Saturday Open Thread [7.9.2016]

This week. I can’t even tell you about the dispair. So I apologize for not changing out yesterday’s Open Thread content, I just couldn’t face it. So this pretty much sums up how I feel this week:

I don't want black men shot at traffic stops. I don't want cops shot by snipers. I don't want kids shot at school. I don't want any of this.

— EM Simpson (@charlie_simpson) July 8, 2016

Then there’s the helplessness. We’re a nation who says we want less violence but we have little leadership that will get us there.

Dallas police were doing everything right — and then the shooting started

The Dallas PD have been doing the hard work to engage their communities, to up the training for officers (especially in de-escalation skills), be more open and less of an occupying army:

As the Dallas Morning News reported last year, Dallas police have shifted to a stronger focus on deescalation techniques since David Brown became police chief in 2010, with dramatic results. In 2009, there were 147 excessive force complaints against police officers; by 2014, those complaints dropped by 64 percent. And as of November, when the article was published, there had been just 13 such complaints in 2015:

“This is the most dramatic development in policing anywhere in the country,” Brown said in an interview Friday with The Dallas Morning News. “We’ve had this kind of impact basically through training, community policing and holding officers accountable.”

Brown says his commanders have improved the quality of so-called reality-based training and increased required training hours for street cops over the past year. Trainers model the scenarios on real-life events recorded by officers’ body cams, dash-cams, and the media.

“We can learn from what Dallas is doing,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington, D.C. “That’s what police departments need — they don’t need training in silos: one day about the law, one day about firearms, one day about crisis intervention.”

Brown believes the Dallas training has also led to a 30 percent decline in assaults on officers this year, and a 40 percent drop in shootings by police.

This is important. There are no perfect police organizations, but this city has leadership that prioritized real community policing, transparency and accountability. This is what is wanted for Police Departments all over the country. This is wanted in Wilmington.

The Horiffic, Predictable Result of a Widely Armed Citizenry

Adam Gopnik discusses a topic that we touched on Thursday:

Once again, it needs stating because it can’t be stated too often: despite the desperate efforts of the National Rifle Association to prevent research on gun violence, the research has gone on, and shows conclusively what common sense already suggests. Guns are not merely the instrument; guns are the issue. The more guns there are, the more gun violence happens. In light of last night’s assassinations, it is also essential to remember that the more guns there are, the greater the danger to police officers themselves. It requires no apology for unjustified police violence to point out that, in a heavily armed country, the police officer who thinks that a suspect is armed is likelier to panic than when he can be fairly confident that the suspect is not. We have come to accept it as natural that ordinary police officers should be armed and ready to use lethal force at all times. They should not be. A black man with a concealed weapon should be no more liable to be killed than a white man with one. But having a nation of men carrying concealed lethal weapons pretty much guarantees that there will be lethal results, an outcome only made worse by our toxic racial history. Last night’s tragedy was also the grotesque reductio ad absurdum of the claim that it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun. There were nothing but good guys and they had nothing but guns, and five died anyway, as helpless as the rest of us.

Go read the whole thing. Then go make everyone you know read the whole thing.

More Guns, More Fear, More Killings

There are a number of problems with the way this “reasonableness” standard has been applied to police officers, who are usually afforded enormous latitude by the courts. Clearly the proliferation of guns in our everyday lives only exacerbates the problem, just as it has in self-defense law more generally. In Texas, an open carry state, it’s exceedingly difficult for police to discern who does and doesn’t have the right to brandish a weapon, particularly in a volatile situation like the one we saw Thursday night. (That difficulty likely contributed to the Dallas Police Department identifying the wrong man as a suspect in the shooting.) Put most simply: In jurisdictions that make it ever easier for civilians to be armed, it becomes ever more reasonable for the police to suspect that anyone, and everyone, is armed. The unsurprising result? The reasonableness standard becomes a race to the bottom.

Even if particular officer-involved shootings (like the shooting of Phil Castile) might seem unreasonable in isolation, it’s going to be harder and harder to say that a police officer is acting unreasonably in assuming that the guy with the gun can kill him instantly. As professor Rachel Harmon at the University of Virginia law school points out in an email, police officers cannot know or care within a split second whether a gun in the hands of a suspect comes with a permit, or whether it’s illegal: “Police fear legally carried weapons as well as illegally carried ones. Since generous carry laws likely mean that police will encounter more armed individuals, even randomly, as in a traffic stop, it’s time to think a lot more about the role gun carry laws might play in police fear and police shootings.”

The continued proliferation of guns means that more civilian-police interactions in which guns are brandished will be resolved hastily and with deadly force. It also makes it ever more “reasonable” for police to assume guns are always present. It’s a vicious circle.

These two trends—the increasing access to lethal weapons and a declining standard for reasonable fear by police—are on an indisputable collision course. We will either have more guns and therefore more police shootings, or we will somehow have to train police officers to believe that it is objectively unreasonable to be afraid of being shot in the split second they have to contend with an armed stranger. The shootings in Dallas are more likely to tilt the standard in the opposite direction and make officers more likely to think the people they encounter are out to do them harm.

Yes, too much for fair use, I’m sure, but this is important. As there are more guns, there will be more deadly force.

‘Good Guys With Guns’ Didn’t Stop Dallas Attack

Surprise, surprise, surprise. Even though there were people with guns in the protest crowd.

I’m a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing

And no matter what an officer has done to a black person, that officer can always cover himself in the running narrative of heroism, risk, and sacrifice that is available to a uniformed police officer by virtue of simply reporting for duty. Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo was acquitted of all charges against him in the shooting deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, both black and unarmed. Thirteen Cleveland police officers fired 137 shots at them. Brelo, having reloaded at some point during the shooting, fired 49 of the 137 shots. He took his final 15 shots at them after all the other officers stopped firing (122 shots at that point) and, “fearing for his life,” he jumped onto the hood of the car and shot 15 times through the windshield.

Not only was this excessive, it was tactically asinine if Brelo believed they were armed and firing. But they weren’t armed, and they weren’t firing. Judge John O’Donnell acquitted Brelo under the rationale that because he couldn’t determine which shots actually killed Russell and Williams, no one is guilty. Let’s be clear: this is part of what the Department of Justice means when it describes a “pattern of unconstitutional policing and excessive force.”

Go read the whole thing, then make everyone you know read the whole thing. I sent this to a couple of African American cops I know yesterday and they all responded with some version of “Yep”. Looking at some of the LEO responses to the Dallas shooting on Facebook yesterday, I finally recognized some of the bullying that some of these guys and girls will indulge in when you are not buying into the mythmaking.

ADDING this video from late March of an interview with a group of NYPD officers who are talking about the NYPD quota system:

So what interests you today?