This incident began when two officers were helping a motorist in a Kroger parking lot. They received a radio call about a shoplifter in the store, and when they spotted Ta’Kiya Young getting into her car, they went over to investigate. She refused to get out of the car, and after a few seconds she started rolling forward toward one of the officers. He shot her once through the windshield, killing her and her unborn daughter.

John and Mike hate everything about this shooting, with Mike going so far as to suggest that officer was “daring the person to pull forward” so that he would have an excuse to shoot somebody. I have to say, it kind of looks like that to me too. The officer rushed past his partner to stand in front of her car. And as soon as she put the car in drive and cut the wheel to the right, he drew his gun and pointed it at her. When she rolled forward, he leaned in over the hood, pointed his gun straight at her face, and pulled the trigger.

The car was moving slowly, and it would have been much easier and safer to sidestep it. It looks like he did something he wanted to do.

Here’s the video and the ASP analysis:

I’ve tried to see this in a way that puts the officer in the best possible light, as a self-defense shooting, but there are some problems. It’s like that classic lethal force training hypothetical where an attacker throws a knife at you: Once he throws the knife, he is disarmed, and no longer a threat. In fact, once the knife leaves his hand, shooting him no longer has any effect on the outcome: The knife is in flight and it may kill you or not, but shooting the knife thrower won’t stop the attack, and stopping the attack is the only justification for shooting.

Similarly, once Young steps on the gas pedal and that 3000 pound car starts moving toward the cop, shooting her won’t stop it. You can see it right there in the video: Even after she’s been shot, her car keeps rolling across the lot for 20 or 30 yards until it hits a brick wall. And watching the second body-cam video in slow motion, it looks like the car contacts the officer’s body before he fires his gun. The impact is over, the shot changes nothing for the officer.

(Conversely, if Young had punched the pedal to the floor, she probably would have taken him out before he could fire at her.)

You may not agree with my analysis — I’m hardly an expert — and I can understand how the officer might not have been able to think it through this way in the moment. Given the way our brains work, we are all living about half a second in the past. On the other hand, John Correia has been accepted as an expert witness on lethal force, and Mike Willever has years of law enforcement experience, and they don’t like anything about this shooting.

Obviously, none of this would have happened if Ta’Kiya Young had cooperated with the cops instead of trying to drive away. But it’s also true that none of this would have happened if the cop hadn’t pulled the boneheaded move of standing in front of her car. There’s no way that’s standard practice in the Blendon Township police department. They may not have a specific rule against standing in front of a car when detaining the driver, but that’s only because they didn’t think any officer would be that stupid.

I mean, what kind of cop stands right in front of a car being driven by a suspected criminal? Maybe the kind of cop who’s hoping for an excuse.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Ta’Kiya Young Shooting Analysis

In my first post in this series, I discussed John Correia’s collection of videos of police-involved shootings. My second post tried to extract some lessons about how to avoid getting shot by the cops. In this post, I’d like to look at some policing issues raised by these videos.

But before I get into that, I should repeat my warning:

Correia describes himself as being pro-police, and his co-host, Mike Willever, is a retired law enforcement officer. They’re not badgelickers — I have seen them call out cops for bad shootings, and they do put a strong emphasis on de-escalation — but they don’t approach these videos with an eye toward changing police policy.

As I wrote earlier, many of these police shootings, even the ones that really piss me off, are actually justified in the moment. That is, at the time the officer pulled the trigger, they had reason to believe it would stop a threat of death or great bodily harm.

But when evaluating police policies, we need to look at how the situation got to the point where the cop pulled the trigger, and we need to do a more complete analysis of social benefits and costs. Someone dying is always a large social cost, which means that if cops kill someone it needs to be offset by a great benefit — such as saving someone else’s life — in order to be considered good policy.

Consider this video of an apparently mentally disturbed woman named Linh Saeteurn running through the streets with a gun. She’s been pointing it at people and has used it to commit some robberies, but she hasn’t actually fired it. As the clip ends, one cop is chasing her, and another cop pulls up, gets out of his car, and immediately shoots her five times in two seconds. The cops keep pointing their guns at her and yelling at her not to touch the gun. A bystander in a car yells at the cops, “You didn’t have to do that!”

From the cops’ point of view, they pretty much did have to do that. With that gun in her hand and a demonstrated willingness to point it at people, Saeteurn presented a threat of death or great bodily harm to everyone in sight. During the analysis portion of the video, John freezes the video just before the officer opens fire, and you can see Saeteurn pointing the gun straight into the camera, and therefore straight at the officer’s chest.

But here’s the thing: That wasn’t a real gun.

And this is where it gets complicated. The officer did what he was trained to do, he followed the rules for using lethal force, and he acted decisively. Correia and his co-host commend him for good shooting, and they are critical of the first cop who chased Saeteurn rather than immediately shooting her to end the threat. Commenters on the video are mocking the bystander.

At no point do Correia, his co-host, or the commenters address the fact that incident was a failure. Saeteurn didn’t have a gun and wasn’t actually hurting anyone. The first cop endangered no one by chasing her instead of shooting her. The second cop, on the other hand, nearly killed this unarmed woman. And by opening fire with bystanders nearby and a building full of windows as a backstop, he was arguably more of a danger to the community than she was. Oh, and the bystander was right after all: The cops didn’t have to shoot her.

Make no mistake, I’m not saying the cops did anything ethically wrong here. Saeteurn started all this, and at the moment the cop started shooting, he had no way to know the gun was a fake. Police had received multiple reports of a woman with a gun, and when they saw her, she had a very realistic looking gun-like object in her hand. For all the cops could tell, she was a threat to the lives of everyone nearby. If I had been that cop, I probably would have shot her too.

And yet…that’s not a very good outcome for an encounter with an unarmed woman. Think of it like a skilled heart surgeon performing a bypass graft: Even if the surgeon does everything right, sometimes the patient dies anyway. That’s not the fault of the surgeon, and they are not morally culpable for the death, but they don’t get to put that operation in the win column.

The shooting of this woman wasn’t a win either. It may have been justified, or at least excusable, but it was definitely not the best possible outcome. I have no idea how the cops could have done better, just as I have no idea how to improve the chances of a successful coronary artery bypass graft, but I do know this: Heart surgeons are trying to get better. And they can do that because they recognize the failures for what they are.

One interesting open question from that last video is why didn’t the first officer open fire? Was he reluctant to fire because he was afraid of the controversy, as Correia surmises? Or did he somehow sense that she wasn’t as dangerous as she seemed? Was there some clue, perhaps at a subliminal level? Did he realize that she hadn’t actually fired the gun and guess there was a reason for that? Was he willing to take on the risk to avoid shooting her?

That possibility is a lot more vividly illustrated in this video from Atlanta where cops respond to a disturbed individual with a gun. Originally called for a domestic disturbance, the cops quickly discover a mentally confused guy named Dearian Bell, and he turns out to have a gun. I knew this wasn’t going to be a typical police shooting when the lead cop’s reaction was to very casually ask “Bro you got your hand on a gun. What’s up?”

The cops go on to treat Bell very nonchalantly, not even drawing their weapons at first, and speaking calmly with him and his wife. He gets out of the car, prompting the cops to draw their guns, but they hold fire. Ultimately, they let him wander around the neighborhood with the gun for 7 or 8 minutes before one of the cops makes the decision to shoot Bell, which proves to be fatal.

By the rules for using lethal force in self-defense, there’s nothing wrong with that shooting. In fact, Correia and Willever are flabbergasted that the officers didn’t shoot him a lot sooner. Correia argues

I think it’s not just the wife who’s at risk here. It’s everyone in the community. Because if this guy does have ammo for that gun — and again then there’s all the other inhabitants of the community and there’s all these officers who have responded to this clearly insane domestic at this point. And listen, I get it. You want to give somebody every possible benefit of the doubt. You don’t want to shoot somebody. We want to use a firearm as a tool of last resort. But I think these officers were at incredible risk of great bodily harm for an incredibly long amount of time.

Correia’s not exactly wrong. The officers did risk their lives by not immediately shooting Bell. But taking risks is part of their job — people who become cops are risk-takers by nature — and perhaps these cops were willing to risk their own lives to avoid having to kill a mentally disturbed man. After all, any one of them who felt Bell was a serious threat could have shot him at any time. His wife didn’t seem the least bit scared of him either. And as for the community, I’m guessing that if you asked them, most of the members of that mostly black community would be alright with the cops taking their time trying to avoid killing a mentally disturbed black man.

Heck, we can leave race out of it entirely: The people of that community were Dearian Bell’s neighbors. If one of your neighbors — a guy you saw regularly, who maybe showed up on Sundays at church with his wife — went a little crazy and started waving a gun around, would you want the police to shoot him immediately? Or would you want the police to do what the cops did here and try to talk him down?

Also, Bell’s wife informed police that he had just stolen it from someone and that it wasn’t loaded. One of the cops can be heard saying that it didn’t have a magazine. That doesn’t rule out a round in the chamber, but combined with the wife’s statement and the fact that Bell never fired a shot, it seems pretty likely the gun was unloaded and harmless.^[1]I have not found news coverage that confirms the state of the gun. It’s entirely possible that these cops were called to a familiar scene with some familiar people and correctly figured out that the guy with the gun was disturbed but harmless, and did not need to be shot instantly.

Willever addresses this and dismiss it harshly:

I don’t care if you’ve been to this house a hundred times. I don’t care if you know these two by first and last name, or their kids are on your soccer team, or how familiar you are with them. A suspect with a gun, in a domestic dispute, does not get this kind of latitude to wander around and make threats and hold a firearm. I don’t care if the wife says the gun’s unloaded. Everything about this is just an absolute trash show.

I understand Willever’s point — imagine the outrage if Bell had shot his wife or an innocent bystander while half a dozen cops just stood around. But it’s a tradeoff, a balancing of risk, and I’m not convinced that an instant kill is the right balance.

There is some precedent. It’s not quite the same, but hostage negotiators let things like this happen all the time. If the cops show up while some guy is robbing a liquor store and he takes the clerk and customers as hostages, the cops will let him wave that gun around as much as he wants, not just for a few minutes but for hour after hour, as long as he isn’t shooting. The thinking is that he’s not actually harming anyone, so there’s no need to rush things and trigger a tragedy. Better to take things calmly, without adding emotional energy, and de-escalate the situation until he surrenders. It works nearly every time, and is much safer for everyone involved than starting a gunfight.^[2]I say “nearly every time” because I assume there have been some failures, but I don’t actually know of any specific examples where hostages got killed during negotiations.

To be sure, there are important differences between the scenario in this video and a hostage situation. In the latter, police typically do not have clear shots at the gunman, and there are hostages at risk if shooting starts. Furthermore, police usually have a solid perimeter around hostage situations to keep the danger contained. Nevertheless, maybe avoiding escalation, even against a drawn gun, is an approach more worthy of consideration.

After all, it kind of worked. For as long as the police held their fire, so did Dearian Bell. No innocent people were harmed. And this shooting took place a few months after the murder of George Floyd, yet there were few protests, perhaps in part because Dearian Bell’s mother told the press that she wasn’t angry at the cop who killed her son. It’s hard to believe police shooting a black man in the late summer of 2020 would have produced such a reaction if they hadn’t held their fire for so long.

Again, I’m not claiming to have all the answers, but it looks like delaying the shooting of Dearian Bell did no harm, and maybe it wasn’t necessary to shoot him at all.

The most frustrating video I’ve seen so far at ASP is this video of two officers responding to a report of a fight at a wedding reception in Winter Park, Florida. They quickly find a guy named Daniel Knight, who is clearly a hothead. He’s outside the venue, being calmed down by his sister. The cops intervene, the situation escalates, Knight punches out one of the cops and turns on the other, who promptly shoots him to death.

There’s no question that Knight was a violent drunk who was mostly responsible for what happened to him. He picked a fight with the cops, and he lost. And yet…cops once again shot and killed an unarmed man.

(Correia says he had a BB gun, but I can’t find corroboration in the sources Correia provides, nor in any news story I found. According to reports, the cop who fired says he had to shoot because Knight had knocked him to the ground and he was afraid of what would happen if Knight knocked him out. He didn’t mention a weapon. And reviewing the video at 1/4 speed, the last thing I see before the officer fires is both of Knight’s empty hands passing in front of the camera.)

I can’t stop thinking about this from the family’s point of view: Their brother had gotten drunk and was getting out of hand, so they removed him from the reception and took him outside where they could calm him down. They were in the process of de-escalating the situation.

And then the cops showed up, giving orders and throwing their weight around like a bunch of total dicks. Knight’s sister tried to protect him, but the cops insisted on separating them, even pulling the sister away. That’s right. When facing a belligerent drunk, these cops got the brilliant idea to manhandle his sister.

I don’t know about you, but if a stranger walked up and started grabbing someone I love, I’m pretty sure I’d want to punch him until he stopped. Of course, I wouldn’t actually punch a cop, because I have impulse control. Daniel Knight had poor impulse control, and that got him killed.

As is so often the case, I can’t really fault the cop for firing when he did. His partner was down, and he was going down, and there were no other cops to help him. If he got knocked out, Knight would have been able to do whatever he wanted to them, and he would have access to both their guns. I probably would have shot too. It was arguably justified in the moment.

However, it seems like officers could have tried harder to avoid being in that moment. Correia and Willever have several suggestions for better ways the cops could have approached this situation. For one thing, they could have brought in more people. With six or eight officers, they would have less to worry about from the crowd, and they probably could have overcome Knight before the situation got bad enough to require a lethal response. Furthermore, the officers made no attempt to de-escalate the situation. They came in heavy and never slowed down.

That’s not to say that Knight was innocent. He brought this on himself. He had a serious criminal history, and he reacted badly to the cops. He was drunk and belligerent. He could have stopped this at any time by cooperating. Trying to fight his way out of this was foolish.

But he was a drunk dude at a wedding, and the cops are professional law enforcement. They should be held to a higher standard, they should have tried to de-escalate, and they shouldn’t be allowed to count this as a win.

Wrapping up, I want to go back to the previous video where the cops waited a few minutes before shooting Dearian Bell. I was struck by one of the things Mike Willever said:

I can’t explain what’s happening here. I don’t recognize this as American law enforcement in any way, shape, or form.

