Go to qualitypolicing.com

Tag: police shootings

  • Courage, not fear

    I still can’t believe this guy got shot down by a cop playing whack-a-mole with his service weapon. The D.A. said:

    The evidence in this case shows the shooting to be accidental, and possibly negligent, but not criminally so. “This shooting is not justified, but also not criminal.”

    I don’t know if I buy the stutter-step no-double-tap explanation. But at least the legal concept is sound. Something can be wrong and not criminal.

    In fact, the only charges are against the paralyzed victim with the dead wife. [Update: Charges were dropped. He died.] This seems kind of mean. And there are no national politicians weighing in. Just a small local protest. Al Sharpton must be previously engaged. (As is often the case, this unnecessary shooting happened in California.)

    Officer Feaster claims he didn’t know he shot Thomas:

    No, no. … I don’t think I shot him. I wasn’t even pointing at him but the gun did go off.

    “Did go off“? What are you saying? It just blew?

    Let’s leave aside whether Feaster is the world’s best shot or the world’s worst cop. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The question I have, the question any reasonable police officer might have, is why the hell did he draw his gun in the place. What made this cop so afraid that he felt the need to approach a crashed presumed drunk driver with his gun drawn and shot the man trying to get out of the wreck? The guy was going to run? What use is your gun in that case? A car just flipped. What exactly was the threat?

    In the same vein, a reasonable police officer wonders, as did Levar Jones complying with orders, why he got shot. Why did cops feel that innocent Jonathan Ayers was a lethal threat while driving away? Why is a man not carrying a gun a lethal threat when he drops his hand?

    Why did all these police officers see non-existent threats? Why were they so damn afraid? (I’m tempted to add “…these days,” but maybe it’s always been this way. I don’t know.)

    In the face of danger you need to act but not overreact. You need courage, not fear. There’s a line I always liked in Birds Without Wings:

    His courage was not the foolish kind of a young and silly man. It was the courage of a man who looks danger in the face, and forces himself not to flinch.

    Hell, a little fear can be a good thing; you don’t want to be blasé in the face of danger. It starts in the police academy. “Stay alert, stay alive!” It’s a good lesson. Even “make a hole” isn’t so bad when it’s put in the context of situational awareness. But too much fear becomes paranoia. And that’s not conducive to good policing (or a happy life).

    Here are some of the videos cops watch in the police academy. Some I saw myself. Others are more recent. They’re all on YouTube (which didn’t even exist when I was a cop). I guarantee you that every last one one of these has been watched in some police academy somewhere. Every cop I know knows 1) Dinkheller.

    And 2) here’s that woman cop getting her ass kicked trying to arrest some big guy. His daughter is there. The cop kind of came back, but never recovered.

    Go on. Watch them. Watch them all. It won’t take but 10 or 15 minutes. I’ve cued them all up to the key moment. It’s a parade of snuff films (though many of the cops do live, somehow). Can you watch all of these and not perceive threats and car stops a bit differently?

    3) Here’s a man who wouldn’t stay in his car.

    4) Here’s a routine traffic stop.

    5) Here’s another routine traffic stop.

    6) And other routine car stop.

    7) This was a routine car stop but the guy drove away.

    8) Here’s a guy in cuffs and a girl. What could possible go wrong?

    9) Three cops. One suspect. Everything under control?

    10) This guy isn’t wearing a shirt and doesn’t seem hostile.

    11) This guy is naked and unarmed. There are three cops, two of them with tasers. The guy is still a threat.

    12) And sometimes this happens. Things can go from 0 to 100 really quickly.

    13) This guy does a little jig. He must be just be an odd character.

    14) And everything seems OK here. Except for that shot cop.

    15) This is what happens when you don’t put suspects on the ground.

    16) We all know that when it comes to an armed man, it’s easier to act than react.

    17) And people who have done time can be especially dangerous.

    18) Out-of-shape fathers with their 16-year-old sons? Could always be cop killers.

