Guest Opinion: Cops share concerns of excessive force
S ociety has a fear-fear relationship with its cops. At enormous expense, we hire, train, equip and mandate police to use force against they whom we fear will do us harm absent force to constrain them, yet we also fear having this very force used against us, or used in excess against others. Both fears are legitimate.
Nobody knows exactly what “excessive force” is. Even the police-disparaging Human Rights Watch laments “the scarcity of meaningful information about trends in abuse.” They also observe that “data are also lacking regarding the police departments’ response to those incidents and their plans or actions to prevent brutality.” Too much of what data are available are contrived with a pro- or anti-police agenda, and all are subject to gross misuse.
Witness this statistic from a 1999 National Institute of Justice report: “… officer use of fists entailed an 81% chance of suspect injury; use of a PR-24 baton, 67%; and use of a handgun, a 48% chance.” Given this statistical “fact,” are we to extrapolate that cops should dispense with fists and sticks and just shoot all resisting suspects in order to halve their injury rate?
Absent reliable, balanced research, we are left to our instinctual fear and resentment of cops. I am retired from a career in law enforcement ranging from battling riots as a D.C. street cop to years as a Fairfax County, Va., police/medevac pilot. I drive safely, and I’ve never used any illegal substance, yet, I too get nervous when I see that police car in the mirror. We all fear the police, or at least the humanity we share with them, which we know means that, like us, they’re sometimes going to be wrong or do wrong.
Police brutality stories are an easy sell in the news media. We all want vindication of our fear. We all need to believe that what we fear and hate is real, not just an irrational product of our bias or emotionalism. Moreover, the specter pervades that if police brutality can happen to others, we might be next. But does it serve any of us to buy into a sensationalist boogeyman image of our cops being masochistic closet-Nazis bent on beating the helpless?
No one appreciates more than cops that police need to be controlled in their use of force. As police officers, we’ve seen some cops cross the line, and we’ve all felt the primal urge to get society’s violent, dangerous predators, anyway we can, before they get one of us or an innocent citizen.
It’s us who drape our coats about a naked rape victim, it’s us who chalk around the body, it’s us who hold the weeping, battered child. It’s us who get spit at by AIDS carriers, shot at by drug thugs and ganged on by mobs. We know the fear. We know the rage. We know the injustice. And we know how it can lead to the rare, clear, excessive use of force.
Yet, does it not serve us all to struggle in the face of media huckstering to keep police and the use of force in perspective?
I once chased a 6-foot-tall robbery suspect at night down a dark, D.C. alley and into a cluttered, unlit garage. On my entry, he leaped at me with what I was sure with my experienced eye was a nickel-plated revolver, despite the poor light. The hammer on my gun was on the rise when lights from an arriving police vehicle revealed that I was about to shoot a 15-year-old black kid swinging a socket wrench at me. I was only a nanosecond from becoming the next “racist, rogue-cop, child killer!” in the news media.
Use-of-force incidents are almost all like mine. They are virtually never clearly defined, easy to read situations. The officer who perceives a threat usually has only seconds to make a decision about something that may result in his/her imminent maiming or death. He usually doesn’t know the suspect, or how nice the suspect may otherwise be, what his mental illness history is, what he “meant,” what he’s thinking or how harmless his friends all believe him to be.
What he/she does know is that cops are killed or severely injured every year by usually harmless, sometimes mentally ill, nice guys having some kind of a bad hair day. He also knows that God himself can’t tell such a person from a ruthless, calculating serial killer in most street confrontations, especially in the time allotted to the cop under deadly threat.
Of all the fears the police officer himself suffers his whole career, the greatest by far is his nightmare of that sheer unbreakable law of averages which dictates that even the best cops, as players in so many potentially deadly scenes, are going to err sometimes.