Welcome to the United Police States of America, Where Police Shoot First & Ask Questions Later
November 4, 2013
By John W. Whitehead
“There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the
risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal.”—Hunter S.
Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century
No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot
unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. What is unusual is
our lack of outrage, the relative disinterest of our elected
representatives, the media’s abysmal failure to ask questions and demand
answers, and our growing acceptance of the status quo in the United
Police States of America—a status quo in which “we the people” are
powerless in the face of the heavy-handed tactics employed by the
government and its armed agents.
However, as I document in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,
it’s all part of the larger police state continuum. Thus, with each
tragic shooting that is shrugged off or covered up, each piece of
legislation passed that criminalizes otherwise legal activities, every
surveillance drone that takes to the skies, every phone call, email or
text that is spied on, and every transaction that is monitored, the
government’s stranglehold over our lives grows stronger.
We have been silent about too many things for too long, not the least
of which is the deadly tendency on the part of police to resort to
lethal force. However, as Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us, “There
comes a time when silence is betrayal.”
For the sake of 13-year-old Andy Lopez, we can be silent no more. The
Santa Rosa teen was shot dead after two sheriff’s deputies saw him
carrying a toy BB gun in public. Lopez was about 20 feet away from the
deputies, his back turned to them, when the officers took cover behind
their car and ordered him to drop the “weapon.” When Lopez turned
around, toy gun in his hand, one of the officers—a 24-year veteran of
the force—shot him seven times. The time span between the deputies calling in a suspicious person sighting and shooting Lopez was a mere ten seconds. The young boy died at the scene. Clearly, no attempt was made to use less lethal force.
Rationalizing the shooting incident, Lt. Paul Henry of the Santa Rosa
Police Department explained, “The deputy’s mindset was that he was
fearful that he was going to be shot.” Yet as William Norman Grigg, a
commentator for LewRockwell.com, points out, such a “preoccupation with
‘officer safety’ … leads to unnecessary police shootings. A peace
officer is paid to assume certain risks, including those necessary to
de-escalate a confrontation with someone believed to be a heavily armed
suspect in a residential neighborhood. A ‘veteran’ deputy with the
mindset of a peace officer would have taken more than a shaved fraction
of a split-second to open fire on a small male individual readily
identifiable as a junior high school student, who was carrying an object
that is easily recognizable as a toy—at least to people who don’t see
themselves as an army of occupation, and view the public as an
undifferentiated mass of menace.”
Unfortunately, this police preoccupation with ensuring their own safety
at all costs—a mindset that many older law enforcement officials find
abhorrent in light of the more selfless code on which they were
trained—is spreading like a plague among the ranks of police officers
across the country, with tragic consequences for the innocent civilians
unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet the
fatality rate of on-duty patrol officers is reportedly far lower than
many other professions, including construction, logging, fishing, truck
driving, and even trash collection. In fact, police officers have the
same rate of dying on the job as do taxi drivers.
Nevertheless, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 400 to 500
innocent people are killed by police officers every year. That does not
include the number of unarmed individuals shot and injured by police
simply because they felt threatened or feared for their safety. This is
the danger of having a standing army (which is what police forces,
increasingly made up of individuals with military backgrounds and/or
training, have evolved into) that has been trained to view the citizenry
as little more than potential suspects, combatants and insurgents.
Consider what happened in Cleveland, when two police officers mistook
the sounds of a backfiring car for gunfire and immediately began
pursuing the 1979 Chevrolet Malibu and its two occupants, a woman driver
and a man in the passenger seat. Within 20 minutes, more than 60 police
cars, some unmarked, and 115 officers had joined the pursuit, which
ended in a full blown-out firefight in a middle school parking lot that
saw 140 bullets fired in less than 30 seconds. Once the smoke cleared,
it quickly became evident that not only had the officers been mistakenly
firing at each other but the “suspects”—dead from countless bullet
wounds—were unarmed. As the Plain Dealer reports:
Despite varying levels of experience, all 13 officers who fired their
guns—and many who did not—told investigators they thought deadly force
was needed to stop a violent encounter with two suspects who they
believed were armed. “I've never been more afraid in my life,” said
Officer Michael Brelo, who fired 49 shots that night. “I thought my
partner and I were being shot and that we were going to be killed.”
Incredibly, no officers were injured in the shooting. Nor was any
apparent effort made to resolve the situation using less lethal force.
Sixty-three of the officers involved in the fatal shooting have since
been suspended.