Me neither, really. But maybe somehow it should be.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Watching People Die – Part 3: Policy

In my first post in this series, I introduced John Correia’s collection of videos of police-involved shootings, which I think is an important resource for those of us writing about police reform. It’s also an important source of information for anyone who worries they might get shot by the police.

But before I get into that, I’ll be linking to some of those videos, so I should repeat my warning:

Black parents speak of “the talk,” where they advise their children of the dangers they face when encountering the police. I think that’s an excellent idea. Every parent should teach their children how to make it safely through a police encounter. And when it comes to avoiding the worst-case outcome — getting shot — Correia’s badge-cam reviews are the raw material from which you could build a bunch of lessons.

Note that most of the police videos collected by Correia involve lethal force, because that’s what he studies. This introduces a selection bias: With rare exceptions, he’s not showing us encounters which de-escalated or ended with a peaceful arrest. These are only the violent outcomes.

For the most part, the lethal force rules for the police are the same as the lethal force rules for ordinary citizens like you and me.^[1]The biggest difference is that police officers have the authority to start confrontations by doing things like performing traffic stops, investigating crimes, and or serving warrants, and if those confrontations lead to violent responses, they can use lethal force to protect themselves. If we start a confrontation, however, we could void our right to self defense. Unlike the police, we aren’t generally allowed to start trouble and then shoot our way out of it. Police are allowed — even encouraged — to use lethal force to stop anyone who poses a threat to take a life or cause great bodily harm. That leads us to some practical lessons.

To start with, contrary to popular misconceptions, police are allowed to shoot first. Who shot first isn’t as important as why they shot. Certainly if someone shoots at cops, that constitutes a threat to their lives, and the cops can shoot back. But the surest way to win a gunfight is to shoot the other guy before he shoots you, and police are allowed to win gunfights. They don’t have to give the bad guys a free shot. If they see a threat that endangers them or anyone else, they can use lethal force to stop it.

Similarly, there’s no strict rule against shooting someone in the back. If a cop reasonably believes that someone with their back turned is a lethal threat to anyone present, the cop is allowed to shoot. If a suspect gets into an ongoing gunfight with a cop, the cop isn’t prohibited from shooting just because they happen to turn away for a moment. In fact, shooting when your opponent can’t immediately shoot back is just good tactics. If the suspect is dangerous enough — an armed carjacker, active shooter, or known murderer — cops can even shoot to stop them from escaping to harm others.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about so many of these police encounters is how fast they transition to violence. Officers are talking, waiting, talking, waiting, and BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM! The shooting seems to erupt super-fast and out of nowhere. That’s often because a threat situation changes suddenly. The effect is somewhat exaggerated by the video format, which is usually wide angle and often poor quality, as in this video of a Las Vegas officer gunning down a guy who walks out of a house with a shotgun. In the initial video, I couldn’t see any reason for the officer to shoot, but when they review it later in freeze frame, the shotgun in hand is quite clear.

Even when you can see it coming, as in this video of a chase that ends in a shooting, the transition to lethal force arrives in a jarring burst of gunfire, as cops shoot round after round into someone. One thing you’ll learn from these videos is that getting shot with a pistol round rarely stops or kills someone instantly. Firing only one shot could easily leave an attacker physically able to continue his assault, as in this video of a guy with two knives who keeps chasing down a cop after getting shot. That’s why police are trained to start shooting when they see a threat of death or serious bodily harm, and to keep shooting until the threat goes away. It may seem gratuitous to shoot someone so many times, and sometimes it is, but then again, sometimes the people they shoot get up.

This brings us to the important question of what makes cops think someone is a threat? What would make them start shooting?

Judging by these videos, the single biggest factor that will make cops shoot you is having a weapon in your hand. If cops respond to a call and discover you holding a gun, they might give you the benefit of the doubt — you could be an armed citizen defending yourself, maybe even the person who called for help — provided you do nothing else to make them think you’re dangerous. Unfortunately, this is a complex situation and context matters a lot.

For example, while cops might not be sure of your intent if you’re holding a gun when they discover you, it’s completely different if you grab a gun after the cops arrive, because cops will assume you’re drawing to shoot them. That will for sure make the cops open fire, as seen in this traffic stop from Santa Ana, California. If you have an illegal gun, you may be tempted to throw it away, but if you grab for it, the cops will assume the worst and open fire.^[2]It’s possible that some of the people in these videos who draw on the cops are actually trying to dump their gun, but often there’s no way to know.

Similarly, if you’ve already shot at someone, that lets the cops know exactly what you’re doing with a gun, and they won’t hesitate to stop you from doing it again, as demonstrated by these Cincinnati police officers stopping an active shooter. And of course that goes double if you’re actually shooting at the cops, as in this video of a traffic stop in South Carolina that turns very violent very quickly.

On the other hand, sometimes you just turn up with a gun and the cops will shoot you dead, as in this controversial shooting in Arizona. The guy with the gun was advancing on an officer, which likely made the other officer open fire.

How you’re moving is even more of a deciding factor when you have a knife. It might seem that the range of a knife is limited to the reach of your arms, but that’s the wrong way to think about it. The true range of a knife is controlled by how far you can run before somebody can stop you. Studies show that a defender with a gun probably can’t avoid being stabbed if a knife-wielding assailant starts their attack from closer than about 21 feet. To illustrate, here’s video of a disturbed man charging a cop who has already drawn his gun and nearly succeeding in stabbing him before getting shot. Police are taught this “21-foot rule,” so if you have a knife, and you behave in a threating manner, and you are within 21 feet of anyone at the scene, cops will shoot you.

(If you find yourself a bystander at a scene like this, for God’s sake run away from the guy with the knife. If you stay in place and let him get close enough to attack you, you will be forcing the cops to shoot to protect you. That’s probably not something you want.)

If you’re the one who gets shot by cops for having a gun, note that falling to the ground in a hail of gunfire is not enough to end the incident. If you still have the gun in your hand, you can still shoot people, so the cops will keep shooting at you on the ground, as seen in this video of a warrant service team exchanging fire with a guy with an automatic weapon. On the other hand, once a knife-wielder falls to the ground he no longer presents a threat and cops should stop shooting.

That said, it’s important to remember that we live our lives slightly behind real time. It takes a fraction of a second to understand what we’re seeing, a fraction of a second to reach a decision, and a fraction of a second to start moving. Even when police have their guns drawn and pointed in the direction of a suspect and are ready for action, it could take 0.5 to 0.8 seconds from the time they see a threat until they start shooting. And when the threat is over, it takes another 0.5 to 0.8 seconds to stop shooting. So it’s almost certain that the last few shots will be fired at someone who is no longer a threat. They will have dropped their weapon or turned away or fallen to the ground, and police will shoot them a couple more times. That’s an unfortunate limit of human performance.

That’s not the only limit. Police have, on numerous occasions, shot people they mistakenly thought had a gun. Here’s an especially egregious case where the police threw a tiny surveillance robot into a guy’s home and then shot him multiple times when walked out, hands raised, but holding their robot in his right hand.^[3]As far as I know, the cops have not clarified whether they mistook the robot for a gun, although it seems the most likely explanation. So if you find yourself facing lots of excited cops, drop anything in your hands.

And don’t reach for anything. I can’t find ASP video on the subject, but there’s a history of cops shooting people who reach for their waistband, because that’s a good place to keep a weapon. There’s also a history of cops shooting people for reaching around in their car or reaching for their wallet. So if you really must reach for something, such as your drivers’ license and registration because the cop asked for them, tell the cop what you’re about to do so he doesn’t freak out.^[4]Yes, people have been shot for reaching for their wallet after the cop asks for ID.

It’s important to understand that I have not been discussing the behavior of bad cops. I’ve been discussing the more-or-less normal rules of engagement for the police.^[5]I am neither a lawyer nor an expert on police use of force policies, and the laws and policies vary from state to state. Almost everything I describe here, and almost everything you see in the videos (except where noted) is considered a legitimate use of force.

Unfortunately, cops don’t always stick to legitimate uses of force. Here’s a Texas cop guessing wrong and then creating a confrontation out of nothing and shooting a guy for no reason. The officer was charged but found not guilty at a sketchy-sounding trial. Similarly, here’s an officer who shoots a mentally ill guy who probably didn’t need to get shot. We’ve also got video of Denver cops shooting at a bad guy in a crowd, and injuring five innocent bystanders, for which at least one cop was charged. And here’s video of an Arlington, Texas cop shooting at someone’s dog, missing, and killing an innocent person.

That last video includes additional footage of a St. Louis cop shooting at a bad guy but hitting his own partner in the crossfire. It make sense that such blue-on-blue shootings would be a common risk of police work, since the person most likely to be near a cop when they do something stupid is another cop. That’s how we get this video of an officer shooting her partner in the confusion of a gun battle, or this video where a cop startled by a dog has a negligent discharge which hits another officer, or even this video where a SWAT team member fails to clear his gun properly and then calmly and deliberately pulls the trigger while it’s pointed another team member.

The best advice I could come up with after watching all these videos is that if you are confronted by one or more excited cops, and you want to minimize your chance of getting shot,

• Empty your hands and show them empty.
• Hold them away from your body, especially your waistband, ideally up by your head.
• Do not reach for anything, at least not without explaining.
• Do not approach anyone unless ordered to.
• Talk politely with the cops. Let them get a sense of you as a normal person.
• Cooperate with routine orders such as showing your hands, getting out of the car, sitting down, standing over there, letting them cuff you, etc.
• Keep calm and think clearly.

I’m not saying you should give up any rights by answering probing questions or consenting to a search, but there’s no point in starting a conflict you can’t win.

There’s another way of thinking about how you can get yourself shot by police, according to these videos, and it comes down to three criteria:

• Be a violent criminal who chooses to go out in a blaze of glory by taking on the cops.
• Be suicidal.
• Be mentally ill and have access to a weapon.

The more boxes you tick, the more likely you are to get shot.

Obviously, there are additional ways you could get shot if the cops are racists, sadists, or ego-driven sociopaths, but in this post I’ve been focusing on legitimate shootings. More importantly, I’ve been focusing on things that are under the control of the people who got shot by police. If you’re a young black male who’s been stopped by police, you can’t control whether the cop is a racist or a sociopath. You can’t make the cops be better cops. But you can empty your hands and keep them visible. You have that much control.

I’ll talk about some things cops could be doing better in the next post.

Update: Part 3 is now up.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Watching People Die – Part 2: Lessons

I’ve been watching people die. A lot.

But don’t worry, it’s only in videos.

I’ve been thinking of getting a license to carry a concealed weapon. I’m not planning on packing heat any time soon, but it seems like the sort of thing where, if the need ever arises, I’ll want to be ready. The State of Illinois training requirements are oriented around legal and safety issues, but they don’t really address how to use a gun in a fight, so I decided to do some research on using a gun in self-defense. And that’s how I found John Correia, his Active Self Protection (ASP) training organization, and a whole lot of videos of violent incidents.

Correia’s training approach takes advantage of the age of ubiquitous video. He and his staff have analyzed videos of thousands of real-world uses of lethal force to build up an evidence-based body of knowledge of how these incidents play out it real life. Almost every day, they post one of these videos of a violent encounter, followed by commentary from Correia and other people, in which they pick apart the incident and draw lessons.

I’m bringing this up because one of the recurring subjects of this blog is police violence, and that too is a topic of Correia’s videos. Videos of lethal force incidents involving ordinary citizens are hard to come by, but lots of cops use dash cams and body-worn cameras to record everything they do, and this is a rich source of material for Correia to analyze, often accompanied by former cop and federal agent Mike Willever. Although focused mostly on tactics, they also discuss the legal and ethical issues of lethal force in police work. I think these reviews are great resource for those of us concerned about police violence to better understand how and why police shoot people.

I’m going to link to some of these videos below, so I need to discuss them a bit. And out of concern for you, my readers, I need to start with this:

I should also note that Correia has an irreverent style that can seem jarring, considering the subject matter. He’s kidding around with his co-hosts, promoting his products and sponsors, and making jokes about dead bad guys “taking the sidewalk temperature challenge.” At first, his breezy patter seemed inappropriate and frankly disrespectful of the suffering and death. But now that I’ve been slogging through these videos for a few weeks, I realize that his sunny presentation is exactly what I need. It provides some breathing room to gain emotional distance from the subject of the videos.

Seeing so many police shootings all at once ended up reinforcing something I’ve believed for a while now: Many of these police shootings, even the ones that make me angry, are justified in the moment.

When I say the shootings are justified, I mean that they qualify as legitimate self-defense under the usual standards: The officer had a realistic, no-bullshit reason to fear for their life.^[1]Contrary to popular criticism, it’s not enough for the officer to assert “I feared for my life.” The legal rule for self defense requires that the fear be genuine and for reasons that would make normal people fear for their lives. Someone pulled a gun or a knife or was beating them down so bad they thought they, or some innocent third party, were going to die or suffer great bodily harm. That’s the only time cops can legitimately use lethal force.

As you’d hope for in a non-totalitarian country, many of these shootings are pretty clearly legitimate. Here, for example, is a fairly routine video of cops questioning a guy who starts shooting at them. They shoot him back. (That one’s not too graphic, and everyone lives.)

Some videos show cops doing genuinely heroic things with great courage, such as these Green Bay police officers in 2021, bravely and skillfully teaming up to hunt down an active shooter. Or see a lone officer dropping an active shooter with a single 40-yard shot from his standard-issue Glock with iron sights. And here’s the team of cops who recently hunted down an active shooter at a school in Nashville. These are the things we imagine cops doing when we give them guns and ask them to protect us.

Every time someone gets killed, it’s an unfortunate result, but often it’s necessary to kill someone to stop them from committing great harm, as when this group of cops hunts down a murderous active shooter in a mobile home park in Normal, Illinois, or when these Denver cops kill a guy who’s holding a hostage at gunpoint.

But many police shootings have a lot more gray areas, especially when the person getting shot has some kind of mental illness or emotional disturbance. Here’s a very unpleasant video of cops trying to serve an eviction notice on a woman who seems to have some kind of mental problems…and a large knife. They end up shooting her dead, and she almost takes an officer with her. And if that’s not terrible enough for you, here’s an awful video of an emotionally disturbed man shot by police after acting threatening with a knife. It looks like a legally justifiable shooting to me — police were responding to calls for help from his family members, and he was charging at people with a large knife — but he seems more ill than evil, and the cops ended up killing him in front of his wife and mother.

