact with more innocent members of the public than criminals. They are in largely stable situations. They may deal with bad people, but they do so in places that have good access to support, they will get timely care if something happens to them, and they almost certainly are well backed up if the situation gets out of hand.
My opinion is that the police basically suffer from a kind of dunning Kruger effect. Most would be woefully unprepared to handle an actual combat situation. You just have to compare the countless videos of about a dozen cops all unloading at the same car like the first to finish gets a prize.
Being a good solider is about maintaining discipline and composure under pressure. Most unit tactics involve some variant of your unit shooting over your head or off to your side whilst some of you push some kind of flanking manoeuvre. Our military even dropped the shoot from the hip on contact SOP because of the risk of friendly fire.
The police do not have anywhere near the same level of conditioning to operating under pressure from their training as any competent army gives it's soldiers. If they want to act like the military that's fine, but they should go through similar training before they do.
Part of the training also drills in the fact that an untrained opponent with a sharp object like a knife is at a strategic advantage versus someone with a holstered firearm if they are closer than 21 feet away. Failure to maintain strategic dominance is a potentially fatal mistake.
Nobody is interested in empathizing with the mental state of the cop in these situations, and if you try to do so, you’ll be shouted down for not empathizing with the family and friends of the deceased. This is not only a false dichotomy, but it precludes you from arriving at possible solutions. The goal of this exercise is not to feel sorrow for the officer, but to discover the root cause of this pattern. Only after doing so can you expect to find solutions, and ultimately, save lives.
It is not acceptable to have a non-zero casualty rate, and what most people fail to understand is that the average human, even with training and experience (and often, experience is actually a liability, not an asset - people with PTSD are further compromised) cannot accurately assess and process a potential threat 100% of the time. This is the simple explanation for why these incidents seem to happen so frequently. Yet the general public thinks that police are somehow different from the average human, and that their brains do not work like their own. Or perhaps more accurately, they don’t understand how their own brain works, so in their mental re-enactment of the scenario, they make the correct decisions, and conclude that the only remaining explanation is hate, racism, or some other evil that only police seem to have.
If anyone wants to get a glimpse into what this environment does to a person, next time you go for dinner with a veteran, take note of where they sit at the table. More often than not, they will prefer to select a position that does not leave their back exposed to an entrance. Even in a harmless restaurant, their brain is instinctively on high alert for potential threats. That’s also why many of them cannot sleep.
IMHO, the way to prevent these errors is to prevent the number of opportunities to make a fatal mistake.
None of this is to suggest a complete lack of malice in all cases - but most of the time, people are people, and they will continue to do what people do, uniform or not.