Considering the troubling trend of routine police stops rapidly escalating to the application of lethal force – particularly against minorities, Bill Maher frequently questions whether propensity to overestimate potential danger has made police officers unwilling to take any risk in a job that regularly requires it.
And while there’s certainly something to that, after talking with a number of active and retired police officers, I’ve learned there’s much more to it than that.
But before we proceed, please allow me to make a few stipulations.
The first is we’re not talking about split second decisions like the one involving 13-year-old Chicagoan Adam Toledo. Any child’s death at the hands of law enforcement is tragic, but when you’ve already been involved in an earlier shooting and you’re running down an alley from the police with a gun in your hand at 2 a.m., nothing good is going to happen.
It certainly wasn’t too terribly difficult to predict that outcome. And it’s beyond any form of rank hypocrisy that his parents can suddenly play the indignant self-righteous game when they clearly had no intention of raising this child.
That police officer had no more than 10 milliseconds – that’s one one-hundredth of a second – to determine whether Toledo still had the gun in his hand, and the human brain is incapable of processing anything that quickly.
And for the progressive mob, who have the benefit of watching the video in slow motion – over and over again – to crucify this officer and call it an “assassination” is beyond despicable.
We’re not talking about the George Floyd murder, either, because that was an assassination.
Lastly, while I’d never recommend resisting arrest, for my pasty white suburban ilk to think they even begin to know what it’s like to be repeatedly stopped for driving while black, give me a flippin’ break! Most of y’all wouldn’t last 20 minutes walking in a pair of minority shoes.
To wit, I keep asking the question and have yet to get an answer. How is that in 82 percent, 86 percent, and 92 percent Caucasian St. Charles, Batavia, and Geneva, their traffic court calls persistently consist of 50 to 66 percent minorities?
And I’ve seen how some of you white folks drive!
No! What we’re talking about is the Daunte Wright Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, shooting, and to a lesser extent, DeCynthia Clements’ death right here in Elgin. The difference between the two being that the Elgin Police gave Ms. Clements every opportunity to stand down before her tragic end.
And The first underlying issue is, unlike Elgin, Brooklyn Center’s 87 percent white police force doesn’t begin to represent their 62 percent minority population. This inevitably leads to the kind of us against them mentality that we saw erupt in Ferguson, Missouri.
The once predominantly Caucasian Brooklyn Center isn’t nearly the only middle-sized American suburban municipality to have to cope with that kind of massive demographic and economic change, either. And when law enforcement has no personal minority reference point to base their decisions on, it’s too easy to reach for the gun instead of deescalating the situation.
The second problem is training, as in police officers don’t get nearly enough of it – particularly in the use of tasers and firearms. That’s particularly true of the smaller suburban police departments who generally send recruits to the police academy for just 15 weeks.
To put that in perspective, it takes two years of school to become a licensed massage therapist.
That dynamic became abundantly clear in Brooklyn Center where a 16-year police veteran mistook her pistol for a taser.
But it’s the third and most surprising complication that’s been the catalyst for going right to the taser – the high price of workman’s compensation claims.
Though, I firmly believe the Clements’ shooting was justified, considering she was armed with a knife, I’m surprised the officers didn’t just lay her out with a riot shield as she emerged from her vehicle. Sure, there’s risk involved, but it was minimal compared to the potential reward.
Similarly, there were three officers surrounding Wright when he tried to twist away while being handcuffed, yet instead of forcing him to the ground, they went for their tasers and tragedy ensued.
Per Mr. Maher, there does seem to have been some major law enforcement policy shift. Because when I think back to the conversations with my former radio show cohost and 30-year police officer (1970 to 2000), Larry Jones, his department certainly wasn’t afraid of getting get into a scuffle if the situation required it.
And the retired officers had the answer.
When the tasers became routine part of the police arsenal around the year 2,000, those municipalities saw them as a “miracle weapon” that would surely -solve two major problems. The first was its capacity to subdue someone without permanent harm, and the second was a means to avoid the most expensive workman’s comp claims.
Think about it! The average officer salary is $67,600, so their workman’s comp claims can easily exceed six figures, particularly if the officer’s permanently injured. So, city managers rewrote their policy manuals to make the taser the first option when it came to recalcitrant subject.
But tasers didn’t turn out to be that miracle weapon. Despite manufacturers’ claims that they’re 90 to 97 percent effective in the field, according to the LAPD they only work 53 percent of the time. And the New York Times recently reported that 33 percent of individuals ineffectively tased became more violent as a result.
So, tasers aren’t making the situation better, they’re making it worse, and mistaking a gun for one isn’t as uncommon as we might think. Considering how unreliable they truly are, if we want to avoid more Daunte Wrights, it’s time to retire the taser and re-edit those policy handbooks to get back to the basics.
Again, if Wright was simply tackled, he might be a little sore the next morning, but he’d still be alive.
Another fascinating issue that came up during the course of my conversations was that, unlike their male counterparts, policewomen cannot meet the physical realities of the job, and this makes them much more likely to resort to the taser and their sidearm.
On Thursday we’ll discuss how progressive politicians and the courts are forcing police and fire departments to relax their fitness standards just so women can make the cut. And what could possibly go wrong with that?
