By Paul Hirschfield
Paul Hirschfield does not work
for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization
that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant
affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
The Conversation is funded
by Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the
Knight Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Alfred P Sloan Foundation,
Rita Allen Foundation and the Simons Foundation. Our global publishing platform
is funded by Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
In the sixth GOP debate, Donald
Trump told Americans: “The police are the most mistreated people in this
country.”
On the same day, the Chicago
Police Department released a videoshowing an officer killing Cedric Chatman in
2013. The teen was sprinting away at the time of the shooting, unarmed except
for a stolen cellphone box. The officer has faced no consequences for his
death.
Cedric Chatman.
The ritual of an unnecessary
police killing with no real accountability has become painfully familiar. The
unnecessary deaths of Tamir Rice and Eric Garner in 2014 are among those that
galvanized a national movement for greater restraint, accountability and equity
in policing.
And yet, 2015 may have been
American cops' deadliest year on record. According to my analysis of the Fatal
Encounters database, police violence directly caused or played a role in 1,126
deaths in 2015, up from 1,072 deaths in 2014.
Outrage over high profile
incidents and a shift in public opinion has led police departments around the
nation to equip more officers with cameras and add deescalation training.
But no local, state or federal
lawmakers have banned police from using unnecessary deadly force. Rather,
lawmakers at all levels still allow police the maximum latitude to use deadly
force that constitutional law permits. Indeed, a comparison with police in the
U.K. shows that this leniency goes too far to protect police at the price of
civilian deaths.
Who is protecting whom?
As written, interpreted and
enforced, laws and rules protect the police from the public. They are woefully
inadequate, however, at protecting the public from the police.
Despite some high-profile
violence against police, American police officers have never been safer.
Concerns over a “Ferguson effect” – another topic at the latest GOP debate –
are premature, at best.
The Supreme Court invalidated
deadly force to make arrests or prevent escapes back in 1985. They later ruled
that laws permitting deadly force to prevent grave and imminent harm from the
perspective of a “reasonable officer on the scene” are constitutional. The
Supreme Court imagined the reasonableness standard as “objective” in light of
the full set of “facts and circumstances confronting” the officer at the time
deadly force is used.
In practice, the reasonableness
of deadly force is fluid and contested.
What is a “reasonable fear” in a
post-Bernardino, post-9/11 America? If fearing remote, worst-case scenarios is
common sense, then are any perceived threats regarding “criminal suspects”
unreasonable?
Flexible definitions have
permitted prosecutors to claim police had “objectively reasonable” fears of
cars that were driving away, unarmed people running away and even people with
their hands up.
Research by The Guardian shows
that young black men are five times more likely than young white men to be
killed by police. But these permissive laws are a problem that transcends race.
Since July alone, at least 54
unarmed white men have been killed by police who faced no reasonable fear of
criminal charges.
Powerful defenders
State legislatures could have
passed their own laws to make clear when deadly force is unreasonable, but none
have bothered.
Permissive laws endure because
whenever tighter restrictions on the use of deadly force are proposed, police
leaders and their advocates swiftly attack them and their proponents for
endangering officers.
Their winning argument is that
officers must make hurried risk assessments while facing extreme stress in
tough-to-read situations. Exercising more care and restraint – for example,
pausing long enough to determine whether a suspicious object or movement toward
the officer’s weapon is a credible threat – means gambling with their lives,
the argument goes. They apparently believe that hundreds of unnecessary
killings would be a regrettable, but acceptable, price to pay in order to keep
police safe.
And that is where the political
debate usually stops, if it even starts.
Lawmakers are rarely asked to
justify their support of these policies that cost far more lives than they
save. However, there is a point at which this ratio feels unacceptably high to
the majority of voters in a civilized society.
The most deadly practices
Perhaps the best way to save
civilian lives is to limit the police use of so-called tactical responses that
are the most likely to result in unnecessary deaths.
Comparing police killings and
officer fatalities in the United States to the United Kingdom reveals some of
these tactics and circumstances.
Fatal police shootings are
exceedingly rare in the U.K. Americans were 403 times more likely than Brits to
be fatally shot by police in 2013-14.
If British police survive the
same types of situations without taking any lives, that suggests most killings
in the United States under those circumstances are unnecessary.
Weapons that rarely kill police
officers
Consider, for example, the
estimated 663 people in the U.S. fatally shot while allegedly wielding blades
or blunt objects since 2013. Such weapons have killed only nine U.S. police
officers since 2008.
Police were not in any grave
danger when they killed people like Lavall Hall, Mario Woods and Darrien Hunt –
men who never raised their weapons.
British police recorded 26,370
violent knife crimes during the 2014-15 fiscal year, including those that
threatened police. But British police have killed only one person armed with a
knife since 2008. During that time, no British officers were killed by weapons
other than guns.
American police fatally shot 53
unarmed people in vehicles in 2015. By contrast, since 2008, no British police
have killed anyone to stop a threatening vehicle. During that same period of
time, no British cops died because they failed to stop a vehicle.
In addition to unarmed motorists,
American police killed about 200 completely unarmed people last year. This
easily exceeds the total of those legally executed over the last five years.
This suggests that prohibiting
the use of deadly force against people unarmed and fleeing, armed only with
vehicles or armed with less dangerous weapons and not attacking anyone would
make policing only slightly riskier while saving hundreds of lives over the
next several years.
The same logic applies to other
potentially lethal “tactical responses” that can safely be outlawed – such as
head strikes, chokeholds, and tasing people who are nonviolent, subdued or
fleeing.
Fewer killings, better policing
Reform opponents are armed and
ready. They will warn that modest reforms will chase good people from police
work and increase crime, but the experience of countries with more restrictive
deadly force laws suggests that’s not true.
Staunchly “prolife” police forces
like Norway’s and Finland’s tend to enjoy more public trust and attract more
upstanding recruits. Crime and arrests may decline under stricter deadly force
rules, because better respected police should garner more legitimacy and
cooperation.
Restricting deadly force will
require investing more in police training and nonlethal weapons technology. A
great source of funding is the billions of dollars that will otherwise be spent
settling lawsuits stemming from unnecessary deadly force.
State and federal laws and police
guidelines all give special consideration to police, because they put their
lives on the line to keep us safe. But these laws are asking far more civilians
to put their lives on the line in order to keep police safe. Such laws do not
afford everyone “equal protection” and, therefore, require thoughtful and urgent
revision.