That last one looks a bit like suicide-by-cop — goading the cops into killing you as a method of killing yourself — but he may not have been thinking that clearly about the result. Here’s a much clearer case of suicide-by-cop, where a troubled young man with a large knife approaches police, asks them to kill him, and eventually works up the nerve to force their hand by charging the police line. And here’s another variation, with a guy who’s walking down the street pointing a gun at random people until he attracts the attention of the police. He then walks out into the street and turns on the cops, forcing them to gun him down.

You can find a lot more of these videos at the Active Self Protection channel on YouTube. In addition to more police shooting videos, there are videos of civilians defending themselves, with and without firearms. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. In each case, Correia reviews the video and discusses pertinent tactical issues of self defense.

Sometimes the videos just show people being victims of violent crimes, and the discussion is about how the victim could have defended themself or avoided the incident altogether. Sometimes the videos just serve as a reminder that evil people exist, and that they don’t think like the rest of us. A few videos just show the consequences of unsafe gun handling.

If you really want to get serious about studying violence, you can subscribe to the Active Self Protection website and have access to a whole lot more videos, including an extensive selection of training videos. If you want, you can also watch some shooting videos that are too violent to get past YouTube standards.

Which brings me to my second warning: The videos I link to here may be hard to watch, but they are not the worst videos I’ve seen from ASP. Some of the videos teach extremely hard lessons. If you’re not sure about a video from the description, it may help to read the comments first to decide if you really want to watch. There are a few that I just don’t ever need to see.

Speaking of the comments, the usual rules apply. Although many people respond with compassion, and some supply additional thoughts and information, there are also the usual assholes. You’ll get racist comments about criminals, misogynistic comments about female cops, and a fair number of people who take great joy in the deaths of criminals and thank the officers for everyone they shoot.

Finally, if any police officers happen to read this, and you made it past my opinions to this point, here’s a fun little video to remind you of the importance of securing suspects before you put them the back of your vehicle. The real oh-shit moment comes at the one-minute mark. And after that, you deserve to watch a video of Las Vegas police handling a sudden hostage situation where everything — the tactics, the gun handling, the marksmanship — is perfection.

As I said at the start, I think these videos are a useful resource for those of us concerned about police violence. In my net post in this series, I’ll try to draw some lessons about why police shoot people.

Update: Part 2 is up.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Watching People Die – Part 1: Incidents

According to CNN, Coral Springs police officers say they found Peterson and three other deputies outside the school with their pistols drawn and behind their vehicles. With direction from the Broward deputies, Coral Springs police entered the building where the shooter, later identified as Nikolas Cruz, was. Two deputies who arrived later and an officer from Sunrise, Florida, joined Coral Springs police as they went into the building. Per CNN, a report on what happened will likely be released next week.

This made me furious. As someone who covers issues that evoke a lot of criticism of law enforcement, I’ve lost count of how many times some cop has responded with some variation of, “You’re complaining now, but when you need us, you’ll be begging for our help!”

Yet when the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School needed help the most, these police officers did nothing.

But…

Until we get a more complete account, including a better picture of the tactical situation at the school, I’m inclined to reserve judgement on the individual officers. While I have a lot of doubts, I can imagine some legitimate reasons why the deputies might wait.

I will say, however, that I’m not impressed by the “What could they do against an AR-15?” argument. First of all, I think some of these people are confusing the semi-automatic (i.e. not a machine gun) AR-15 with its fully-automatic cousins. And second, how would the cops have known that the shooter had an AR-15 when they hadn’t even entered the building?

That said, compared to most handguns, the AR-15 is a really loud weapon. The cops wouldn’t be able to figure out exactly what model of gun he had, but someone familiar with gunfire would probably realize the shooter had a centerfire rifle, and they’d probably know that such a rifle might be powerful enough to penetrate the officers’ body armor.

A rifle would also be more accurate than the officers’ handguns. In a building like a house, that wouldn’t give the shooter much of an advantage: He’d have trouble maneuvering with the weapon in the tight spaces, and any exchange of gunfire would take place at close range which would negate the benefit of the rifle’s superior accuracy. But in a school with wide-open spaces such as a gymnasium or a cafeteria, the shooter would have an advantage, and I sure wouldn’t want to be an officer who’s trying to advance up one of those long corridors against a shooter with a rifle.  Factor in the complication of shooting past fleeing students and it becomes a very difficult tactical situation.

There are other possibilities. According to reports, several officers were hiding behind their cars in the parking lot. Given the size and complex shape of the school building, and the weird way the sound of gunshots can echo off walls, the officers may not have been able to tell where the shots were coming from. Maybe they thought someone was sniping at them from the trees around the school, or maybe they thought the shooter was with them in the lot and they were trying to sneak up on him.

Finally, there’s the question of training. School shootings are incredibly rare. Far more common scenarios involve a small number of people and a bad guy who doesn’t necessarily want to kill anyone, such as a robbery gone wrong, or a suspect taking hostages when cornered by police. These are the situations police train for, and they have usually been taught to secure a perimeter to keep the offender from breaking out. That makes a lot of sense, and it’s what police were trained to do for a long time.

The Columbine school shooting changed that, because while the police were throwing up a cordon around the school, the shooters were killing students. And so police began rethinking their plans. The modern consensus on active shooter situations is that the first officers on the scene should basically charge right in and do their best to find and stop the shooter, or at least pin him down and limit his movement.

But that’s a very dangerous thing to do. It’s an almost military-style calculation: Take a huge risk with your life that, if you survive and succeed, will save a lot of other lives. Until recently, taking those kinds of risks had been discouraged in police departments. Maybe Broward County still discourages it.

So maybe none of the deputies was able to figure out where the shots were coming from. Or maybe they all had different ideas and couldn’t figure out what to do. Or maybe they got stuck in some kind of groupthink, where one influential deputy misunderstood the situation or the appropriate tactics and the rest followed along. Or maybe they were doing what they were trained or ordered to do.

Sheriff Scott Israel is currently throwing his deputies under a bus, claiming to be investigating their behavior while frantically disavowing responsibility for their actions. The thing is, if only one deputy had stayed outside the school, I’d be willing to believe he was derelict in his duty. But when four of the Broward County deputies do the same thing…that suggests something more complicated was going on. And Sheriff Israel seems to be trying desperately to distract us from it.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Brief, Partial, and Contingent Defense of the Cops Who Waited

Make no mistake, this whole process was a sham. Start with the fact that it took a year to get the case to the grand jury. Most homicide investigations are over in a few days, and even if the police needed to interview more witnesses and process more evidence, this case could still have been in front of a grand jury months ago.

Then there’s the unusually non-accusatory presentation to the grand jury. Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty says he recommended to the jury that they not charge Loehmann for the killing, which brings up the question of why he wasted so much time and effort presenting the case to the grand jury in the first place. My guess is that he didn’t want to charge Officer Loehmann, but he didn’t want to take all the heat for that decision, so he steered to grand jury to where he wanted it to go. Loehmann killed Tamir Rice, and the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office made sure he wasn’t charged for it.

Even though the process was fake, however, I’m not sure the end result was wrong. That Tamir Rice was killed is a tragedy, but it should take more than a tragedy to make a crime. There ought to be some element of intent. If Officer Loehmann had thought to himself “It’s just a kid with a pellet gun, but I’ll bet I can use that as an excuse so I can finally get to kill someone,” he would be a murderer. And proving intent doesn’t require mind reading, because a jury is allowed to draw inferences. They could decide, for example, that it was so obvious Tamir Rice was a kid with a toy that Loehmann’s shooting of him can only be explained as intentional murder.

Even if it’s not intentional murder, there could be lesser crimes that Loehmann  might have been charged with. Depending on local law, he might be found to have behaved recklessly or negligently in failing to identify Tamir Rice as a child with a pellet gun. He might have jumped to unreasonable conclusions and shot too soon, and that could lead to some sort of criminal charge, much the way you could be charged for killing someone in a car accident if the accident was the result of your intentionally engaging in dangerous driving, even if you didn’t intend to hit anyone.

Or it may be that Officer Loehmann didn’t do anything that amounts to a crime. He might have made an honest mistake. There’s even an argument that he made the mistake because his partner, Officer Frank Garmback, drove up so close to Tamir Rice that Loehmann didn’t have time to properly assess the risk. It’s therefore arguable that Garmback bears more responsibility for Tamir Rice’s death than Loehmann. Garmback’s lawyer claims that he meant to stop further away but the car slid in the snow.

If that’s all true, it’s possible that the killing of Tamir Rice was the sad result of a chain of honest mistakes by good police officers that unfortunately lead to a terribly tragic death. (Obviously it would be convenient for the Cleveland police if it was.) But even if the death of Tamir Rice is not a crime, it’s still a tragedy. Regardless of what it may have looked like to Officer Loehmann, a 12-year-old child is dead for no good reason.

Those of us who keep a mistrustful eye on the police have a name for these kinds of tragedies. We call them isolated incidents. As in, “The death of Tamir Rice was an isolated incident that is not indicative of a larger problem in American policing.”

Unfortunately, there are a lot of isolated incidents: Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Freddie Grey, Eric Harris, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Bettie Jones, and rather a lot of others that haven’t made the news. Everyone at that link is an unarmed black person who died in an incident involving the police. Some of the officers have been charged with crimes, some of the killings are probably justified, and many of the deaths appear to have been accidental, including TASER deaths and a number of black pedestrians struck by police cars.

Suppose you and I meet for drinks after work every Friday, and as part of our drinking tradition we flip a coin to decide who pays. After a while, you notice that I am consistently winning 4 out of 5 tosses. You might not be able to prove that my winning any single coin flip was more than an isolated incident, but the statistics make it very clear there’s a lot more going on than just bad luck.

Or suppose a member of your family checks into the hospital for minor surgery and ends up dying from an infection. Assuming there were no visitors, that infection had to come from a member of the hospital staff. All hospitals have problems with infection control, but suppose you investigated and learned that your hospital’s rate of deaths due to hospital-acquired infection is twice as high as other hospitals. The nurse or doctor who infected your family member presumably didn’t intend to kill them, and the hospital almost certainly doesn’t have a policy of deliberately infecting and killing patients, but the higher-than-normal rate of hospital-caused infection deaths still points to a serious problem.

Now suppose your hospital investigation revealed that black patients die from hospital-acquired infections at twice the rate of white people. That would be worth looking into, wouldn’t it? And if you ruled out other patient factors (genetics, environment, culture) then you’d pretty much have to assume that the hospital is more careless about infection control with black patients. Perhaps it’s unconscious bigotry, or resentment of patients who lack insurance. It could be that hospital administrators assign the better staff to take care of white patients. But whatever the cause, it ought to be stopped.

The Guardian‘s data on people killed by American police shows that in 2015 black people were killed by police at twice the rate for the rest of the population, and young black men were five times more likely to be killed by police than young white men of the same age. Some of that could be explained by the greater tendency of black people to commit crimes — they are being shot more by cops because they are more likely to present a threat — but I don’t think that would explain the higher rate of unarmed black people killed by police.

Once you’ve ruled out justified killings, you’ve shown that a problem exists. Identifying the cause might be harder. It could be that enough cops are straight-up KKK-style racists to cause the statistical difference. Or it could be that white cops just have a harder time identifying with young black men: They might see belligerent young white men as troubled kids who need straightening out while seeing equally belligerent young black men as hardened criminals that deserve no mercy. Or given the reports that Officer Loehmann had a poor record as a police officer, perhaps the problem is caused by something as banal as police commanders giving less thought to the quality of the officers they hire to to patrol black communities.

As I said at the top, I don’t know enough about the Tamir Rice shooting to know if officer Loehmann should be thrown in prison. (People who followed the case more closely than I may have reached more certain conclusions.) But I do know that when it comes to police officers killing black people without justification, throwing the officers in prison is not the primary goal. Throwing the officers in prison is at best a means to an end, and maybe even a necessary means, but the primary goal should always be to get cops to stop killing so many black people for no good reason.

Because that shit has got to stop.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Don’t Let the Tamir Rice Grand Jury Distract From the Goal

When police officers shoot people under questionable circumstances, Dr. Lewinski is often there to defend their actions. Among the most influential voices on the subject, he has testified in or consulted in nearly 200 cases over the last decade or so and has helped justify countless shootings around the country.

Apuzzo’s story is reasonably balanced, but I’d like to talk about a number of red flags when it comes to Lewinski’s work.

His conclusions are consistent: The officer acted appropriately, even when shooting an unarmed person. Even when shooting someone in the back. Even when witness testimony, forensic evidence or video footage contradicts the officer’s story.

My guess is that most police shootings are justified — at least from the point of view of the officer pulling the trigger — but if Lewinski is reaching the same conclusion every single time, then what exactly is he bringing to the table? How much expertise is he contributing when you could replace him with a guy holding up a sign reading “The officer acted appropriately”?

Consistently finding that the officers acted appropriately also raises the issue of bias, which is the next red flag:

He has appeared as an expert witness in criminal trials, civil cases and disciplinary hearings, and before grand juries, where such testimony is given in secret and goes unchallenged. In addition, his company, the Force Science Institute, has trained tens of thousands of police officers on how to think differently about police shootings that might appear excessive.

That’s a pretty big conflict of interest. He runs a company that gets most of its money from police departments to train police officers, and then he offers expert testimony on police conduct in court cases which could send police officers to jail and cost police departments millions of dollars in damages. If he testifies against an officer in a shooting, he risks alienating the sources of his income.

Many policing experts are for hire, but Dr. Lewinski is unique in that he conducts his own research, trains officers and internal investigators, and testifies at trial.

When it comes to the credibility of an expert, doing original research can go either way: On the one hand, it can be a good sign because making original contributions to a field of knowledge requires you to understand it in great detail. On the other hand, it can be a bit of a red flag because it’s easy to cross the line between original science and making up your own special science. (See, for example, forensic bite-mark “expert” Dr. Michael West.)

