Alton Sterling of Baton Rouge and Philando Castile of suburban St. Paul were shot by officers in incidents that originated as routine police matters. Neither survived the encounter.
It must be the goal of every police stop that both the officer and the civilian survive. It is unfortunate that this even needs to be said.
This is not an indictment of police officers, whom I support, but of policing methods currently in vogue that impose an unnecessarily confrontational and militaristic tone to a law enforcement function. Alternative procedures exist and are in place in areas like Los Angeles and Dallas, both of which encourage a less confrontational approach to law enforcement.
I do not believe for a second that any police officer wants to kill a civilian, but one would be remiss to not acknowledge that it happens with alarming frequency. Nearly three civilians are killed per day by police in America.
This is the genesis of the Black Lives Matter movement. Blacks see themselves as the victim of unreasonable policing methods. There is little video evidence of whites being the victims. Thus, the use of the phrase "All Lives Matter" is a misappropriation of the concept. "All people" are not being summarily killed by the cops. Only blacks are.
It goes without saying that if the Sterling and Castile incidents had been handled differently, that the outrage that erupted when the videos became known would not have happened. The protests in Dallas would not have happened, and the shootings in Dallas would not have happened. Seven deaths, and a shaken nation are the result of police practices that appear faulty.
These encounters are not isolated incidents. Its a sad commentary that the casual reader will know exactly what I mean when I mention the names of Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice and now Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. The reader will remember what happened in New York and Cleveland and Ferguson and Waller County, Texas and now St. Paul and Baton Rouge. This is not isolated, and it is not new. What is new: evidence in the form of video. What is newer is police confiscating the video of witnesses, and harassment of those who take the videos, but that's the subject for another day.
This is admittedly Monday morning quarterbacking at its finest. But how many times do we have to be here, mourning black victims of seeming overreach by police officers? How many times do we have to see families grieving to not sit back and evaluate the situation and see whether we can envision an alternate scenario?
So, lets look first at what happened, and see how it might be avoided next time.
Philando Castile was pulled over on a pretext stop for an alleged broken tail light in suburban St. Paul, MN.
A "pretext stop" is one in which the stated reason for the stopping of a motorist (or pedestrian, for that matter), is not the real reason for the official encounter. The real reason can be to investigate some other crime for which there is not probable cause to make an arrest, or merely to harass and annoy and let the citizen know that they are being watched (an improper use of the police power). The minor equipment violation is a mere justification for the stop. Often, the minor violations don't even exist. The stop of Sandra Bland in Texas may have been a pretext stop. (See video below).
Such a stop is characterized by unequal power between the officer and the motorist. The officer is trained to be controlling and authoritarian, and the motorist is immediately on the defensive. Its an adversary situation from the start. Officers often bark commands and expect immediate and unquestioning compliance from a distressed citizen.
This aggressive style immediately ratchets up the confrontation level to a 10 in no time flat. Both sides, the officer and the civilian, take on familiar roles. The officer demands immediate response, often even before the civilian can process the demands. This is what likely occurred in the case of Tamir Rice, the 12 year old Cleveland boy playing with a toy pellet gun who had less than two seconds to react to arriving officers before he was shot and killed. (See video below).
According to the girlfriend of Philando Castile, sitting in the passenger seat, the officer asked to see identification. Castile told the officer he had a weapon, which he had a legal right to possess. This disclosure was smart, as it indicated an awareness of the tension of the situation. The disclosure was designed to put the officer at ease in the event the weapon would be discovered in a search.
Unfortunately, the disclosure appears to have been wrongly construed by the officer, who shot Castile, claiming he thought Castile was going for his gun.
The officer appeared confused on the audio recorded by the girlfriend. The girlfriend can be heard calmly explaining her version of the events that contradicts the rushed explanation of the officer. Unfortunately, there is no body camera video, and the squad car's dashcam video may not have picked up the encounter because of where the squad car was parked. However, the officer's shooting appears improper for a number of reasons.
Proper training would suggest that once the officer knew of the presence of a legal gun, that he should have stepped back from confrontation.
The officer could have asked Castile to put his hands on the wheel. He could have engaged his nearby partner to help. He could have safely had the motorist exit the car, leaving the gun in his pocket until he could be disarmed. He could have asked the motorist to safely hand him the weapon. He could have asked the motorist to leave the gun in plain sight on the seat as he exited the vehicle. All of these alternatives should have been explored in training before the officer was allowed to make traffic stops.
If the officer's training is poor and he does not have the skills to properly react to predictable situations, he should not be on that assignment.
In addition, there appears to be confusion over what the motorist was to do. First, he apparently was asked for identification. But when he tried to get it out, the officer was apparently fixated on the disclosure of the presence of the gun, and assumed, wrongly, that Castile was drawing his gun while seated in a car behind the wheel. The officer fired into the vehicle, striking and killing Castile.
