Disclaimer: Despite the title of this post, and the analysis to follow, I am not calling a particular shooting “bad.” That would be an insult to an investigative process that is just starting, and presumptuous given that I am not part of said process. Rather, my intent is to use one example–with some thoughts on how it might have happened–to explain how I think we should think about shootings that aren’t as clear-cut as we would like.
On September 16, Terrence Crutcher’s car broke down the middle of the road in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Police came to check on him. Crutcher approached police, initially refusing commands to show his hands. Eventually he walked back to his vehicle with his hands high in the air. While he was at the door to his own vehicle, one police officer deployed a TASER and a second police officer shot him with her handgun. According to police this was because Crutcher lunged towards his vehicle, as if to grab a weapon. Crutcher was found to be unarmed, with no weapon in the vehicle. He was later pronounced dead at a hospital. And Terrence Crutcher was black.
Crutcher had a criminal record, but his only real offenses (carrying a concealed weapon and resisting an officer) were twenty years ago. He had four children, and was studying music at Tulsa Community College. He was involved in his church, and sang in the choir.
I say this to paint the picture of why this is a police department’s nightmare. Why it offends the sensibilities of people watching the news; why it makes the news. As some in the #BlackLivesMatter and political/nonviolent movements have been noting recently, someone’s history and character should not inform our feelings of their death. There
should not be any conversation about whether someone “deserved” to die. Nobody deserves for someone else to decide whether they live or die. Nobody deserves to be shot by police or anyone else. If someone smokes weed and shoplifted some cigarillos, it doesn’t make their life any less valuable than that of someone who works full-time in a soup kitchen and spends weekends nursing orphaned kittens back to health. But background is part of the story that we crave, and the media serves us.
The Tulsa Police Department released the video from a car dash camera and from the helicopter. If you click those links, know that you are choosing to watch video of police shooting someone, which you may find disturbing. At the time of the shooting, the helicopter is on the far side of the car and police officers are blocking the dash camera’s view of Crutcher. I’ve found some websites that claim you can see Crutcher dropping his arms just before the shooting; I’ve found others that claim the video proves his hands were up. I can’t tell–and I think judging it with authority is going to be difficult, as you can’t hear audio that clearly tells you when the shots are fired (so you can’t tell if any movement by Crutcher is before or after he is hit).
Before Crutcher is shot, you can hear someone in the helicopter saying “That looks like a bad dude, too. Could be on something.”
So this story has all the elements: An unarmed black man, who literally sings in his church choir, with his hands up, shot by a white police officer, after another officer, for unknown reasons, calls him a “bad dude” and muses that he “could be on something.” My Facebook feed is blowing up. I’ve seen it called an execution. I’ve seen it called murder. I’ve seen people calling for the officer’s immediate arrest (which is really the most mild of those three things).
The legality of police use of force is governed primarily by the US Supreme Court decision Graham v. Connor. Graham v. Connor established the “objective reasonableness” standard for police use of force. An action is considered “objectively reasonable” if:
- A police officer with the same level of training and experience,
- performing the same duties,
- in the same situation,
- with the same information available to them at the time,
- could take the same action.
So I’m going to deputize you. Please try your very best to fill the shoes I’m putting you in. And if you’re a pacifist… I guess for this exercise, pretend you’re not.
You’re a police officer. You raised your right hand and swore that you would enforce the law. You’ve got a gun on your right hip, that you’ve trained in how to use. And you’ve accepted that if it comes to it, you WILL use it.
Almost every day, when you read the news, you read about another police officer being shot. It’s September, and already more police officers have been shot and killed this year than all of last year.
You see a car stopped in the middle of the road–looks like car trouble. You stop to see if you can help. The driver starts walking towards you.
He’s big. I mean, you rocked the athletic tests at the academy and you’ve stayed fit ever since, but still. You weigh, what, 140 pounds soaking wet. This guy has got to be over 300. He walks towards you. You can’t see his hands. Your heart rate has gone from 60 to 160. You’re scared.
You order him to show you his hands. He refuses. You call for backup. You draw your gun. Finally he puts his hands in the air, but now he’s walking away from you. You order him to stop, but he doesn’t. He keeps walking back towards his car.
Your heart rate skyrockets even more. He’s refusing to obey orders, even at gunpoint. That’s a HUGE RED FLAG. He’s got his hands in the air to show he’s not a threat, while at the same time still behaving in a manner that could be threatening. Is he trying to stall you while he plans his attack? You know bad guys do that all the time.
Your backup arrives. The driver is still walking to his car, still refusing to stop. He gets to the driver’s door. You know that action is always faster than reaction. You know if he suddenly becomes a threat, it will take you three quarters of a second just to realize what is happening. You know that’s enough time to eliminate the advantage you have by already having him at gunpoint. You know that he could reach into the car, grab a gun, turn, and shoot you faster than you could react. You know that if he pulls a gun, even if you get the first shot off, life isn’t like the movies. He could easily still shoot you after you shoot him.