    And to cops these aren’t just abstract videos. There are people I know, friends, some taught in the academy, who were shot and lucky to live. Others, the pictures on the walls, weren’t so lucky.

    Certainly cops need some of this. Some people are willing, even eager, to kill police. You can’t go on the job as a pacifist. But at some point fear isn’t healthy. It isn’t good for the job. It can even make the job less safe.

    And I worked in a dangerous post. It made me less afraid. You face danger a few times, and you learn to respect it. Cops in the Eastern don’t squeal every time somebody steps on a leaf. But you don’t shoot at everything that moves.

    But what if your work in some place without much danger? How do you stay awake, much less alert? (In my squad we could be alert and asleep!) And then, during some “routine” traffic stop or domestic — blam — something goes off script. Maybe you, the young cop who took the warrior mindset to heart, get a flashback to one of those videos in the academy where the cop got ambushed. And you think: “This is exactly how that cop got killed.”

    [Cue trippy flashback music and echo]

    “This officer hesitated [tated] and it cost him his life [life, ife, f…]”

    “Better to be judged by 12 [elve] than carried by six [six, ix, x…].”

    So you misidentify a threat, overact, and pull the trigger. You’ve screwed up because you’ve gone through life in a constant state of “Condition Yellow” because you didn’t want to slip into unaware “Condition White” in which:

    You may very well die — unless you are lucky. I prefer to not depend on luck.

    …

    Some insist you cannot go through life using this system without becoming a hair-trigger paranoid person who is dangerous to ones self and others. I believe well-adjusted police officers can run through the color code dozens of times every day and be no worse for wear. Most experienced police officers who learn the color code realize they have been taking these steps on their own all along.

    Maybe. For some. For me even. (This is why cops don’t sit with their back toward the door.) But even if constant hypervigilance doesn’t make you paranoid, it is very tiring. Exhausting, even. I don’t miss it. And stress affects some people more than others. NYPD officers are much more likely to commit suicide with their service weapon than be killed by a criminal. Why?

    I don’t know the answer. I don’t like the “warrior” or “guardian” dichotomy. I would certainly put the emphasis on the latter, but you need a bit of both. You can’t let the warrior mindset take your soul.

    Seth Stoughton writes in the Harvard Law Review:

    Officers learn to be afraid. That isn’t the word used in law enforcement circles, of course. Vigilant, attentive, cautious, alert, or observant are the terms that appear most often in police publications. But make no mistake, officers don’t learn to be vigilant, attentive, cautious, alert, and observant just because it’s fun. They do so because they are afraid. Fear is ubiquitous in law enforcement.

    And to those who say police need to abandon this warrior mindset for guardian mindset. Well, they’ve got an answer for that, too. And it’s not crazy. What do you do when it’s time to fight?

    At some basic level policing does involve confronting and fighting criminals intent on hurting you or others. I always notice that when people talk about police reform or improving community relations, the word “criminal” will never come up. It’s as if the entire job of policing is nothing more than dancing with kids and smiling at church-going ladies in fancy hats.

    See, just as the public needs to have a more realistic perspective about the “epidemic” of police killing innocent people (happens, but not too much), police need to get a realistic grip about being shot on the job (happens, including to friends of mine, but still less than cops think). Nationwide police get shot and killed about 3 times every month. That’s an annual homicide rate (cops getting killed per 100,000 officers) of under 5, which just happens to be almost identical to the national homicide rate. Of course keep in mind cops are on-duty only a fraction of the time, so cops on the job have a homicide rate 5 times higher than the national average. But hell, it’s still safer to be a cop than to live in Baltimore.

    Stay alert. Stay alive. But for God’s sake stop being so damn afraid all the time.

    [In memory of the police officers killed in the above videos: Kyle Wayne Dinkheller, Jonathan Richard Schmidt, Edward Scott Richardson, Billy Colón-Crespo, Ramón Manuel Ramirez-Castro, Darrell Edward Lunsford, Sr., Thomas William Evans, and Robert Brandon Paudert. They gave their all.]