There was no danger to the officer at that point; indeed, the officer instigated the contact. He should have been trained to proceed in a manner that protected his life, Castile's life, and that of Castile's girlfriend and her 4 year old daughter in the back seat. It is unusual and dangerous for an officer to fire through the window of a stopped car with other passengers in it. Nobody appears to have been trying to flee or provoke a confrontation.
How do we know Castile was likely not confrontational? Records show this was at least the 52nd time Castile had been pulled over in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area since 2002. Fifty-two times.
By then he knew the drill.
The pretext for the traffic stop given the dispatcher by the officer was that Castile's "wide nose" resembled that of a supposed robbery suspect for an unidentified burglary that happened sometime before the shooting.
It is unknown how many of the 700,000 black inhabitants of the Minneapolis-St Paul area have wide noses, but one can assume its more than a hundred fifty (150), hardly making the now-dead Castile a prime suspect in any wide-nosed burglaries. One can see how the pretext of an alleged broken tail light and a "wide nosed" suspect, combined with poor training, set the officer up for failure and Castile up for death.
Anton Sterling was killed by two Baton Rouge police officers who wrestled the 37-year old to the ground, sticking a gun in his chest and shooting him dead. The officers, reacting to a report that Sterling had a gun, were shocked!, shocked! to discover that Sterling had a gun. They then shot Sterling to death because of the legal gun they knew he had before they arrived on scene.
In largely white, suburban areas, a problem solving approach is usually utilized by modern police departments. The officers find out the facts, talk to both sides if there's a complainant, and then reason with the two sides to defuse the situation. Arrest who you will, but nobody's personal safety is put at risk.
While this problem solving approach is also used in most urban areas, that's not what we see on the videos in question. One of the complaints of black lives matter is that officers act in a less confrontational manner when dealing with whites, who are apparently not perceived as threatening to the officer's safety or as confrontational in return.
We do not have the benefit of an entire video record in the Anton Sterling CD-seller with a gun situation. The officers had body cameras, but they were allegedly "torn away" during the scuffle. Proper training would dictate that officers be taught to keep their equipment well-maintained. It is reported that a store-owner's video was confiscated by one of the officers who tackled Sterling. Perhaps that video is not "lost."
Nevertheless one officer had the foresight to yell, "Gun, gun!" to alert his partner to the presence of a gun. Such a move was unnecessary, since they both apprehended Sterling precisely because he had a gun. Sterling was then shot because he had the gun that the officers knew he had before they arrived on scene.
Team tackling a larger man that the officers knew had a gun appears to be poor planning and dangerous. Guns can fire or misfire, putting both the officers and the civilian at risk. The officers knew the suspect had a gun because the 911 report was that the suspect had threatened another with the gun. While the officers used a taser, it did not appear to be effective. When it didn't work, they were not committed to gang tackling. They could have disengaged before jumping on the civilian. Training is the key, and it is difficult to believe that physical force was the only alternative when they knew of the presence of a gun.
There did not appear to be a need to immediately take down the suspect at that point. As in the Eric Garner NY "loose cigarette seller" situation, it appears that the officers may have prematurely, and fatally, escalated the confrontation. The officers, for their part, knew he had a gun, but there did not appear to be any immediate need to subdue him. It appears Sterling had a second amendment right to carry the gun, and he was not threatening anyone when the officers arrived.
There did not appear to be an attempt to engage the CD Seller verbally to persuade him to stand down, although the officers may have done so. That of course would be shown in the now-missing storeowner video.
Dallas has become a model city for community policing.
As reported in The Atlantic, Dallas has reformed its police force from a less militaristic model. Steps they took include:
- The department committed itself to transparency.
- They developed a new foot pursuit policy that emphasized de-escalation.
- Officers are slated to take lethal force training every two months instead of every two years.
- They published years of statistics for transparendcy and accountability.
- The use of body cameras used by officers increased.
- Poor performing police officers were fired.
- Traffic ticket fines were no longer used to augument police budgets and the number of tickets was cut in half.
- Other suggestions for enlightened police procedures designed to reduce confrontation include eliminating ticket quotas and unbinding police budgets from fines, penalties, civil forfeitures and assessments, and prohibiting the use of pretext stops.
That second and third world countries are warning about policing in America shows just how exceptional the US is at this point in time.
Dallas has shown America the way to reform its police. Its time for the rest of America to do the same. Had two cities moved to community policing earlier, seven Americans might still be alive today.
TAMIR RICE (Cleveland 12 year old with toy gun) The squad car appears at 0.17.
ERIC GARNER (New Yorker selling "loose cigarettes") "I can't breathe" chokehold video.
SANDRA BLAND (Traffic stop, Waller County, Texas)
ALTON STERLING (Baton Rouge Man Selling CD's)
PHILANDO CASTILE (Minnesota Man Pulled Over for Busted Tail light, shot while moving arm)
"Black Lives Matter" By Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota via Wikimedia Commons
Use of photo does not constitute endorsement of this article.
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Recommended article from FiveFilters.org: Most Labour MPs in the UK Are Revolting.
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