Does he have a gun? You don’t know. But only civilians get to say “probably not.” Cops have to think, “Possibly.”
Now your adrenaline is really pumping. You’ve got tunnel vision–blackness creeps in around the edges of your view. The voices of your fellow officers have become muffled. You can’t hear what they’re saying.
He lunges into the car! Or does he?
You hear a loud POP. It’s your partner’s TASER deploying. Or is it a gunshot? Who is shooting? The suspect? Your partner, seeing something you don’t? Someone else? Do you even know what the sound was at all?
You don’t have hours to think about this. Or minutes. Or seconds. You have a fraction of a second and your body is in full on condition red, fight-or-flight mode. Maybe your finger was already on the trigger–did it jerk when you heard the pop?
Is it possible you shot him?
If you did, woe is you. Because it turns out there was no gun in the car, or on his person. It turns out he’s a student, a choir singer, and a father. Now there will be a departmental investigation. The prosecutor will review your actions to decide if you should be charged with murder. The family will sue you, personally, because you took their loved one away. Now everyone in the country is posting on Facebook about how you should be arrested immediately. Now you have to go into hiding, because people want you dead. You’ll have to leave the department, because no one is safe around you. And you can’t get another job, for the same reason. But none of that even matters, because all you can think about is that you just shot this guy who wasn’t supposed to be shot. You took a life.
A repeat of my earlier disclaimer: I’m not saying this is how it happened, or that this is how things will unfold from here. I’m not saying this shooting was “bad” because Tulsa PD might determine that, based on what the officer saw and experienced at the time, she acted “correctly.” But hopefully this has helped me get my point across.
People see bad shootings, or shootings that look bad, and they respond with rage. They call for firings, arrests, and prosecutions. They frame it in criminal terms. It’s murder, it’s execution.
When considering a crime you have to consider intent. Did this police officer–does any police officer–put on the uniform and say, “I’m going to go murder an unarmed black person today?” Do you think this officer just shot Crutcher because she was pissed?
The way I see it, a bad police shooting is almost never a murder. It’s a mistake. It’s a HUGE mistake. It’s a mistake with a firearm. It’s a mistake in violent action. It’s a mistake that could cost someone his life.
When we put on a gun and go into a violent world, we know that the stakes are SO much higher than with many other jobs. We know that if we make a mistake at work, the cost can be SO much greater than time and money.
What should the consequences be for someone who makes such a mistake?
I 100% agree that there should be accountability and justice when the police screw up. But I do not agree that accountability and justice are the same thing as throwing someone in jail. There should be a criminal investigation, to determine if a crime was committed and the officer should be charged. And there should be a departmental investigation. A thorough one. One that considers every second of the encounter. Everything that went wrong, every road not taken.
In the movie version of the Wild West, everyone wore a gun and everyone was responsible for their own violent defense. In today’s society, we outsource our violence to the police. If we are to lay that responsibility on their shoulders, we should also grant them protection and support. It’s a lot harder to convict a police officer of a crime in a line-of-duty shooting than it would be to convict a civilian in similar circumstances. And it should be. Because we give them guns. We expect that lethal force will be a tool on their belts. We expect that they run towards gunfire, that they confront every criminal act, that they never just walk away.
I have not discussed race in this post. For some, that will make the whole post irrelevant, because we can’t talk about Terrence Crutcher without addressing that he was a black man shot by a white police officer. Racial undertones and the probability of implicit bias are present in every interaction between black people and the police. The comment by the officer in the helicopter? Maybe he had a good reason for saying it, but I can’t help but think he said it because he was looking at a big black guy.
We have no way of knowing if, or the degree to which, implicit bias contributed to Terrence Crutcher’s death. Some will say it’s the whole reason he’s dead. There’s some statistical evidence to the contrary. Some will say race has nothing to do with this. That’s absurd. But the bottom line, to me, is that there is absolutely no way to measure this. And even if there were, implicit bias is not the same thing as overt racism. If the officer’s decision to shoot was influenced by her implicit bias, does that increase her criminal culpability?
I’ve addressed race and policing in America before and you better believe I will again. But for the purposes of using one incident to illustrate my thoughts on bad shootings in general, I find it helpful to leave my comments on that angle at that.
For the non-police among you, I really, really hope this will cause you not to turn a blind eye to officers’ actions, but to at least see things a little differently when something like this is in the news. For the police: Well, this post mostly isn’t for you. But maybe I can just take a moment to offer one more reminder that the days of blanket immunity from judgment and scorn are over. We need to stop expecting it. We need to be more transparent about why things are done the way they are. We need to be ready to explain our actions and those of our subordinates. And we need to be willing to take really hard looks at critical incidents–not with the intent to find wrongdoing and dole out discipline, but neither with the intent to slap each other on the back and say “job well done.” We need to be willing to ask, “What could we have done differently?”
And that is all I have for now, friends. Be safe.
Additional sources for this article:
The Washington Post
Heavy