Lewinski’s personal “About” page says this about him:

Dr. Bill Lewinski is one of the world’s leading behavioral scientists whose work has focused primarily on the intensive study of the human dynamics involved in high stress, life-threatening encounters.

And his Force Science Institute “Who We Are” page describes his research this way:

Dr. Lewinski is conducting the leading research on human behavior in force encounters. His current focus is on action/reaction parameters, perception, attention & memory and judgment. His research has been published in national law enforcement publications, websites and e-news lines. This research has been highlighted on 48 Hours Investigates and the BBC’s Panorama.

Those are not exactly scholarly publications. In fact, of the nineteen published research papers listed by Dr. Lewinski, sixteen are in law enforcement publications. On the other hand, the remaining three papers appear to be genuine research published in legitimate peer-reviewed journals. The man has a Ph.D. and he taught college courses for decades. He’s been involved in some real research.

Still, this is not the research output of “one of the world’s leading behavioral scientists.” For instance, a quick search shows that his most-cited paper was referenced 23 times. By comparison, my old college adviser has a paper that was cited 94 times, and while he was a great teacher, he wasn’t a leader in his field either.

It’s also hard to say what Lewinsky contributed to his two most-cited peer reviewed papers because he wasn’t the lead author for either of them. That was Professor Joan N. Vickers from the University of Calgary Kinesiology department. She has dozens of peer-reviewed publications, many of which have been cited hundreds of times, which means she probably is the kind of scientific leader that Lewinski wants people to think he is.

Apuzzo’s article discusses some criticisms of his research, but I have no way to tell how valid they are. It appears that much of his research is about human behavior under stress in situations typical of police shootings. For example,

In 1990, a police shooting in Minneapolis changed the course of his career. Dan May, a white police officer, shot and killed Tycel Nelson, a black 17-year-old. Officer May said he fired after the teenager turned toward him and raised a handgun. But an autopsy showed he was shot in the back.

Dr. Lewinski was intrigued by the apparent contradiction. “We really need to get into the dynamics of how this unfolds,” he remembers thinking. “We need a lot better research.”

He began by videotaping students as they raised handguns and then quickly turned their backs. On average, that move took about half a second. By the time an officer returned fire, Dr. Lewinski concluded, a suspect could have turned his back.

That seems plausible to me. I don’t know enough about human perception and reaction to know if that particular example is correct, but I do know there’s been a lot of research in this area. We’ve learned a lot about the limits of human perception and behavior, including that we overestimate our ability to understand what happened, and it all gets worse under stress.

That’s why I think it’s wrong to impose severe criminal punishments on people when they make ordinary human mistakes, even when the consequences are unusually tragic, and I see no reason not to extend that principle to the police. Civil damages are a different matter. After all, the officer still made a mistake, and someone still got hurt who didn’t have it coming.

Somewhat disturbingly, Dr. Lewinski doesn’t see it that way. He doesn’t think the officers made mistakes. He the thinks the limitations of human perception and reaction are a justification for a frightening shoot-first policy:

The shooting looked bad. But that is when the professor is at his best. A black motorist, pulled to the side of the road for a turn-signal violation, had stuffed his hand into his pocket. The white officer yelled for him to take it out. When the driver started to comply, the officer shot him dead.

The driver was unarmed.

Taking the stand at a public inquest, William J. Lewinski, the psychology professor, explained that the officer had no choice but to act.

“In simple terms,” the district attorney in Portland, Ore., asked, “if I see the gun, I’m dead?”

“In simple terms, that’s it,” Dr. Lewinski replied.

That’s not the first time we’ve encountered cops who shot people for doing exactly what the cop told them to do. It seems like a no-win scenario for motorists.

“A batter can’t wait for a ball to cross home plate before deciding whether that’s something to swing at,” he told the Los Angeles deputy sheriffs. “Make sense? Officers have to make a prediction based on cues.”

Lewinski is talking about the generally uncontroversial observation that human physical actions are faster than reactions. A bad guy deciding to shoot a cop has the advantage of surprise, so he can be pulling the trigger before the officer has time to recognize what’s happening and respond. This is a real concern for police officers, but Lewinski’s recommendation that officers should solve that problem by shooting before they see a clear threat is deeply disturbing.

Just imagine what it’s like for the black motorist in this story. A cop stopped him, and for whatever reason he had his hand in his pocket. Yes, the smart thing would have been to hold both hands where the cop could see them, but he goofed, and now the cop is screaming at him. What is he supposed to do?

If we accept Dr. Lewinski’s evaluation of the situation, it doesn’t matter if he keeps his hand in his pocket or pulls it out. Either way, the cop should shoot him, because waiting to see if he has a gun would put the cop at risk. So neither of the motorist’s choices will get him out alive. The simple act of putting his hand in his pocket was a fatal mistake from which there is no escape.

On the other hand, what if the motorist did have a gun in his pocket. Then he might be able to survive the encounter with this cop by pulling the gun as fast as he can and shooting first, before the cop can shoot him.

If someone is trying to murder you, even if it’s a cop, you have the right to self defense. Of course, you can’t be doing something wrong at the time — robbing a liquor store, mugging an old lady, breaking into someone’s home — you have to come into the situation with clean hands. But the only thing the motorist does wrong in this scenario is having a hand in his pocket, which is not a crime.

(The paradoxical thing is that having a gun might violate the law, which might mean he can’t claim self-defense, but not having the gun would leave him clear to defend himself, but he’d have no means of doing so.)

You might argue that the motorist has no reasonable belief that the cop is going to kill him: Just because an armed cop is standing outside his car screaming at him doesn’t mean the cop is going to murder him for no reason. That seems like a pretty good argument, but Dr. Lewinski refutes it for us:

“In simple terms,” the district attorney in Portland, Ore., asked, “if I see the gun, I’m dead?”

“In simple terms, that’s it,” Dr. Lewinski replied.

By Lewinski’s own logic, the black motorist can’t afford to wait too long to decide whether or not the cop is going to kill him. By the time he sees the muzzle flash, it’s too late. Best to shoot the cop first, just to be safe, right?

(Reminder: I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t advice. This is a hypothetical argument in a blog. For God’s sake, don’t go thinking it’s okay to shoot cops!)

You might still think it’s not reasonable for the black motorist to believe that the cop will kill him for no reason. Yet that’s exactly what Lewinski is claiming the police officer should do: Kill the motorist before he sees a clear reason to do so. So not only is Dr. Lewinski providing a self-defense argument for black motorists to shoot cops, he’s also providing empirical justification for believing cops are likely to shoot them for no reason, because that’s what he’s telling them to do.

We could apply Dr. Lewinski’s argument more broadly: If you’re a white guy walking down the street and you see a young black male walking toward you, how can you be sure he’s not going to shoot you? Best to shoot him first, just to be sure. After all, if you see the gun, you’re dead, right?

Of course, if you’re the black guy, and you see a white guy coming toward you, shouldn’t you shoot him first? After all, he’s probably thinking about shooting you first. Or maybe not, but can you afford to wait until you’re sure? Dr. Lewinski doesn’t think so: If you see the gun, you’re dead.

We could follow this line of reasoning as far as we want, until we’re gunning each other down in the streets for not showing empty hands and hurtling nuclear bombs across the oceans because we fear our enemies might do the same.

My real point is this: The reason we can justify so much mayhem with Dr. Lewinski’s argument is that Dr. Lewinski’s argument is morally bankrupt. It fails the “What if everyone did that?” test. He’s not telling cops to kill to protect themselves from danger, he’s telling them to kill whenever they can’t be sure they’re safe. And no one can never be sure they’re safe.

A few years back, I wrote about one of those puppycide incidents that went really bad:, and I asked why police couldn’t use less lethal methods to subdue the dog. Someone defending the police told me it would be nuts to go on a drug raid with pepper spray instead of a gun. (Apparently it’s an either/or thing.) My response was that if this was true, then by choosing to conduct drug raids with gun in hand the police have also chosen in advance to meet all resistance with lethal force: Could be a bad guy with a gun, could be a lady with a baseball bat, could be a 10-year-old boy with a hammer. They all get a bullet.

If that’s really the case, then maybe police shouldn’t be conducting so many raids. And if we accept Dr. Lewinski’s argument that cops doing traffic stops should be able to shoot anybody who might be a threat, then maybe they shouldn’t be doing so many traffic stops.

I think it’s telling that you only really hear this argument as a defense after the fact. No police department issues up front warnings to citizens that they will be shot if they fail to put their hands up as an officer approaches. That’s because they know this is a shameful policy, and they don’t want to claim it unless they have to.

Getting back to my example of cops who run into a frightened 10-year-old with a hammer during a drug raid, despite all the bad stuff we’ve seen cops do over the years, I’m confident most officers would find a way to handle that kid without shooting him. Because nobody wants to kill a child.

So maybe the best way to get police to stop unnecessary killings is to find a way to make them want to stop unnecessary killings. Maybe cops will find better ways to stop motorists that are less risky for everyone. Or maybe when a cop who sees a black motorist with his hand in his pocket, he will just roll with it and hope he doesn’t get shot. After all, that’s what the black motorist is doing.

(Hat tip: My co-blogger Ken helped me to characterize the legitimacy and influence of Dr. Lewinski’s research.)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Argument For Pulling the Trigger

Police officers in Ferguson, Mo., have routinely violated the constitutional rights of the city’s black residents, the Justice Department has concluded in a scathing report that accuses the officers of using excessive force and making unjustified traffic stops for years.

The Justice Department […] says the discrimination was fueled in part by racial stereotypes held by city officials. Investigators say the officials made racist jokes about blacks on their city email accounts.

This is the official answer to the question of why the protestors in Ferguson were so quick to assume that Darren Wilson was a racist murderer. The department’s racial problems would have been obvious to black people in Ferguson. They would have seen it in the way they were treated, the things that were said at the side of the road when the police stopped them, the way cops treated black people on the street. It would have been a regular topic of discussion in the black community.

So when the story of the Mike Brown shooting broke in Ferguson, this is how it looked: A member of a police department with a history of racism, equipped with a sidearm, possibly body armor, and several non-lethal weapons, confronts an unarmed and comparatively vulnerable black man on the street, and despite having a car which can be used for either cover or escape, he gets out and chases the black man down the street and shoots him multiple times, killing him. You can’t blame anybody for at least suspecting that this was a racially motivated killing.

As it happens, after a thorough investigation, which probably wouldn’t have happened without the protests, it turns out there’s some convincing evidence that Mike Brown attacked Officer Wilson. It appears to have been a reasonably justifiable shooting. But in the early days it only made sense to assume the worst — that the shooting was part of the long racist pattern of policing in Ferguson.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Racism Detected In Ferguson

How is it possible that this off-the-books facility existed for so long, and yet nobody, no lawyer, no judge, raised its existence, whether in a criminal proceeding following an illegal interrogation, or at arraignment when a beaten defendant appears with no cognizable explanation for the imprint of the Glock on his face?

What about a civil suit?  Where are the § 1983 actions for the deprivations of civil rights?  Even if the state courts were part of some conspiracy to keep this black site out of the courtroom, are the federal courts part of the conspiracy as well?  And what of the family of the “at least” one dead guy?  Didn’t they go to a lawyer to address this little detail, that their father or husband turned up dead?

Scott doesn’t like when people speculate in his comment section, so I’ll do it here.

Part of the answer to Scott’s question of why this hasn’t come out is that this is Chicago and that’s how we roll. Former Commander Jon Burge tortured people for years before it came out. Actually, it came out all the time, but just from criminal scumbags, not anyone that the good people of Chicago were willing to believe.

I’m sure this place really exists, and I’m sure people are occasionally interrogated there. I’m also pretty sure there have been some shenanigans about whether or not somebody’s client is actually there. However, I also think that calling it a “black site” is just hype for the Guardian.

Big city police departments have lots of buildings that aren’t technically police stations — armories, administrative centers, supply depots, specialized units, stuff like that. It’s not hard to imagine that if you’re a cop who’s grabbed somebody up and you want to talk to them without the distractions of a busy police station (or their lawyer) you might want to take them to one of these buildings. It’s police-controlled, but it’s not the first place someone will look.

Or suppose you’re a cop attached to one of those special units that operates out of that Chicago-Police-building-that-is-not-a-station, maybe a unit with some kind of intelligence function. You’re trying to develop an informant, so you pick the guy up and bring him to your office. Or you happen to stumble on a crime in progress and make an arrest.

In any case, meanwhile, somebody trying to help the guy you picked up — perhaps his mother — might call 1-800-LAW-REP4 and a lawyer like Eliza Solowiej (mentioned in the Guardian story) might try to visit him. She can’t find him at any of the stations, but being a somewhat infamous thorn in the side of the Chicago Police, she knows to try Homan Square.

Since it’s not a police station, it’s probably not set up to receive the public, including lawyers looking for their clients. And the cops there are even more surly than usual because they’re not used to people walking up and asking questions. It’s probably not normally used to hold people either, so the folks guarding the doors don’t really know how to deal with it. Easier just to tell the lawyer he’s not there and hope she goes away. Or maybe she gets a cop who knows the rules and he lets her in.

(Both things happen in the Guardian story. Besides, you don’t need a “black site” to make cops lie to defense lawyers.)

By the way, the Chicago Police say that Homan Square houses the Bureau of Organized Crime, the SWAT Unit (which would explain the military-ish vehicles), Evidence Technicians, the CPD ballistics lab, and a few units that have undercover officers. I’m pretty sure it’s also where you go when someone steals the radio out of your car and the police call you to say the found it. And from other information, I think it includes city-wide anti-prostitution and anti-gang functions. Most of these aren’t exactly street cops who arrest people all the time, so it’s not the first place people think of when they’re looking for someone who’s been arrested.

I imagine they all got a memo from headquarters about what to do if a lawyer drops in. Followed by a word-of-mouth warning that there are going to be reporters around, so for God’s sake don’t do anything stupid.

