Global Crisis

Yesterday CNN published my new essay on the shooting of a black, homeless, disabled man by the LAPD. I argue that the focus on whether of not "Africa," as the man was known, was reaching for a gun, is the wrong question. Instead, use-of-force incidents should be assessed by taking a broad time frame, looking at the decisions that led up to the violence.

I am writing a longer piece on the upcoming Supreme Court case for Al Jazeera, out sometime in the next few weeks, and so have been thinking about that specific issue a lot, and learning from Seth Stoughton, a law professor at South Carolina. After the Africa shooting, I reached back out to him for more information.

According to Seth Stoughton, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who specializes in police regulation, there are two ways to look at use-of-force incidents. One position advocates for a narrow time frame in which we only examine the moment in which the trigger was pulled. The other argues for a broad time frame, in which the whole chain of decisions leading up to the moment of force is part of the assessment.

In fact, Stoughton notes that the Supreme Court may well rule on this matter in Sheehan vs San Francisco, a case also involving police violence and mental illness. On March 23, the court will hear whether San Francisco police should have considered Teresa Sheehan's disability before entering her room, and whether their failure to accommodate her disability violates the Fourth Amendment. Sheehan was shot, but survived, and is trying to keep her lawsuit from being thrown out. As with most Supreme Court cases, the decision will likely have broad implications.

In an email, Seth wrote me to clarify slightly. "The failure to accommodate Ms. Sheehan’s disability isn’t the basis of the Fourth Amendment claim. The Fourth Amendment claim is for an unreasonable seizure (and one reason this seizure was arguably unreasonable is because officers knew of her disability)."

That's my fault for trying to compress the whole case into a single sentence, and I appreciate Seth clarifying. You should also read this storify of his tweets on the concept of tactical restraint, as I think it's critical for re-imagining policing.

One criticism of every piece critical of police violence is the argument that the suspect should have just complied with commands and he or she would have been fine. Therefore, the failure to not comply justifies the death or violence.

I need your help pushing back against that when you see the argument and have the energy to do so. To make it clear that for people with disabilities, failure to comply may not be a choice, and best practices offer other ways to approach such situations. There will always be moments in which police need to use deadly force. It may even be true that there was no way to approach Africa without violence resulting, though I am skeptical of this. I believe he was another victim of the cult of compliance, and there will be more. Probably within a few days.

This appears to be Grade-A policing...restraint/stabilization until action/force is unavoidable. http://t.co/DxlzDLo1bw @Lollardfish ^lh
— The Virtus Group (@TheVirtusGroup) February 7, 2015

I write a lot about bad killings and ugly use-of-force incidents. I then get asked, "well what should the cops have done?" which is a fair question. One of the people I rely on is CIT and SWAT trained officer Louis Hayes, a member of the Virtus Group, a use-of-force trainer and one of the founders of the Illinois model. You can see his tweet above.

Here's a video of a police shooting, linked not embedded, in which police do initially show tactical restraint and back up out a house in which an encounter is deteriorating.

What's impressive about his is how hard the officers work to not shoot a drunk, armed (he picks up knives at various points during the video), mentally unstable (thanks to THC, alcohol, and perhaps other factors) individual. Like Hayes, I try to avoid rendering absolute judgment. Notice his "appears" in the tweet. But many other incidents I've watched would have ended with gunfire right away.

Instead, the officer keep backing up, backing up, calling for support, backing up, and trying to stabilize. It may be that at the end the officer makes a mistake by going back close to the house and allowing the suspect to re-engage (breaking a window, glass in the officer's face) and thus drawing fire, but if so it was within a context of trying to stabilize overall.

This time, the officers still shot and killed the individual. But if this is the standard for police conduct in dangerous situations, a lot of lives will be saved - including law enforcement lives.