  • Officer Down

    NYPD Housing Cop Randolph Holder was shot and killed a few hours ago around 120th and FDR Drive. This is about a mile from my house (but a world away in East Harlem). Rest in Peace.

    Update: Apparently the killer was also a “non-violent drug offender.” From the Times:

    Last fall, the man suspected in the shooting, Tyrone Howard, was arrested along with 18 other members of a drug crew that had spread violence through a stretch of public housing along the East River and was ordered into a drug diversion program, which is meant to keep some drug offenders from further crowding already overcrowded jails.

    In May, he stopped taking part in the program, the officials said.

    “If ever there’s a candidate not to be diverted it would be this guy,” Mr. Bratton said. “He’s a poster boy for not being diverted.”

    The police said Mr. Howard was believed to have been involved in the shooting of a 28-year-old man on Sept. 1 in East Harlem.

  • It’s more dangerous to be black than to be a cop

    I heard this somewhere recently and it made me go, really? So I thought I would double check.

    Indeed, one is more at risk to be murdered as a black person in America than as a police officer.

    For 2013 and 2014 I get an average of about 80 officers killed on duty per year (this excludes correctional officers, traffic accidents, a few other categories.) That’s a rate of 9.0 per 100,000 (based on 885,000 officers).

    Meanwhile the homicide for blacks in 2013, men and women, is 15 per 100,000. (Based on a black population of 41.7 million and 6,261 homicides in 2013.) That’s crazy. Blacks are three or four times more likely to be shot and killed as on-duty police officers.

    [Now of course one could quibble that cops are only on duty 1/6 of the time and a good chunk of cops never see the street. Meanwhile being black is a 24/7 job. So hour by hour it might be more dangerous to be a cop. But stop quibbling. Even with a flawed comparison, sometimes you just need a stat just to smack you on the side of the head.]

  • Headline you won’t see:

    Police officer line-of-duty deaths are down 15 percent this year. Gunfire deaths are down 38 percent.

    Odd, because a lot of reporters were calling me last year when the number were up.

    “Is it Ferguson?!” “Is it Obama?!” “Are criminals less brazen?!” “Has training gotten better?!” “Are criminals worse shots?!”

    [Silence of me staring at non-ringing phone]

    That said, I thought I had a rather nice discussion on the Larry Mantel show the other day. Talking about the potential trade off between less incarceration and more crime.

    [Near silence of me picking up old-fashioned phone to see if the dial tone is working. It is.]

    For the record, just like I said last year, I don’t think it’s a big deal.

  • Dan Aykroyd continues to “embrace the police”

    Dan Aykroyd is making a donation to the children of slain Philadelphia Police Officer Robert Wilson III. Wilson was killed by two robbers last Thursday. Seems Wilson just happened to be in a store, in uniform, when armed robbers decided hold the place up:

    Officer Wilson stopped by the GameStop store to purchase a video game for his son as a gift for doing well in school. His 8-year-old son’s birthday is on Monday. He also leaves behind a wife and a 1-year-old son.

    It’s a nice gesture from Aykroyd, who has always supported police.

  • RIP Officer Rafael Ramos

    RIP Officer Rafael Ramos

    NYPD Officer Ramos was just buried. Here is Commissioner Bratton’s

    eulogy.

    In honor of Officer Ramos, I’m reprinting some of what I’ve written about police funerals in Baltimore. I went to too many of them:

    Twenty months in Baltimore wasn’t very long, but it was long enough to see five police officers killed in the line of duty. And there were other cops, friends of mine, who were hurt, shot, and lucky to live. A year after I quit the force, my friend and academy classmate became the first Baltimore policewoman killed in the line of duty, dying in a car crash on the way to back up another police officer.