Update: My laptop battery was running out of juice when I wrote this (It went into hibernation in the middle of the page refresh after I clicked Publish!), so it was kind of a rush job. I wanted to clarify that when I say that the Homan Square building isn’t really a station, what I mean is that it’s not one of the 22 district stations that Chicagoans think of when we talk about “going to the police” to report a crime or a car accident or something like that. CPD still calls it a station.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at It’s Probably More of a Dingy Gray…

This especially applies to laws against hurting people’s feelings, such as laws that punish “bullying” or offensive (but non-violent) behavior, or even laws that increase the punishment for “hate crimes.” Although these laws are nominally intended to protect the powerless, they are part of a system that tends to protect and support the powerful, often harming the powerless in the process. That latter effect can swamp the intended purpose of the law and do more harm than good.

I think I first really understood this after hearing about Canadian anti-pornography laws premised on the feminist theory that pornography was a form of hate speech which harmed women. Among the first people to be prosecuted under these laws was the owner of a gay and lesbian bookstore — no doubt to protect women from the inherent misogyny of the materials sold there.

I’m  bringing this up because of a recent proposal for extending the federal hate crime law:

Violence against police officers that is motivated by anti-police bias should be prosecuted as a hate crime, the nation’s largest police union is arguing in a letter to President Barack Obama and Congressional leaders this week.

“Right now, it’s a hate crime if you attack someone solely because of the color of their skin, but it ought to be a hate crime if you attack someone solely because of the color of their uniform as well,” said Jim Pasco, the executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police.

I’ll bet supporters of hate crime legislation didn’t see that coming. It never occurred to me that in the face of increasing complaints about police militarization and rough treatment of citizens, police unions would agitate for greater punishment of people who attack them.

I’m not sure it even makes sense to talk about “anti-police bias.” I know they mean someone who hates cops, but it’s not as if cop is an innate human attribute like race or gender, and it’s not a system of belief or a group you can join like a religion. Cop is a job description. There’s nothing wrong with criticizing either the requirements of a public service job or the way particular employees perform at it.

“Enough is enough! It’s time for Congress to do something to protect the men and women who protect us,” Chuck Canterbury, the president of the union, said in a statement Monday. The group has long lobbied for harsher punishment for those who harm law enforcement officers.

Indeed they have, and very successfully. Anyone who kills a police officer is already subject to the harshest possible punishment, which is often the death penalty, and that’s only if they live long enough to be captured. So what do the union bosses really want?

I assume much of it is just grandstanding for the rank-and-file. That tends to explain a lot of bombast by the heads of any organization. But I think there’s probably more to it.

The FOP newsletter mentions several murdered police officers, and some dodgy news coverage talks about treating “killing cops” as a hate crime, but the language used by the union bosses talks only about “violence” and “attacks.” Furthermore, as near as I can tell, the federal hate crimes laws apply to a pretty broad range of aggressive acts that fall far short of murder, and some hate crime laws apply even to relatively minor property damage (to address things like spray painting swastikas on a synagogue). It sounds like even minor crimes against police could be treated as hate crimes if there was evidence the offenders didn’t like cops.

To me, this seems pretty clearly targeted at protesters. There’s certainly nothing wrong with charging them when they do something violent or destructive, but it’s important to keep a sense of proportion. With the proposed changes, if the laws are interpreted broadly enough — and you know police will interpret the laws broadly — every thrown object, every shove at a riot shield, and maybe even every vandalized patrol car could be charged as a hate crime, subject to the same kinds of harsh punishments we intended for Nazi skinheads and Klansmen who burn crosses on people’s lawns.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Should It Be a Crime to Hate Police?

I knew there would be people who would take Brinsley’s reputed motive and use it to smear protesters and activists who had spoken out against police abuse. I wanted to write about that, so I looked to one of my better sources of stuff to blog about, Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms, and he did not disappoint. [Update: An earlier draft of this post included several examples of people smearing activists, but the post was getting so long that I deleted them, and through carelessness I ended up with this paragraph that basically calls Jack’s post a “smear,” which is a bit too far. However much I disagree with Jack, his post was a legitimate opinion piece. Sorry, Jack.] He has posted some observations about the shooting that I’d like to respond to.

1. The dangerous escalation of rhetoric and the persistent misrepresentation of facts by civil rights advocates, activists, journalists and pundits made this kind of episode nearly inevitable. You cannot flood the airwaves with constant references to “police shooting unarmed black men” as if there was an organized racist liquidation of blacks by police in the streets and not risk sparking violence from the hysterical, the deranged, the angry, the lawless and the desperate.

There wouldn’t be constant references to police shooting unarmed black men if police were not, in fact, shooting unarmed black men. Michael Brown, John Crawford, Ezell Ford, Tamir Rice, Rumain Brisbon, Dante Parker, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley. All African Americans, all reportedly unarmed, all killed by police. (Police killed Parker and Garner by means other than shooting, and Rice was too young to be called a man, but neither of those things makes it better.) Some of the killings may have been justified, or at least understandable, but they were killings of unarmed black men nonetheless. It’s not like the civil rights advocates, activists, journalists, and pundits are just making stuff up.

2. The irresponsible “hands up” protests did not cause these deaths, but they probably helped create the conditions that led to them. The shootings of the two NYPD police don’t make the false “hands up” lie—which continues to assert that Michael Brown was executed when the evidence indicates he was not, and that there was racial bias involved, when there is no evidence of this at all—any more unethical, reckless or irresponsible than it already was. It was wrong from the beginning. It was wrong to assert these things before what happened in Ferguson had been investigated, and it was wrong to keep asserting them after it was clear that they were unsubstantiated or false.

Jack might have a point about “hands up” now. Although most witnesses do say his hands were up, there’s a reasonable argument that it was a posture of attack, not surrender. And since the grand jury declined to indict Wilson, suggesting that they found the shooting to be justified, it seems likely that they didn’t believe Brown was surrendering.

However, Jack’s assertion that Michael Brown activists should not have made accusations before the investigation was complete is hypocritical nonsense. He is making that assertion in the middle of a post in which he accuses civil rights leaders and activists of creating the atmosphere that motivated cop killer Ismaaiyl Brinsley. In other words, just hours after the shooting — long before the NYPD investigation could possibly be complete — Jack claims to know who the murderer was, why he did it, and the identity of the people whose anti-cop rhetoric supposedly influenced him to do it. Jack is doing exactly the same thing he’s criticizing others for doing. The next time a cop kills an unarmed black man, should we hold Jack accountable for creating the conditions that made the cop fearful?

I think the answer is obvious: Of course not. Jack is entirely justified in commenting on this incident. Vigorous discussion of matters of public interest is not just allowable in our free society, it is necessary for the proper functioning of a democratic government. By discussing these issues, Jack is being a good citizen, as are the people who are criticizing the police.

3. The response to the shootings by those who have continued to suggest racist murder by police in specific incidents absent any proof, and in Brown’s death, in defiance of the known evidence, continues the theme. Al Sharpton, who is a prime offender, wrote..

“I am outraged at the killing of 2 police officers in Brooklyn. That is why we stress non violence as the only way to fight for justice.”

Despicable. “Justice,” in this context, suggests that the killings are in response to injustice, and that the injustice is the intentional and racist killing of unarmed black men.

How much do you have to hate Al Sharpton to get angry at him for denouncing the use of violence against police? Geez.

Sharpton’s use of “justice” of late is well-publicized: “Justice for Mike Brown, ” “Justice for Eric Garner,” Justice for Trayvon.”  This phrasing, setting off the murders of the police with “fight for justice” continues the lies, misrepresentations and manipulation of public opinion, especially among African Americans. There is no evidence that Brown or Garner, or other shooting victims like John Crawford or 12-year old Tamir Rice were shot because they were black, except that they were black, which for Sharpton and others like Eric Holder, is enough.

This is not the first time Jack has criticized activists for claiming there was racial bias in the Michael Brown shooting when “there is no evidence of this at all.” Technically speaking, Jack is plain wrong. As Jack more-or-less admits, the simple fact that a white police officer shot an unarmed black teenager is evidence of racial bias. It’s not very strong evidence, and it’s subject to interpretation and possible refutation by other evidence and testimony. But it’s still evidence.

In addition, shortly after Brown was shot, several alleged eyewitnesses claimed that Wilson shot at Brown’s back, and that Brown’s hands were raised in surrender. These witness statements are evidence too. They are subject to interpretation, impeachment, and refutation, of course, but remember that these statements were undisputed by any other public witnesses for months. (There were some accounts of witnesses making contradicting claims in private statements, but these were second- or third-hand, not on-the-record statements to the press.)

Granted, even if Wilson had shot Brown in the back as he was fleeing, that wouldn’t prove a racial bias — he could have murdered him for some other reason — but it’s not an unreasonable inference. More generally, just because Wilson wasn’t shouting the N-word while shooting a fleeing Mike Brown in the back and wearing a “White Power” T-shirt doesn’t mean that the incident was entirely free of racial bias.

Jack seems to be laboring under a common misunderstanding of what activists are complaining about when it comes to police treatment of black people. Activists are not accusing police of a coordinated conspiracy to murder helpless black people. And for the most part, they’re not even saying that the individual police officers who killed unarmed black men did so to fulfill their desire to murder a black guy. They realize that even the Ferguson police are not the KKK.

(Of course, some people have said these things — the world is full of people saying stupid things — but that’s not the thrust of the main activist movement. Likewise, there certainly have been cops who probably murdered black people out of racial hatred, but those aren’t the people that most police supporters are defending.)

The main accusation against police is not that they are racially-motivated murderers, but that as former FBI agent William W. Turner wrote in The Police Establishment in 1968, “Since its inception, the police establishment has conducted itself more as the agent of the power structure than the servant of a pluralistic society.” Here in the U.S., that tends to play out along racial lines.

In white neighborhoods, police see their role as protectors of the community, cracking down on criminals who would disrupt the peace and harm the good citizens. But in black neighborhoods, so the argument goes, police see their role as keeping the population under control. Thus black people have stories of being questioned while sitting on the stoop of their own homes, or of being stopped for walking with their hands suspiciously in their pockets, or of being ordered to disburse for daring to gather in small groups on the street corners. In the past few months, police in Ferguson arrested black people for stopping while walking on the sidewalk and tear-gassed black people standing in their own fenced-in yards.

Activists argue that this disregard for black people makes cops less hesitant to escalate the level of force. If Tamir Rice had been a white 12-year-old boy instead of a black one, would Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann and his partner have approached the scene in a way that gave them more time to assess the situation instead of driving right up to Rice and jumping out to shoot him? If John Crawford had been a white guy carrying a toy gun through Walmart, would the cop who shot him have given him more of a chance to explain himself and surrender instead of shooting him almost immediately?

If Eric Garner had been an overweight white guy like me instead of an overweight black guy, would New York police have taken his complaints about not being able to breath a little more seriously? If Michael Brown had been a white teenager, would Officer Wilson have made the same decision to chase him down the street, knowing that he would have to kill Brown if he resisted arrest? If Ezell Ford had been a mentally ill white man, would police have struggled to control him long enough for help to arrive instead of shooting him?

You don’t have to be a cop hater to think that in at least a few of these cases, things would have turned out differently if the cops had been dealing with white people. That is the essence of the general complaint about racial bias by the police. That is why protesters say black lives matter.

Each of these is also a separate case in which “justice” is a complicated mess of facts and law, with no societal conclusions to be drawn or clarified by considering them together.

That’s true for criminal cases, which must be considered in isolation. But it’s not true for broader concepts of justice when considered as a matter of public policy. In policy analysis, patterns matter. Medical science does not allow us to determine which particular cigarette gave a smoker lung cancer, but we know damned well that smoking causes cancer. Just because we can’t point to a specific cop who killed a black man and say with certainty that it is a racially-motivated murder doesn’t mean that we can’t observe the pattern of cops killing unarmed black men and say that there’s something damned wrong going on.

Similarly, Ferguson protest leader Deray McKesson tweeted…

“I do not condone the killing of the two NYPD officers today. I do not condone the killing of unarmed black people. I do not condone killing.”

Also despicable. He, like the alleged shooter Brinsley, is drawing a false equivalence between what may be legal shootings by police unrelated to color and the killing of the two officers, who were not black, in response.

Jack’s reaction to this is just unhinged. McKesson and Sharpton are both denouncing the killing of police officers. They are saying that killing cops does not serve their cause. And in Jack’s mind, this is linking the police killings to the cause in some sort of false equivalence.

Granted, the cold blooded murder of officers Ramos and Liu is a terrible crime, without question. But some of the things police officers are being accused of are pretty terrible too, even if they don’t quite rise to the level of first degree murder. As Jack points out, the police killings may in fact be legal, but then again, they may not be. (Officer Peter Liang, for example, looks like he might do time for killing Akai Gurley, although that crime doesn’t seem to have any racial component.)

And even if the killings are legal, that doesn’t mean they’re morally right. Lots of terrible things that people do to other people are perfectly legal and yet terribly wrong. This is an argument not that these things are acceptable, but that the laws should be changed.

Another point is that McKesson and Sharpton are not the ones who linked the cop killings to their cause. That was done by everybody from Governor Pataki to former Mayor Giuliani to the head of the NYPD union. Activists like McKesson, Sharpton, and the rest are responding to that by saying they oppose violence against the police as much as they oppose violence against black people. This does not seem like a bad thing.

5. The deaths of police officers in the wake of the ongoing, high-profile campaign to demonize police and the justice system for political advantage were predictable.

It’s always possible that rhetoric will incite crazy people to do terrible things. But censoring yourself because of how a crazy person might respond is a madness of a different kind. No one would ever be able to change anything if they took responsibility for how everyone in the world might react to what they say. That’s no way to live your life.

And if you want to talk about the consequences of rhetoric, the police union appears to have circulated a memo saying that the NYPD is now a “wartime” police department. Remember that the next time an NYPD cop shoots someone.

More such deaths are also likely, unless the rhetoric from civil rights and political leaders becomes responsible and fairly represents the facts and the law. Public figures, activists and journalists who continue  the “hands up” lie or who link Garner, Crawford, Rice, Brown and Trayvon Martin in a manufactured conspiracy of the justice system to profile and kill unarmed black men are accountable for what happens next.

Jack, the activists are saying there’s systemic racial bias and injustice; you’re the one who’s created the strawman of a racist conspiracy.

