I am reposting in response to the CDM Black Caucus’s statement on Tamir Rice. Legally speaking, the Cleveland Grand Jury should have returned no bill. The outcome was both completely justified and pre-ordained, not because of racism or politics, but because of the law. Politics entered into the equation when the DA sat a grand jury. It was an attempt to provide cover for the legal system.
Tamir Rice died. We can blame the police officer, but he has more than enough legal justification for his actions. Race clearly enters into the hundreds of cases of people killed by police. We can blame racism. Training and departmental policies about the use of lethal force might also help. But the ultimate problem is the law itself. If police have an objectively reasonable reason to feel threatened, they can legally shoot people.
There is no statute governing the police use of lethal or excessive force. Thus it falls to case law to decide the lawfulness of an officer’s actions. (See below). If we want to stop the use of excessive and lethal force, we need to change the law. Here’s what I wrote before:
A tale of two communities.
One a mid-sized Massachusetts city, the other a small suburb of 14,000.
An officer from the city is laid off and finds work in the suburb. Responding to a call in the suburb one evening, the officer finds himself in the living room of a nice home talking to an older couple about an attempted home invasion. Their dog is barking at him. The officer isn’t in danger, just annoyed. Nonetheless, he takes out his gun, points it at the dog, and tells the couple, “Shut that fucking dog up, or I’m going to shoot it!”
The officer does not last long in the suburb.
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This anecdote, I think, illustrates a problem with American law enforcement: different communities, different standards. Suburbanites tend to know their rights. They are not afraid of the police. They do not fear retaliation if they make a complaint. They know the people in the local government. They know lawyers. They know how to sue. The suburb does not tolerate police who pull their weapons and threaten house pets. They tolerate such behavior. A suburban kid gets busted with intent to distribute, his parents hire a lawyer to get him off with a suspended sentence and probation. His urban counterpart, with an overworked, underpaid, public defender, ends up in the system. Our communities have their standards, what we will tolerate and what we won’t.
What people of color once knew from experience, we all know from Youtube. Lethal force are too frequently applied in a racist and capricious manner. One source of the problem is that statutes set a very low bar for law enforcement. Communities may set certain norms for law enforcement, but laws are supposed to provide a backstop for social norms. In the United States, the law tragically provides almost no backstop.
If a police officer has “probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or other” in Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985), s/he can shoot to kill. That belief only needs to be reasonable as it will be “[t]he “reasonableness” of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight” Graham v. Connor 490 U.S. 386 (1989). Thus case law goes a long way in protecting police officers from prosecution. These cases set a low bar for police use of lethal force, and provide the standard for objective reasonableness as a test. It’s important that they only consider the officer’s point of view. In Utah, an unarmed 20-year old was shot and killed by police when he went to adjust his pants. Police were looking for three people that flashed a gun. The 20 year-old was with two friends. He was wearing headphones and not complying with police orders. The shooting was justified. As Amnesty International reports, “No state limits the use of lethal force to only those situations where there is an imminent threat to life or serious injury to the officer or to others.”
I’m no lawyer, but as I understand it, the lack of a statute results in a reliance on case law, which compared to international law and standards, are decidedly weak. I’m not overly concerned with complying with international law, but it’s worth comparing any American system to an ideal. That’s often how change starts. This should be our guiding principle:
“Law enforcement officials shall not use firearms against persons except in self-defence or defence of others against the imminent threat of death or serious injury, to prevent the perpetration of a particularly serious crime involving grave threat to life, to arrest a person presenting such a danger and resisting their authority, or to prevent his or her escape, and only when less extreme means are insufficient to achieve these objectives. In any event, intentional lethal use of firearms may only be made when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life” (emphasis added).
There is much more that needs to be done. Police work is not necessarily discriminatory, insensitive, or abusive. Most police do see their jobs as serving and protecting. In many communities, and many instances, their jobs have more to do with social work than criminal investigation. Since the advent of the Quinn Bill, police have become a much more professional group of people, educated and well-trained. It’s time for our laws address all of their roles in the community in all of our communities.
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Final anecdote: A police officer makes a traffic stop. The driver threatens him with a knife. and a car chase through two towns ensues. The suspect is eventually cornered in a strip bar where he brandishes a barbecue fork with 5 inch tines. An autopsy later determines that he is drunk and has used cocaine. The police officer, a 16-year veteran of the force, ends up shooting and killing him.
“An individual, including a police officer, may use deadly force if he has a reasonable belief that he is in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury,” [District Attorney William] Bennett said.
“Applying this legal standard to the credible facts, there is insufficient evidence to prove that the sergeant did not actually and reasonably believe that he was about to be attacked. … Consequently, no criminal charges will be sought in this matter and the criminal investigation will be deemed closed.”
I remember there being some controversy over this shooting, which took place in Monson. Would the suspect be alive today if police followed used lethal force “”only as a last resort when strictly necessary to protect themselves or others against the imminent threat of death or serious injury”? Would the officer in question have been indicted? The DA’s words echo Garner, but they hardly offer a ringing endorsement of his actions.
…why race of the suspect seems to be a disproportionate factor, unless it is simply the correlation of race to type of community in which case the stats are skewed by default. I’d still like to know which comes first – racial bias or recruitment into the police force.