    Crystal Sheffield patrolled opposite me in the Western District. Occasionally I would switch my radio over to the Western District channel to see what she was up to. When she died, I returned to Baltimore, hitched a ride in a police car from the train station to the funeral, and stood in the cold rain at attention in my civilian clothes with my uniformed fellow officers. Police funerals are one of the few events that bring together law enforcement personnel. Funerals give meaning to that often clichéd concept of Blue Brotherhood. At an officer’s funeral, police-car lights flash as far as the eye can see. Thousands of police officers wearing white gloves and black bands on their badges stand at attention. Guns are fired in salute. Bagpipes are played. A flag is folded. The coffin is lowered into the ground.

    At the end of a Baltimore police funeral, a dispatcher from headquarters calls for the fallen officer over all radio channels. The response, of course, is silence. After the third attempt the dispatcher states the officer is “10- 7.” Ten-seven is the rather unsentimental radio code for “out of service.” Ten-seven usually refers to a car, an officer handling a call, or an anonymous murder victim on the street. To hear your friend and colleague described as 10-7 is heartbreaking. In this way the few officers left working the streets know the burial is complete.

    A few seconds later a routine drug call is dispatched or one bold officer reclaims the radio airwaves for some mundane police matter. A car stop. A warrant check. A request for a case number. The show goes on. Sometimes it just don’t make sense.

  • Thinking beyond “the Thin Blue Line”

    Read my whole piece at CNN:

    Most citizens can be forgiven for going through their day without thinking of anarchy or barbarians storming the gates. But many police, especially in New York City, see themselves as a thin blue line besieged by both a liberal and criminal world, neither of which they particularly like or understand. Large protests, especially when they’re anti-police, solidify this belief because police see firsthand just how thin their blue line actually is.

    Police know they are outnumbered and sometimes outgunned, even while presenting a front of dominance and control.

  • Two Officers Down

    Shot and killed. Ambushed in their car in Brooklyn. Earlier the killer shot his ex-girlfriend in Baltimore.

  • Baltimore Officer Down

    From the Baltimore Sun:

    Groman and another officer approached the car from the driver’s side
    and another officer approached from the passenger’s side, police say in
    charging documents. Officers directed the driver, Tavon Sullivan, to get
    out of the car, police say, and he sat on the sidewalk.

    Police say Jones, sitting in the back seat, refused Groman’s orders to exit.
    Groman told Jones to show his hands, which were in his jacket pocket and
    waistband, according to Maj. Stanley Branford, commander of the
    Homicide division, but Jones did not.

    Police say Groman told Jones
    he would be tased if he didn’t comply. Groman pulled out his Taser just
    as Jones pulled out a black Rossi .357-caliber revolver, police say in
    charging documents.

    Detectives said Monday they do not know who fired first. No officers fired a gun, police said.
    After Groman was struck, police said, Jones ran out of the car and was chased by two officers.

    Police say Jones ran into a backyard and was scaling a fence when an officer
    hit him with his Taser, allowing police to arrest him.
    …

    “We’ve had marches nationwide over the fact that we have lost lives in
    police custody,” [Commissioner] Batts said. “I wonder if we’ll have those same marches
    as officers are shot, too.”

    It’s worth noting that 1) Yes, cops get shot at even in situation where the shooter has no realistic chance of getting away with it. 2) No officer fired a shot. And this includes even after the suspect shot an officer and was trying to run away. I mention this because if cops really were out there to murder black people, this would have been a fine chance to get away with a freebie. But that’s not the way police officers think. 3) Had the officer drawn his gun instead of a the less-lethal Taser, well, who knows what would have happened? But the Taser didn’t help keep Groman from being shot. 4) Had the officer drawn his gun, no doubt some people would be complaining about an officer drawing his gun for no good reason.

    Officer Groman is expected to “recover.” But as I’ve said before, you don’t ever completely recover from something like this. My thoughts are with him

  • Police killing whites and blacks

    A lot of people really believe that cops are out there gunning for blacks. People who know more about police officers find this absurd. Of course black lives do indeed matter. But other things being equal (like committing a violent crime), are cops more likely to shoot and kill blacks because they are black? That’s an empirical question worth trying to answer. And recent event and protests not withstanding, based on the data we have, the answer seems to be no.