Further, as with most social movements, unrest in Ferguson started at the bottom, with people from the neighborhood taking to the streets the evening of Michael Brown’s shooting. Sharpton and other national civil rights leaders didn’t show up until later. (A cynical person might even say that they saw a chance to get in front of something that they could use.) When you portray the protesters as blindly following the rhetoric of political leaders like Sharpton, instead of admitting that they might be reacting to their own lived experience, you are denying the agency of thousands of people. We saw the same thing in the 1960’s, when establishment apologists sought to blame black unrest on agitators and communists (really) rather than admit that millions of black people were angry because there was something sick about the way our society treated them.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Of Protesters and Cop Killers

A bunch of teenagers began looting some of the stores, and Ferguson residents moved to block the looters and protect the stores, essentially providing their own police protection. They weren’t entirely successful and some of the stores were heavily looted. At one point a fire broke out in one store, and residents entered it and used bottles of soda to extinguish it, thus also taking on the duties of the fire department.

(I was watching some live streaming video from a guy with a cell phone, and I got to see one of the young black men guarding a storefront get a call from his mother and then turn the phone over to an Al Jazeera correspondent who had been interviewing him. The correspondent then assured the women that her son was behaving “very responsibly.”  The 21st century is a very strange place.)

I’ve since heard that the police retreat was arranged between community leaders and the police commander, but it was weird having cops posted close enough to antagonize people but not doing anything to, you know, fight crime.

Friday, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency in Ferguson, and imposed a curfew from midnight to 5 am. I really don’t understand this police obsession with people being out late at night. First of all, it’s Saturday night, and they want everyone to be home by midnight?

https://twitter.com/omyword/status/500760631700500481

And are there no night jobs in Ferguson? I know there’s a 24-hour Walmart, but it looks like that’s in St. Louis. Still, there must be gas stations or convenience stores. And of course bars, although police probably consider them to be part of the problem.

Anyway, I followed events on Twitter last night, and the curfew went about as well as you’d expect. Tell the people of Ferguson they have to be off the streets at midnight, and everybody interprets it the same way: There will be a clash between protesters and cops at midnight. It was like the governor had announced the schedule for a sporting event.

Team Black showed up early in the evening, as usual. Community leaders such as Antonio French urged residents to go home before the curfew, as did the New Black Panthers, who also formed a buffer zone at times between protesters and the cops to try to keep things peaceful.

By midnight there were only a few hundred people in the streets, and a large portion of the press was packed into a sort of First Amendment pit at one end of the protest area. A number of reporters had defied the curfew by moving out into the neighborhood, and the folks at VICE News were live-streaming video from their position in the crowd, thus blatantly documenting their disregard for the curfew.

Team Blue took the field shortly thereafter, as rather a lot of cops with riot gear and armored vehicles gathered in front of the journalist holding area. One of the vehicles had a sniper-looking guy on top, although SWAT snipers also function as observers, so this wasn’t necessarily as threatening as it appeared. They began clearing the street with smoke rounds and then, in violation of an earlier promise made by Capt. Johnson, they fired tear gas as well.

https://twitter.com/LucyStag/status/500906352890617857

Afterwards, the police explained that as they closed in, someone in the crowd began shooting — seriously wounding another person in the crowd — and the police used tear gas in response. They were unable to capture the shooter.

The night was pretty much quiet after that. The curfew will be in effect again tonight, so I expect everyone to set it off around midnight again.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Ferguson a Week Later

A lot of police shootings are perfectly legitimate, stopping bad people from doing bad things. Beyond that, there are cases where the victim didn’t deserve to get shot, but you can understand why it happened — people who were holding toy guns, cops who mistook a harmless object for a gun, accidental discharges, confusing situations, shots that miss the target and hit someone else. These may involve various degrees of recklessness or risk on the part of the shooter, but they aren’t straight-up murders.

The most prominent witness, Dorian Johnson, describes something that sounds an awful lot like a murder:

Brown made it past the third car. Then, “blam!” the officer took his second shot, striking Brown in the back. At that point, Johnson says Brown stopped, turned with his hands up and said “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting!”

By that point, Johnson says the officer and Brown were face-to-face. The officer then fired several more shots. Johnson described watching Brown go from standing with his hands up to crumbling to the ground and curling into a fetal position.

That sounds pretty bad, but there’s no way for me to tell if Johnson is mistaken or even lying. For all I know, he never even met Brown; it wouldn’t be the first time a supposed witness had completely fabricated a story to get attention. It was certainly possible that this was just a terrible mistake. In theory.

Then we all got to see how police work is done in St. Louis County, and in Ferguson in particular. For several nights, peaceful protesters have been met with heavily armed riot cops. On Wednesday, police announced that protests would be allowed during the day, but that a curfew would be enforced at night.

Why? Why should people not be able to go outside late at night in their own neighborhood? As Lt. Max Geron of the Dallas police says,

“Most protesters will meet, protest, and go home when they feel they’ve made their point. If they aren’t breaking any laws, they can be left to express themselves.” Establishing a dispersal time then gives protesters something to rebel against. “When you establish arbitrary rules that have no basis in law, the police then feel they have to enforce those rules or they look illegitimate. They can set these rules with the best of intentions, but they just end up creating more problems for themselves.”

The police in Ferguson did set a curfew time, and to deal with the problems they created, police sent about a platoon of SWAT (-ish) officers, complete with armored vehicles and a sniper on the roof, as seen in this shot by The Huffington Post‘s Ryan Reilly:

As night fell, the police tried to move the protesters off the streets. They started with a sort of Jedi mind trick, thanking the protesters for leaving before they actually left, and then telling the protesters that they should join their friends who had left. It was pretty funny in a sort of creepy not-getting-the-joke kind of way. (“You should probably leave now. All the the really cool people have left. You don’t want to be a loser by staying…” wasn’t actually what they said, but that was the undertone.)

Then came the teargas, followed by a handful of Molotov cocktails from the protesters, followed by more teargas. For an example of what that’s like, check out this video taken a little later in the night by Polarbear Productions of the police trying to drive off a crowd standing in the street. It starts with the loud chirp of an LRAD crowd control weapon in warning mode — followed by a barrage of smoke or teargas and rubber bullets.

http://youtu.be/GO1SKC6dK7o

This is no way to treat people who are just hanging out in their own neighborhood. “Not disbursing,” regardless of how they charge it, isn’t what you’d call a real crime.

The police in Ferguson also expended a lot of effort trying to stop people from recording them or reporting on what they were doing. Ryan Reilly was detained with Wesley Lowery from the Washington Post while they were hanging out at a McDonald’s restaurant tweeting and recharging their phones. (For God’s sake, somebody get these people external battery packs!) The police told them they were being arrested on trespassing charges, but after Matt Pearce from the Los Angeles Times called the police chief for a statement about it, they were kicked loose without any paperwork.

I think it was probably arresting the reporters (and also St. Louis Alderman Antonio French who was tweeting from the scene) that drew a lot of mainstream media attention. More politicians have weighed in on the matter, and the Missouri State Police have moved in to replace the St. Louis County police.

Stunningly, that seems to have changed everything. The state troopers are led by Capt. Ron Johnson who (a) is black and (b) has really good leadership skills. He seems to have taken a page out of Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank’s protest playbook, because he and his men showed up in regular uniforms rather than riot gear, they didn’t bring rifles or armored vehicles or tear gas, and they just began mingling with the crowd, talking to them and marching down the street with them. (From some of the reports, it sounds like the police are staged nearby and are keeping an eye on the area, because there were a few minor incidents and the cop cars showed up immediately to deal with the problem.) After a while, a lot of the cops just left the area, and the residents of Ferguson had their streets to themselves. Just a bunch of people hanging out at an outdoor event in the neighborhood.

Maybe I’m just fooling myself, but based on what I’m reading on Twitter, it felt last night like the situation had settled down. The reporters gave up hunting for conflict and shuffled off to their hotels. Obviously, things could still have gone wrong — there are rumblings on Twitter all the timee — and it could still slip out of control with another fatal gunshot, but it no longer feels like that fatal gunshot is imminent.

So the immediate threat of violence has abated, and the long-term solution to American race relations is still a work in progress. That just leaves the original problem that started it all: The circumstances of Michael Brown’s death. To give you some idea of where I’m going with this, up until last night — before Capt. Ron Johnson filled the world with brotherly love — my original title for this post was “Fuck Tha Ferguson Police In Particular.”

Given how badly the police have handled everything else in Ferguson — and I realize it was the St. Louis County cops who deployed their SWAT team, not the Ferguson cops, but it’s all happening on Ferguson’s patch and to the people the Ferguson cops are supposed to protect and serve — I don’t see any reason to think they give a damn about the people of Ferguson. At least not the black ones. This seems like exactly the kind of environment that would tolerate the kind of cop that would someday lose his temper and execute a young black man. And then try to cover up the crime.

At this point, I’m pretty sure the Ferguson police are capable of anything. We know they attack peaceful protesters, I think they’re harboring a murderous cop, and frankly, I’d like to know where all of them were when Biggie and Tupac got shot.

This tweet actually sums it up pretty well:

On the one hand, named witnesses on camera saying what happened. On the other hand, mysterious cop in hiding saying "nuh uh." Tough call.

— Kaili Joy Gray (@KailiJoy) August 15, 2014

I had to go to sleep before I could finish this post, and now I see that the night was fairly peaceful, and that the Ferguson police department has made good on their promise to reveal the shooter’s name, which is Darren Wilson.

They’ve also picked this moment to reveal that they believe Michael Brown was a suspect in a what is either a strong-armed robbery or shoplifting at a nearby store. Obviously, as everyone is tiresomely point out, that’s not a reason to kill him. However, if it’s true, it makes it more plausible that he responded violently when confronted by Wilson. Ferguson police also say Dorian Johnson was involved in the same robbery/shoplifting incident, which would cast doubt on his credibility as a witness.

That said, the Ferguson police have not, as far as I know, said anything to contradict Dorian Johnson’s account of the shooting, which is that Wilson shot Brown in the back from some distance and then shot him again while he was surrendering. Nothing Brown did beforehand could possibly justify that.

Which makes it kind of weird that the police would release the report about Brown at this time. It’s almost like they were pissed off at having to reveal the shooter’s name, so they decided to smear Brown’s memory in retaliation, even though it has very little to do with officer Wilson’s behavior.

You know, after Capt. Johnson’s performance at calming things down last night, I was wondering how the Ferguson police would attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Sigh. Hopefully the peace will hold for another night.

One other note: Police initially refused to name the officer who shot Brown, claiming there were security concerns, and earlier I said that sounded reasonable. But now that I think about it, I’m not convinced. We’ve known that NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo apparently killed Erik Garner in New York for weeks, and he’s still okay. Out of all the thousands of officers who have killed people, how many times have any of them been the victim of retaliatory violence? Heck, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot and killed Victoria Weaver at Ruby Ridge, an event which angered an awful lot of people, including a large number of well-armed right-wing nut jobs, and he’s still fine 22 years later.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Ferguson Turns On a Dime

When this story first broke, I found myself conflicted over how to react to it. I was angry that a police officer shot Michael Brown for no good reason…if that’s really what happened. There’s been no definitive information either way, but subsequent events have not exactly painted a rosy picture of the Ferguson Police Department.

About a year and a half ago, I blogged about Colin Flaherty’s racist slant on news reports of black violence:

You can see what Flaherty’s doing here. He has obsessively curated a collection of reports of violent incidents at establishments frequented by black people, probably because they are in black neighborhoods. These are real incidents — sometimes an idiot cutting in line at a sale, and sometimes a dozen or so kids who might be gang members — but Flaherty tries to portray these incidents as mob action by attributing the violence to every black person in the building. Thus a fight between a handful of teenagers in a mall food court becomes, in his mind, a riot by every black person in the mall.

I’ve seen a bit of the same thing on Twitter and in some news reports regarding the events in Ferguson. The first night, right after the shooting, everything actually went pretty smoothly in Ferguson and the protests ended somewhat peacefully. However, there were several reports of protesters chanting “Kill the police!” But from what I could find, it sounds like at most a handful of protesters might have yelled that, and some people just attributed it to all the protesters.

On Sunday night some protesters were looting stores, at least one of which was set on fire.

Monday night’s protests were more peaceful, but the police responded in force, apparently using Warrior Cop as a guidebook for dealing with protesting citizens. They eventually cleared the streets with tear gas and some kind of non-lethal projectiles. They also ordered the press in particular to leave the area — even calling press offices and telling them to call in their reporters — which doesn’t sound legal.

It’s not generally a good sign when government forces don’t want the press around, although it’s hard to believe they thought they could keep anything shady out of the news in an age when so many people have cell phones. For example, Ray Downs at the Riverfront Times has protester-recorded video of cops reportedly launching tear gas at people standing in their own yard. (Note: There is rather a lot of swearing.)

That’s not to say the professional press hasn’t been getting some good pictures. In part, that’s because the protesters are making an effort to set them up. I’m particularly impressed by this emerging protest tactic captured by Ben Kesling of the Wall Street Journal.

Here’s another one by journalism student Markia Holt:

I think that’s just brilliant. By holding up their hands and yelling “Don’t Shoot,” they are submitting to authority, and yet because Michael Brown was supposedly doing the same thing when he was shot, they are rather vividly calling to mind the police violence that started it all. They’ve managed to add an undertone of “fuck you” to a surrender ritual. It’s almost Gandhi-esque.

One more example, this time from Whitney Curtis of the New York Times. I’ve been seeing this everywhere:

That photo image is a little fuzzy, but in tribute to the late Joel Rosenberg, firearms instructor and a one-time co-blogger here, I think I have to make one particular comment: Get your finger off the trigger, dumbass!

It’s still not clear what the hell happened Saturday night between Michael Brown and the officer who killed him. As I’m writing this, St. Louis County Police have not released many details from their investigation. As is usually the case, they haven’t even released the name of the officer who shot Brown. Given the unrest in the streets, I can understand their concern for the officer’s safety, especially if he has a family. On the other hand, you know what we call it when anonymous government functionaries kill citizens without consequence? A death squad. Let’s hope the St. Louis County police eventually see their way toward transparency.

One thing the police have revealed about the shooting is their contention that Brown attacked the officer in his car and tried to take his gun. As I mentioned before, this kind of close quarters struggle over a weapon is just about the only situation that could justify shooting an unarmed man.