Also, I think there is a significant proofreading issue in the first paragraph explaining the suburban anecdote. In about the middle of the paragraph I assume you meant to say, “They DO NOT tolerate such behavior.”
because people of color are disproportionately policed.
Perpetrators of excessive or lethal force come from all races. Some Latino police abuse or kill Latinos. Some of Freddie Gray’s killers were black. My guess is that a lot of police are raised in authoritarian households and/or communities that support authority, and some police care more about their authority than the law.
The underlying problem is that we have a legal system that allows police to shoot people if they can make the post hoc argument that they felt threatened.
Poor people per se get different justice, and just like with food stamps and welfare, most people shot by police are white.
The couple with the barking dog would have gotten that result whether they were June and Ward Cleaver OR Cliff and Claire Huxtable.
A larger percentage of black people as a whole are poor, and it is commensuratately a greater problem for them. But it’s why the response to complaint about racism is scepticism. Too many poor white people recognize the treatment.
This is such a terrible thing, to have a kid killed by cops thinking his toy gun is real.
Where is the outrage in terms of banning toy guns, and banning real guns? Clearly this tragedy would not have happened if guns were very rare in the community.
The other real culprits, never identified, are gun owners not willing to give up voluntarily their weapons.
Just curious. How many BMGers are gun owners? And how do you feel about what happened to Tamir Rice?
There’s a short book available now by Ta-Nehisi Coates, titled “Between the World and Me.” It’s a thought-provoking read, and worth your time. I mention it because Coates writes about a friend of his, Prince Jones Jr., a college student whose mother was solidly middle class (she was a doctor), was trailed by a cop for hours, and then the cop shot him.
While discrimination by class does exist, discrimination by race definitely exists in America.
He writes of his experience and is valid. But poor white people get similar treatment, although I would not expect him to realize that based on his own life.
Worth discussing. I think it’s both, but poverty may play the greater role.
it’s race too, as Joel says.
There is a strong argument this was the case in Cleveland. In Cook County we have seen State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez and Mayor Emmanuel consistently undermine efforts to let police see justice and accountability. She deliberately undercharged the cop that murdered Rekia Boyd, they kept the death of Laquan McDonald sealed and hidden for over a year. They have lost the moral authority to lead, the police in Chicago have lost the moral authority to use lethal force on behalf of the community. These officials work at the behest of the police union, which has defended convicted torturers like Jon Burge along with every dirty cop that has killed an unarmed black person in the last few years.
My sister is poor and white, my nephew is bigger than her and disabled and had an episode where she called the police to get him off her. They didn’t ride up shoot him dead and kill an innocent neighbor with ricocheting bullets. That incident happened to a poor black family last weekend. Cops immediately showed up and started shooting. There is a reason the whole goddamned town is under indictment by the DOJ. Chicago is a Ferguson on steroids with ‘Democrats’ in charge. The police may indeed have the law on their side and local officials in their pocket, but true justice is on the side of their victims.
argument that the cop wouldn’t have gotten off in Cleveland.
I have a childhood friend who is a retired paramedic. He worked in Chicago for 20 years. Southside. Robert Taylor homes. Cabrini Green. Early in his career he averaged one call per hour for a 24 hour shift. His Facebook page has ignorant, right-wing talking points, but also some pretty racist stuff, especially when his friends comment. I get the feeling that Chicago is pretty racist. (Incidentally, he and his friends hate Rahmbo).
We need to align the law with justice. They do this in Europe. There are statutes about use of force and using lethal force as a last resort.
Toxic local law enforcement, aided and abetted by corrupt local officials, and a legal system that has yet to catch up with morality. Systematic changes will be required.
And you’re friend isn’t alone. Boston isn’t immune to this either, but the cycle of white flight has never gone away in Chicago. The formerly Jewish and Irish South Shore went black by 1970, ditto Irish/Polish Englewood and Lithuanian Marquette Park by 1980. Morgan Park and Beverly integrated a bit better due to shady neighborhood groups that made sure the “right kind” of black families could move on, and “not too many at one time” so the blocks wouldn’t be “destabilized”. A friend who works as an accountant down there says all her white co-workers regularly disparage BLM and even the UU church had to take the sign down after police intimidation. The one black co-worker is a cop kid and is a mouthpiece for the same rhetoric, either in self defense or legitimate feeling. After Daley II demolished the towers the black working class that couldn’t get vouchers to the new “mixed income” communities fled to suburbs that couldn’t handle them like Harvey and Chicago Heights whose white populations fled in droves in the 90s and early 2000s leaving the cities as ticking time bombs of fiscal insolvency, hotbeds of gang activity due to police scarcity, and mini Fergusons that rely on traffic tickets to fund their schools.
It’s not just a broken justice system but in many ways a broken country. Chicago is not alone, but it’s definitely one of the worst Northern cities for these issues. It’ll be up to my generation to fix it.
> We need to align the law with justice. They do this in Europe. There are statutes about use of force and using lethal force as a last resort.
Agreed, but how to do this with the gun epidemic we are seeing? Sadly, the first step – taking the majority of guns off streets – is still elusive.
It’s a very complicated problem that I am afraid cannot simply be legislated away.