American Policing Is A Cult
Back during the aftermath of the police killing of James Jahar Perez, I remember that one of my great frustrations was the repeated argument that once an officer is in such-and-such a situation, force is justified even if the officer’s actions were what caused it to escalate that far, as was so plainly evident in that particular killing. I’d written a bit about it after the farcical public inquest.
In general, testimony suggests that the point at which Officers Macomber and Sery began to feel that something might be amiss was when Perez rolled up his tinted driver’s side window, making it impossible for them to have visual control over Perez’ actions. While details vary, the general sense is that prior to this, there likely was some sort of interaction between Macomber and Perez -- or at least that Macomber was issuing verbal commands of some sort to Perez.
But the window being rolled up is the key moment to the entire incident.
As near as we can tell, once that window went up, eliiminating Macomber’s visual control over Perez, the decision to rush the car, pull open the door, and escalate the level of contact between himself and Perez is a decision that took the situation in exactly the opposite direction from sensible procedure.
One that window went up, once visual control was lost, would it not have been a better tactic for Macomber and Sery to retreat to the relative cover of their patrol car and call for back-up, indicating to dispatch that a traffic stop had just resulted in a subject vanishing behind an overly-tinted window and leaving them with absolutely no clue as to what might be transpiring inside the vehicle?
Why rush the car? Why pull open the door? (Especially, for that matter, if Macomber was behaving as if he were without a partner, behaving as if he were on his own as is usually the case?) Why not instead call for additional officers and balance out the sudden unknown with the sheer force of numbers?
As I noted in that same piece, part of what was so fundamentally galling in all of this was that much the same thing happened in the lead-up to the police killing of Kendra James the previous year: the responding officers escalated the situation as if scripting themselves into a situation where suddenly use of force became “necessary”.
At the very least, I wondered at the time, shouldn’t that be a sort of “fruit of the poisonous tree”? If they created the circumstance in which they used deadly force, shouldn’t they be held responsible for that initial decision to escalate?
Looking at the 8 Can’t Wait campaign earlier, it wasn’t so much that I thought any one piece was more important than the others, but that “require de-escalation” can underpin so many other called-for reforms. At the very least, there needs to be a clear prohibition against unnecessary escalation, which is precisely the sort of escalation which led to the killings of Kendra James and James Jahar Perez.
The more this week has sunk in, the more skeptical I become that you even can reform existing police departments and policing behavior. We’ve spent decades building up cops’ view of their job as a kind of military cosplay and toxically-masculine television heroics; probably millions of dollars on inviting William Lewinski to drill into cops’ heads that if they don’t use deadly force as soon as possible, they’re dead; and turned over all the power to the organized crime families that are cop unions.
That doesn’t leave us “merely” (it’s not, of course, mere) with the challenge of reform, it leaves us with the challenge of cult deprogramming, and I’m skeptical that’s even possible.