In an interview with Trymaine Lee at MSNBC, a friend of Brown’s named Dorian Johnson tells a very different story:

Now, in line with the officer’s driver’s side door, they could see the officer’s face. They heard him say something to the effect of, “what’d you say?” At the same time, Johnson says the officer attempted to thrust his door open but the door slammed into Brown and bounced closed. Johnson says the officer, with his left hand, grabbed Brown by the neck.“I could see the muscles in his forearm,” Johnson said. “Mike was trying to get away from being choked.”

“They’re not wrestling so much as his arm went from his throat to now clenched on his shirt,” Johnson explained of the scene between Brown and the officer. “It’s like tug of war. He’s trying to pull him in. He’s pulling away, that’s when I heard, ‘I’m gonna shoot you.’”

…

“I seen the barrel of the gun pointed at my friend,” he said. “He had it pointed at him and said ‘I’ll shoot,’ one more time.”

A second later Johnson said he heard the first shot go off.

“I seen the fire come out of the barrell,” he said. “I could see so vividly what was going on because I was so close.”

Johnson says he was within arm’s reach of both Brown and the officer. He looked over at Brown and saw blood pooling through his shirt on the right side of the body.

“The whole time [the officer] was holding my friend until the gun went off,” Johnson noted.

Brown and Johnson took off running together. There were three cars lined up along the side of the street. Johnson says he ducked behind the first car, whose two passengers were screaming. Crouching down a bit, he watched Brown run past.

“Keep running, bro!,” he said Brown yelled. Then Brown yelled it a second time. Those would be the last words Johnson’s friend, “Big Mike,” would ever say to him.

Brown made it past the third car. Then, “blam!” the officer took his second shot, striking Brown in the back. At that point, Johnson says Brown stopped, turned with his hands up and said “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting!”

By that point, Johnson says the officer and Brown were face-to-face. The officer then fired several more shots. Johnson described watching Brown go from standing with his hands up to crumbling to the ground and curling into a fetal position.

It sounds plausible, and the struggle at the car comports with police claims. I think it’s possible that the officer and Brown got into some kind of struggle — perhaps when the officer pulled up and grabbed him — and perhaps the officer got angry and shot… Or perhaps, from his standing position outside the car, Brown started to get the better of the officer, who felt the need to pull his gun and defend himself… I can almost make this work as a terrible misunderstanding…

But not if the rest of Johnson’s story is true. Not if the officer shot a fleeing man in the back and then gunned him down as he surrendered. That would be murder.

Of course, Dorian Johnson could be lying. I have no way of knowing. I’ve heard that other witness accounts are similar, but I don’t know much about them.

The police are supposed to be investigating, but they’ve been behaving a little strangely. For one thing, as of earlier today they still haven’t interviewed Johnson, according to his lawyer. I don’t know how the police normally handle these kinds of investigations, but I would think a close eyewitness is someone they’d want to talk to. Even if they think Johnson is a lying little weasel who’s covering for his dead friend, wouldn’t investigators at least want to get his statement to lock it down?

Then there’s the autopsy, about which something was just released:

It shows he died as the result of gunshot wounds. Police won’t specify how many times the teen was shot.

The autopsy was done by the St. Louis County Medical Examiner’s office on Sunday, the day after Brown was shot.

Police won’t release any further details of the autopsy, pending the results of toxicology tests. Those should be available in the next four weeks.

I’m not sure why the police would be delaying the release of this information. They’re going to have to release the body to the family pretty soon, at which point the family will be able to get their own answers.

One of the things I’ve been trying to understand is why this killing has produced such an explosive reaction. There wasn’t this much of a reaction when NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo apparently strangled Eric Garner. And there wasn’t this much protesting when Beavercreek, Ohio police officers Sean Williams and David Darkow shot John Crawford III after he failed to put down a realistic-looking air rifle. But then I guess I’m answering my own question. There has been a rash of killings of black men by cops, including Ezell Ford, killed in LA on Monday. Not all necessarily the result of evil intent, but killings nonetheless.

Meanwhile, night has fallen on Ferguson, and Twitter is full of rumors of a shooting.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at #Ferguson

Reportedly an as yet unnamed police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri has shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old black kid named Michael Brown. Area residents gathered in the street, there was shouting, police assembled to try to keep order, there was a bit of a riot, and eventually things quieted down without too much damage.

The most important word in that last sentence was “reportedly.”

The early reports on breaking stories like this are often inaccurate. Some eyewitnesses have said Brown was surrendering, others say he was running away. At least one eyewitness has said the officer walked up to Brown while he was lying on the street and shot him in the back a few more times.

Who do we believe? The police? The eyewitnesses? Given what we know about eyewitness testimony, and the fact that their stories conflict, which eyewitness should we believe? We don’t even know if they really were eyewitnesses. That account of a cold-blooded street execution seems like something someone would make up to cause trouble. In a crowded urban area with thousands of people, there’s got to be at least one person crazy enough to want to insert himself into the story by running up to the first reporter on the scene and making up an exciting story. Or they could be completely honest witnesses who saw a cop commit a horrifying crime.

But unless the officer deliberately killed Brown, it’s probably not a murder, in which case it might be some lesser crime having to do with recklessness or depravity or some manner of culpable error. Or it might fall into the category of what I’ve sometimes heard called an “excusable” shooting, meaning that the victim didn’t deserve to die, but that the officer isn’t to blame. That is, he made an honest mistake.

(Shooting someone who was wielding a realistic-looking toy gun is a classic example of an excusable shooting. The resulting death is wrong and unnecessary, but you can understand why the officer believed he was doing the right thing at the time.)

On the other hand, if Michael Brown really was unarmed, which seems likely (but not certain) since the police haven’t reported finding a weapon, then there’s almost no way this can turn out to be a justified shooting. If this were a justified shooting, that would mean we thought the officer did the right thing, and if another officer found himself in the same situation, we would want him to do the same thing. If this were a justified shooting, that would mean the officer was in fear for his life and shot in self defense. Which seems unlikely, given that Michael Brown had no weapon.

Unless…

The only way I can think of that the officer would be justified in shooting an unarmed person is if that unarmed person attacked the officer at close quarters and tried to take his gun. Then the officer might have no choice but to shoot to defend himself.

Which brings me to this:

An unarmed teenager killed Saturday by Ferguson police, spawning continuing community unrest, had struggled for an officer’s gun in a patrol car first, officials announced this morning.

So the story being told by the police is exactly the one that would justify the shooting. It would exonerate the officer, justify his actions, and make it more difficult for Brown’s family to sue the city. Which is convenient for the cops.

But that doesn’t make it untrue. Maybe the cop who shot Brown is telling a self-defense story not because it’s the only one that clears him but because self-defense is the only reason he would shoot an unarmed kid.

I hate this kind of story.

I should point out that calling a shooting “justified” or “excusable” is not legal terminology, at least not the way I’m using it. I don’t remember where I first heard the terms used that way to classify non-murderous shootings, but it seems to me like a helpful way to think about the right and wrong of lethal force.

I should also point out that by the time you read this, and maybe even before I publish this, some important part of the story could change, and some or all of the possibilities I discussed above could be ruled out by events. That won’t stop people with agendas from picking sides before all the facts are known.

I really hate this kind of story.

Update: Just so I don’t come across as a complete narcissist, I am angry that a cop gunned down an unarmed black kid for no good reason…if that’s what happened. Fuck. I think I should be angry. In fact, I’m pretty sure I should be angry. Heck, I practically want to be angry. But I don’t know if I should be angry. Crap. I hate this kind of story.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Another Cop Shoots Another Black Kid

According to Mayor de Blasio and Police Commissioner Bratton, the NYPD will continue to strictly enforce laws against loosie peddlers and subway dancers. “I can understand why any New Yorker may say, that’s not such a big offense,” de Blasio said. “But a violation of the law is a violation of the law.”

Commissioner Bratton added, “We need the public’s help also to appreciate that when an officer does approach you to correct your behavior, that you respond. That’s what democracy is all about.”

I think I sort of understand what Bratton was getting at. I think he was trying to say that we live in a democracy, and that out of respect for that venerable institution, good citizens should cooperate with the people enforce its laws. Of course there’s also the point that democratic government is supposed to exist to serve the people. People like Eric Garner.

I think there are several observations I can make about this whole affair:

1. Police Commissioner Bill Bratton is a tone-deaf asshole. Right after officers under your command have killed a guy for selling loose cigarettes is not the best time to be lecturing everyone else about their civic duty to cooperate with the police. Bratton and his officers should be thinking about how better to fulfill their own duty to protect and serve.
2. Laws are sometimes enforced by assholes. Psychopathy is not just for criminals — many psychopaths function well enough in society to stay out of prison. Some of them become businessmen, some of them become politicians, and some of them become cops. Some of them become Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, or Police Commissioner of New York.
3. It was not the intent of the legislature in enacting cigarette taxes that violators be killed. Bratton’s point about democracy may justify the initial decision to confront Garner, but it doesn’t justify killing him. However that happened, even though it’s probably not murder, the officers were not carrying out the will of their democratic leaders.
4. Law enforcement is inherently violent. All laws are ultimately enforced through violence. Nobody goes to jail voluntarily. Usually the mere threat of violence is enough to make people cooperate with the justice system — they get into the police car, they show up for court, and they go to jail — because they know that if they refuse to cooperate, they will face violent and even deadly enforcement.
5. It wasn’t a quality-of-life crime. “Broken windows” enforcement is about going after people who commit minor quality-of-life crimes in order to discourage a cultural of lawlessness. Selling untaxed cigarettes is not a quality-of-life crime, it’s a revenue crime. Garner was improving the quality of life of the people he sold to. But he was depriving the government of revenue.
6. “Broken windows” isn’t what they say it is. The theory behind “broken windows” enforcement comes from an academic study in which people were more likely to commit a crime if they had reason to believe that nobody cared, such as a nearby broken window. However, as former NYPD Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple discusses in The Crime Fighter, “broken windows” works mostly as a type of pretext stop: Bust a guy for selling loose cigarettes and you get to take his life apart to look for other crimes.
7. Legislators should know all this. I’m sure if you asked the legislators who passed the law that Garner allegedly broke, they’d tell you they never intended cops to kill people over it, yet the fact that some cops are assholes who kill people is no great secret. The legislators knew the kind of people who would be enforcing their laws and they passed them anyway. The resulting deaths are statistically inevitable. As I’ve said before, I wish legislatures would think about how laws are enforced before they pass them.
8. If “broken windows” works, they should try it on cops. Maybe if they prosecuted the crap out of these cops and hit them with truly pants-shitting prison sentences, it would discourage the NYPD’s culture of lawlessness.

Sorry for the rant. Just had to work it out of my system.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at What Democracy’s All About?

Officer: License and proof of insurance.

Me: Here you go.

Officer: Do you know why I pulled you over?

Me: Uh, no I don’t, officer.

Officer: You were doing 75 in a school zone.

Me: I’m sorry to hear you experienced that. I place the highest priority on safe driving, and I have passed all state-required driving requirements. I’ll investigate my recent driving behavior and I’m committed to learning any lessons that may arise from the results of my investigation.

Officer: Seems fair. Have a nice day!

Inspired by this horror, but we’ve all heard the same responses from police departments when their officers are accused of brutality. I’m sure that’s just what they’re looking for from me, right?

(Hat tip: Maggie McNeill)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at I’m Sure That Goes Both Ways

Last December 19th, nine of the 10 members of the Burleson County Sheriff’s Department staged a raid on the rural home of Henry Magee. […]

By the time the raid was over, Deputy Adam Sowder was dead. Magee shot him as Sowder and his fellow deputies attempted to force their way into Magee’s home.  Magee was arrested and charged with capital murder — the knowing and intentional killing of a police officer.

[…]

Earlier this month, District Attorney Julie Renken presented the case against Magee to a grand jury. “I made a very thorough presentation on Texas law on cap murder and Texas self defense law,” Renken told me in a phone interview. “There were over three hours of testimony. I did not make a recommendation either way. I just wanted to present the law and evidence very fairly.”

Remarkably, this week the grand jury returned a “no-bill” on the murder charge. That is, they found that Henry Magee had acted in self-defense.

As Radley notes, this is a remarkable ruling:

“I don’t know of any other case where someone shot and killed a police officer in the course of a drug raid has been no-billed by a grand jury,” [Magee’s defense lawyer Dick] DeGuerrin says. “At least in Texas.” Over the course of about eight years of covering these raids, I don’t know of one outside of Texas either.

Scott Greenfield notes how remarkable it is, but he’s worried that the wrong people will get the wrong message:

Yet, this scares me to the core.  How many fans of the John Bad Elk decision, incapable of grasping that it is not good law, have been chomping at the bit for a “no bill” like this?  There will be armed men and women in tin foil hats with their fingers tightly grasping their weapons praying for someone to walk through that front door so they can put them down.

To the nutjobs, this story proves what they have been thinking, saying, all along.  This proves they have the right to kill cops. This proves they can defend their home from the thugs with shields. This proves it.

I agree. We surely don’t want crackpots getting the message that it’s now okay to kill cops.

But…I wouldn’t mind if some cops got that message. That is to say, I think it would be a good thing if more cops realized that it is possible to cross the line — that in the course of their job, there are acts they could engage in that are so hazardous to citizens, and so lacking in justification, that a grand jury would conclude that they were no longer entitled to the protection of the law, because they were no longer the good guys.

I just want to send that message without any more people getting killed.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at An Unfortunate Message For Police

The gist of the article is that people visiting Tempe last weekend were going to see a massive police presence as officers from nine agencies teamed up for the “Safe and Sober” campaign, something that as near as I can tell is intended to violate the constitutional rights of hundreds of innocent people in a valiant effort to make college suck.

As far as he can tell, it doesn’t seem to make sense:

Tempe is a great place to live and work, but looking at the numbers, the “Safe and Sober” campaign certainly doesn’t make me feel any safer. It doesn’t make being sober like the totalitarian hypocrites who made it happen want seem all that appealing either. Thinking about all those cops ignoring real crimes to harass a few college kids is depressing.

Well, I don’t know for sure why police departments do things like that. I suppose it could just be a way to make it look like they’re Doing Something About The Problem. However, many years of watching the War on Drugs have taught me a few things about police priorities, and after reading Matt’s blog post, I had some strong suspicions about what was going on.