    This is not to say there isn’t a problem with some police use of lethal (and less-lethal) force. But if you want to improve policing, you’re barking up the wrong tree if your only solution is to make cops less racist. I’ve said it before:

    Sure, race matters, but if you want to improve policing, you need to move past the idea that police only do bad things to black people. This isn’t a black and white issue. It’s a police issue.

    Here is what we know: taking population into account, if one looks at black and white men of all ages killed by police (based on very shoddy data, mind you) blacks are four times more likely than whites to be killed by police.That doesn’t sound good. But since we know police-involved homicides correlate with homicide and violence among individuals policed, what rate of racial disparity would one expect to find in police-involved homicides? Certainly not 1 to 1.

    Somebody on facebook (and no, I won’t be your “friend”) just asked me a rather basic question: “What is the racial breakdown of those who kill police?” Fair question. And you would think I would have known the answer. But I didn’t. I would assume there would be a pretty tight correlation between the race of those feloniously killing cops and the race of those shot and killed by police. Violence begets violence.

    At least one would expect that correlation if one thinks, as I do, that cops are not out there gunning for blacks. So I found that we actually do have some decent data about those who kill cops (but not so much the other way around). Based on FBI data of cop killers 289 cop killers have been white and 243 black. (If one really is looked for a group to scapegoat, 98 percent of cop killers are men.)

    [This is UCR data from 2004 to 2013. And data is those who kill cops is pretty complete. During these past 10 years, according to Officer Down, a very reliable source, there have been 520 cops shot and killed, 14 stabbed to death, and 82 killed by a vehicle (not all of the latter feloniously).]

    Adjusting for population, black men, overall, are 5 times more likely than white men to kill police officers. But to put a less ominous-sounding way, the odds that any given black man will kill a cop this year is 0.000012 percent. For white men it is 0.0000024 percent. And for women it is basically zero.

    If one takes rates of violence into account, police are not more likely to shoot and kill blacks than they are whites. Given the racial disparity found in violent crime rates (for homicide it’s 6:1, black to white) and the racial disparity among those who kill police officers (5:1, black to white), the disproportionate rate of blacks killed by police (4:1, black to white) (Ed Note: 3:1, based on 2016 Washington Post data, is a more accurate figure) seems, well, less than I would actually expect.

    If you find this difficult to believe, consider some possible reasons:

    1) Big-city police departments (cities are disproportionately minority) might be better trained and less trigger-happy.

    2) Cops in more violent neighborhoods (disproportionately minority, like where I policed in Baltimore) are less likely to over-react to real and perceived threats than are cops in less violent neighborhoods. (Even though these shootings tent to get all the press.)

    3) Police might indeed improve and become less likely to be involved in shootings, both good and bad, in response to a public outcry — and the public simply does not cry out when whites are killed by police.

    The idea that police don’t use lethal force in a racist way might be a tough pill for many to swallow. But keep in mind that the fact remains that blacks are indeed four times more likely than whites to be killed by police! Even if the cause isn’t racist cops, something is seriously wrong. So what is the solution? As I’ve said before:

    If one wishes — as one should — to reduce the racial disparity of police-involved shootings, one needs to focus on racial disparities in crime and violence in general. If one wishes — as one should — to reduce the incidences of unjustified police shootings and improper police use-of-force, one needs to improve police training and reduce police militarization.

    It’s also worth mentioning, unrelated to race, the average age of your average killer of cops is 30, which is higher than I would expect. And in case you were wondering why cops want to keep everybody in jail? Well among cop killers, 82 percent (n=565) have been previously arrested (and 63 percent convicted) of a previous crime. Twenty of those who killed police officers (3.5 percent of the total) had a previous conviction for murder. And then they got out and kept killing.

    [see follow up]