I doubt the police officers involved in this massacre are bad cops in
the sense of being corrupt and on the take, or violent and abusive, or
bloodthirsty and trigger happy. Nor are they any different from most of
the cops who patrol communities large and small across the country. Just
like you and me, these officers have spouses and children to care for,
homes to maintain, bills to pay, and worries that keep them up at night.
Like most of us, they strive to do their jobs as best as they know how,
but that’s where the problem arises, because they have clearly been
poorly trained in how to distinguish what is a real threat. They have
also been indoctrinated into the mindset that they have a right to
protect themselves at all cost and empowered to shoot first and ask
questions later with a veritable arsenal of military artillery, much of
which has been provided by the federal government.
These shootings are occurring with such frequency now that they are
quickly forgotten, lost in the morass of similarly heartbreaking, tragic
incidents. It was barely a month ago, for example, that police in
Washington, DC, shot and killed 34-year-old Miriam Carey after she
collided with a barrier leading to the White House, then fled when
pursued by a phalanx of gun-wielding police and cop cars. Carey’s
1-year-old daughter was in the backseat. Seventeen gun shots later,
Carey was dead and her toddler motherless. It was what is known as a
“bad shoot.” As James Mulvaney, a professor of law and police science,
explains: “A ‘good shoot’ in police lingo is one in which officers use
deadly force to prevent a suspect from inflicting serious harm. A ‘bad
shoot’ is one in which there might have been a nonlethal alternative.”
Even the suggestion that there are nonlethal alternatives is
misleading. Nonlethal weapons such as tasers, stun guns, rubber pellets
and the like, introduced with a government guarantee of safety for the
public and adopted by police departments across the country purportedly
because they would help restrain violent individuals, have
resulted in police using them as weapons of compliance more often and
with less restraint—even against women and children—and in some
instances, even causing death.
These “nonlethal” weapons also enable police to aggress with the push
of a button, making the potential for overblown confrontations over
minor incidents that much more likely. Case in point: the fact that
seven-months pregnant Malaika Brooks was tased three times for refusing
to sign a speeding ticket, while Keith Cockrell was shot with a taser
for jaywalking.
Researchers have discovered that dehumanizing weapons like guns or
tasers, which do not require the aggressor (police) to make physical
contact with his victim, are aggression-eliciting stimuli. One study
found that simply showing an image of a gun to students caused them to
clench their fists faster (a sign of aggressive effect) when presented
with an aversive situation. If a simple handgun can noticeably increase
violent behavior, one can only imagine what impact the $500 million
dollars’ worth of weapons and armored vehicles (provided by the Pentagon
to local police in states and municipalities across the country) have
on already tense and potentially explosive situations.
So what is the answer?
How should we as a society respond when we hear about the Las Vegas
police officer who shot an unarmed man at a convenience store whom he
“thought” was a homicide suspect, or the Los Angeles cop who shot an
unarmed man seen leaving a convenience store where an ATM had been
robbed of $40 or the DC cops who killed a young mother in a hail of
gunfire? As John Grant notes for Counterpunch: “The ignominious
and unnecessary public killing of Miriam Carey should be a human marker
that triggers our cultural meaning machine to honestly consider what’s
wrong with the picture of a howling pack of cops shooting down a
troubled young mother … like a dog.”
The current practice is to let the police deal with it themselves by
suspending the officer involved with administrative pay, dragging out
the investigation until the public forgets about the incident, and then
eventually declaring the shooting incident justified based on the
officer’s fear for his safety, and allowing him to go back to work as
usual. Meanwhile, the epidemic of police violence continues to escalate
while fear of the police increases and the police state, with all its
surveillance gear and military weaponry, expands around us.
If ever there were a time to de-militarize and de-weaponize local
police forces, it’s now. The same goes for scaling back on the mindset
adopted by cops that they are the law and should be revered,
feared and obeyed. As for the idea that citizens must be compliant or
risk being treated like lawbreakers, that’s nothing more than
authoritarianism with a badge. As Grant points out: “As the public
killing of Miriam Carey should make clear, a significant part of the
problem is cops and the pack mentality they too often resort to. These
men and women are encouraged to see themselves on “the front line”
protecting us, the people. They are pumped up with post-911 fears and
adrenaline and, when it hits the fan, relentlessly determined to get
their man or woman. A lot of reality can get lost in this process.”
In other words, it’s time for a reality check, for both the police and
the citizens of this nation, and a good place to start is with the words
of that gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who warned: “Coming of age
in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much
less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly
and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly
give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have
been conned into believing will be freedom from fear.”
WC: 1942
,
is the fact that it’s the government that poses the gravest threat to
our freedoms and way of life, and no amount of politicking, parsing or
pandering will change that.