You may be surprised to hear there is a revenue angle:

[Tempe Police Chief Tom Ryff] said he is working on plans on how to sustain the task force by asking the Tempe City Council to authorize overtime for officers and asking the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety, which helped fund the Safe and Sober campaign, for additional federal grants.

I think that pretty much explains what’s going on, and why so many law enforcement organizations decided to make life suck for ASU students: The Governor’s Office of Highway Safety pays them to do it. What police commander is going to turn down more money for his department? At the very least, it will free up some of their budget commitment, maybe to buy some cool new SWAT gear, and if they play their cards right, they might even fund some overtime.

There’s a little more to it than that, however. The Arizona Governor’s Office of Highway Safety website has a Grant Opportunities page which mentions “DUI Abatement” grants. The Arizona Criminal Justice Commission offers this explanation:

Overview – The Oversight Council on Driving or Operating Under the Influence Abatement grant program provides grant funds for two types of programs as authorized by ARS §28-1303:

• for enforcement purposes, prosecutorial and judicial activities, and/or alcohol abuse treatment services related to preventing and abating driving or operating under the influence occurrences in a motor vehicle or a motorized watercraft as defined in ARS §5-301; and,
• for innovative programs that use emerging technologies to educate, prevent, or deter occurrences of driving or operating under the influence in a motor vehicle or a motorized watercraft as established by ARS §28-1304.

The goal of this program is to fund Arizona programs and services in order to reduce occurrences of driving under the influence.

The funding methodology is described a little further down:

Funding – Funding availability is dependent on the additional assessment assessed and collected per A.R.S §§ 28-1382 and 1383.

Enforcement Program: Seventy percent (70%) of the monies in the abatement fund will be awarded to political subdivisions and tribal governments for enforcement purposes, prosecutorial and judicial activities and/or alcohol abuse treatment services related to preventing and abating driving or operating under the influence occurrences in a motor vehicle pursuant to ARS §§28-1381 and 1382 or a motorized watercraft as defined in ARS §5-301.

So I look up ARS 28-1382 and 1383 and guess what? Those are the DUI laws.

I’m not sure I’m reading this right (and my tolerance for reading statutory English is about used up) but it looks like 28-1382 is the “extreme DUI” law, and it specifies a $250 fine ($500 for a second offense) paid to the abatement fund, with ARS 28-1383 adding another $250 for aggravated offenses. Looking at the funding section, I think there’s a similar fee structure for drunk boating (extreme and aggravated). In addition,  the fund gets a flat 5% of all restaurant liquor licenses.

I’ve written about the evils of profitable punishment and the distortion it creates for law enforcement before, and this sounds like more of the same. Not only are the police commanders getting money to harass college students, but the harassment pays for itself. Over the first two weekends, Operation Safe and Sober made 66 arrests for extreme DUI and 22 arrests for aggravated DUI. If I’m doing the math right, that’s $22,000 that will flow right back into the DUI abatement fund, to be used to cover the costs of more enforcement. And if you don’t think the law enforcement agencies that put the most money into the fund are going to get the most out of it, you don’t know how government works.

I doubt that $22,000 defrays the entire cost of the Safe-and-Sober operation — even with the restaurant licensing money thrown in — but if you’ve got the cops on the payroll anyway, it’s more money than they’d bring in doing their usual jobs like, you know, patrolling the neighborhoods or responding to 911 calls.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Profitable Punishment – Tempe Style

ExCop-LawStudent, on the other hand, is an experienced police officer, and his commentary is scathing:

According to one report, the Trooper had difficulty filling out his report at the Travis County Jail.  That is a typical problem when the arrest is not actually for a crime, but for Contempt of Cop.  In addition, state troopers tend to have an attitude that requires their directions to be obeyed without question or hesitation, and they tend to get irritated if they perceive that someone is not moving fast enough.  Finally, troopers are extremely reluctant to admit that they made a mistake, as they perceive that as a sign of weakness.

In any event, it is easy to look at this and determine what happened.  The Trooper did not think that this little old lady was moving quickly enough and decided to yank her out of her chair even as she was gathering her belongings.  Once she challenged him (“you’re hurting me”) he likely decided that she needed to be shown her place and be arrested.  This led to the charges.  If you look at Northington’s arms, it is fairly clear as to who used force, and it wasn’t the little old lady.

Again, there are problems with this.  According to the arrest affidavit, she resisted arrest by grabbing her seat.  OK, even if we give the trooper the benefit of the doubt, if she is resisting arrest, there has to be an underlying charge.  What was she being arrested for in the first place?  Second, any assault on a peace officer is a felony, even if that is just by contact (i.e., an offensive touch).  Without video, it is the trooper’s word against the suspect.  Here, Northington supposedly slapped the trooper with an open hand.  Yet the black trooper does not make a move to help the trooper who was just “assaulted” by Northington.  I’ve been in those situations where an officer gets slapped.  Every officer that is there immediately jumps in to control the suspect when that happens.  That did not happen here, and is indicative of a COC arrest.

The department spokesperson has a particularly galling response:

“Our DPS troopers work every day to ensure that all visitors and staff at the Texas Capitol remain safe and that order is maintained,” [DPS spokeswoman Katherine] Cesinger wrote. “It’s unfortunate that some find it is easy to pass judgment on the officers who are risking their lives every day to protect and serve Texas.”

Even ignoring that a representative of an institution that routinely handcuffs and cages people (and not always with good reason) is complaining that mere criticism is passing judgement, I still wonder: Do police officers who say things like that realize how stupid it sounds?

I mean, if a cop stopped me for speeding and I explained that I’m a taxpayer and a productive member of society, would he let me go? If I give a lot of money to charity, will cops let it slide if I occasionally duck out of restaurants without paying? If a pediatric cardiac surgeon murders his wife, does the homicide squad give him a walk because of all the children he saved?

No. Of course not.

Look, it’s not the “risking their lives…to protect and serve” that’s pissing people off. That’s the police activity that we like. That’s why we hire them and give them pension plans. It’s the abuse, the unnecessary beatings and tasings, the dog shootings, and the occasional killing of random innocent people that make us angry, and rightly so. If the police don’t like us passing judgement on them, they should behave themselves.

We can laud people for their good works while also criticizing and punishing them for their transgressions. We can be pissed off at police behavior we dislike, and we can also be thankful for officers who respond to emergency calls and protect us from criminals. There’s no contradiction here.

Update: In a couple of tweets, @whattheada, who’s a prosecutor, comments,

Maybe cops won’t let someone go bc they’re a surgeon or donate to charity, but PDs expect lienency from ADAs…

and

…im just saying – that’s a terrible argument. those ARE mitigating factors used ALL the time.

This wasn’t a lawyer arguing for leniency for a client who had been found guilty (or was negotiating a plea), this was a police spokesperson trying to discourage criticism in the press — essentially trying to shutting down further inquiry into the matter.

It’s one thing to say “Our guy behaved badly, but he’s otherwise a very good officer, so we’ve decided to give him a break.” When done honestly, that’s an acceptable judgement call. What this police spokesperson is saying is more like, “He’s a very good police officer, so how dare you question his behavior!” Now that’s a terrible argument.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at On Criticizing Cops Over Questionable Behavior (update)

…It is rumored that some cops offered Obrycka a bribe if she would back off, and then threatened to plant drugs in the bar and in Obrycka’s car if she didn’t back off…

When Abbate attacked Obrycka, he wasn’t on duty, he wasn’t doing police work, and he wasn’t using police powers. He was just a drunk jerk that beat up a woman, and he happened to also be cop. With 13,000 cops in this city, there are always going to be a few troublemakers. To borrow a phrase from the Rodney King trials in California, it appears Abbate didn’t commit any of his crimes under color of authority. In a sane world, his barroom brawling has nothing to do with Chicago police in general.

But if Abbate’s buddies really are trying to bribe and intimidate witnesses, we’re no longer talking about one guy with a bad attitude. We’re talking about a criminal conspiracy within the police department[.]

Yesterday, that conspiracy cost the City of Chicago $850,000 when the federal jury hearing Karolina Obrycka’s lawsuit against the city of Chicago more-or-less agreed with me:

Chicago police adhere to a code of silence protecting fellow officers, a federal jury ruled Tuesday in a lawsuit filed by a female bartender whose videotaped beating by a drunken off-duty officer went viral online.

Officer Abbate was convicted long ago, and under normal circumstances, it would have ended there. But as Scott Greenfield explains, it’s the code of silence that cost the city so much:

Absent the machinations of police to conceal and silence the witnesses against him, the City of Chicago would have no liability for his conduct, it then being merely another vicious drunken cop beating a woman.

I realize that no cop wants to arrest a fellow officer for a crime, but I’m also sure that no one (outside of a few psychopathic cops) believes that police should be able to commit crimes with impunity.

The City of Chicago, and other police forces around the country, need to do something about this. It’s not a new or unexepected problem. “Who watches the watchers?” is one of the oldest questions about professional policing, and solving it is one of the fundamental duties of government.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Chicago To Pay For Not Watching the Watchers

The FBI said Thursday it will join the police investigation into the death of Chavis Carter, the 21-year-old man shot in the head while handcuffed in the back of a police car in Jonesboro, Ark.

The investigation comes amid lingering questions over who pulled the trigger. Police said he committed suicide with a gun officers failed to find when they searched him. His family members said they believe he was killed by police who are attempting to cover it up.

For some reason, this story reminds me of a time a few decades ago in the American south, when there was a whole spate of drowning incidents of young negro men, who police determined must have been trying to steal more chain than they could swim with…

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Death That Rings a Bell

So what did Ford do to this employee who made such a costly mistake? They gave him that month’s award for quality improvement. After all, he’d prevented a lot of defective cars from being sold.

Some people who’ve heard this story have called it idiotic to reward an employee who caused so much damage. What was Ford thinking? To understand, let me tell you another story. This one comes from W. Edwards Deming’s Out of the Crisis.

A company was looking at ways to improve quality at one of its factories, when they noticed something funny about the monthy defect reports. The monthly reports clustered around an average, as expected, but the deviations from that average were lopsided.

On the bottom edged, with fewer defects, they trailed off as expected — some months were a little better than average, a few were much better, and occasionally they had a really good month. But on the top edge, some months were worse than average, but never too bad. Above a certain cutoff point, there was noting. Not a single month had a defect rate higher than this cutoff number.

What really spelled it out for the quality team was that the monthly quality figures showed a spike of reports just below the cutoff. The defect rate tailed off away from the average and then spiked just before cutting off completely. In a quality reporting data set, this almost certainly means that someone is faking the numbers. When the real defect count was below average or not too high above average, they were getting the honest defect report. But whenvever the real defect count went above the cutoff, someone changed to to a number just below the cutoff, causing the numbers there to spike.

The quality team eventually figured out what was going on. Word had gotten around the factory that the company’s managment were planning to shut that factory down if its defect rate got above a certain number. (It’s not clear from the story if this the truth, but it’s what everyone at the factory believed.) So the quality assurance person responsible for that factory was hiding defects when the count got too high. From his point of view, he was saving thousands of jobs.

This is exactly what Ford was trying to prevent. By rewarding a worker who reported a massive screwup, they hoped to reassure everyone that they would not be punished for reporting their own mistakes or for giving management bad news. This is because one of the early lessons learned by statistical quality control experts is that you can’t punish people for giving you bad news if you want accurate news.

Which brings me to the New York Police Department, Officer Adrian Schoolcraft, and a recent investigation into how the CompStat program was run, as reported by the Village Voice:

For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded every roll call at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn and captured his superiors urging police officers to do two things in order to manipulate the “stats” that the department is under pressure to produce: Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports.

Arresting bystanders made it look like the department was efficient, while artificially reducing the amount of serious crime made the commander look good.

The NYPD tried to stomp all over Schoolcraft, even having him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward, but under pressure from outside, they also ran their own investigation, and the Village Voice got a copy.

Investigators went beyond Schoolcraft’s specific claims and found many other instances in the 81st Precinct where crime reports were missing, had been misclassified, altered, rejected, or not even entered into the computer system that tracks crime reports.

These weren’t minor incidents. The victims included a Chinese-food delivery man robbed and beaten bloody, a man robbed at gunpoint, a cab driver robbed at gunpoint, a woman assaulted and beaten black and blue, a woman beaten by her spouse, and a woman burgled by men who forced their way into her apartment.

“When viewed in their totality, a disturbing pattern is prevalent and gives credence to the allegation that crimes are being improperly reported in order to avoid index-crime classifications,” investigators concluded. “This trend is indicative of a concerted effort to deliberately underreport crime in the 81st Precinct.”

Remember, as Radley Balko points out, this was at the same time as the NYPD was arresting people in bogus marijuana arrests in which officers stopped people and tricked them into pulling small amounts of marijuana out of their pockets. (Possessing small amounts of marijuana is not a crime in New York, but displaying it in public is.) This allowed officers to pad their arrest statistics with the kinds of crimes that are discovered and cleared at the same time.

John Eterno, a criminologist at Molloy College and a former NYPD captain, says that what was happening in the 81st Precinct is no isolated case. “The pressures on commanders are enormous, to make sure the crime numbers look good,” Eterno says. “This is a culture. This is happening in every precinct, every transit district, and every police housing service area. This culture has got to change.”

As for Mauriello, he’s no rogue commander, says Eterno, who has published a book about crime reporting with John Jay College professor Eli Silverman. “Mauriello is no different from any other commander,” he says. “This is just a microcosm of what is happening in the entire police department.”

Indeed, it is clear from Schoolcraft’s recordings that Mauriello was responding to pressure emanating from the Brooklyn North borough command and police headquarters for lower crime numbers and higher summons and stop-and-frisk numbers.

This is a standard recipe for disaster in quality control — and CompStat is at heart a statistical quality control program. Take a bunch of people doing a job, make them report quality control data, and put pressure on them to produce good numbers. If there is little oversight and lots of pressure, then good numbers is exactly what they’ll give you. Even if they’re not true.

The entire Village Voice article by Graham Rayman, “The NYPD Tapes Confirmed,” is filled with a lot more information and disturbing examples.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Statistical Quality Control Meets the NYPD