Tag Archives: Darren Wilson

Why Are Cops Still Using Real Bullets?

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterOne facet of the current outrage over hyper-aggressive, racially-focused police work isn’t getting much attention, but it keeps rolling back in my alleged mind. It’s this: Why, in 2014 USA is the average beat cop still exercising “lawful” force with live ammunition?

The spate of demonstrations and high emotion surrounding the Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice (the 12 year-old in Cleveland) incidents will subside soon enough, replaced in the public’s attention by some new atrocity, Christmas shopping or speculation of what Leonard DiCaprio was planning to do with 20 supermodels. But until then it’s worth asking the question, “Why haven’t police departments been required to transition to non-lethal ammunition?”

Its been an established fact for decades that the average cop goes his/her entire career without firing their weapon. Obviously, firearms are standard issue equipment for the exceedingly rare incident where the cop confronts some truly lethal perp/psycho. But even then, in those remarkably rare moments when a lone cop or two is caught by surprise, the preferred outcome is to render the suspect immobile and pack him off to jail for the courts to decide his fate.

In the (even rarer) case where the police are in pursuit of an indisputably violent, gun-wielding offender, a situation where back-up is usually called in, it isn’t impossible to switch over to a “live” gun stashed in the cop car … or just let the SWAT team take over.

Without question, the usual suspects, the NRA and its most ardent, imbalanced, gun-fetishizing supporters will howl that replacing death-dealing bullets with rubber bullets (which stun and hurt like hell, especially at short distances) or chemical darts is a new low in lunatic, liberal criminal-coddling, a neutering of the last barrier of flexing machismo between the thug class and the huddled, fearful masses.

The response to that, as always, should be “[bleep] them.” That crowd is as unstable as any street “thug”.

Polling shows a wide gap between what white America and black America think of aggressive policing. And yes, it does matter that the former has almost no experience with an insecure cop freaking out at the sight of you, or getting hostile when asked why the hell he’s getting in your face? For blacks, even suburban professionals, that’s a common occurrence, and one that gets exponentially worse in predominantly black neighborhoods.

This situation wouldn’t be as bad if the average police force had a better pool of police candidates to choose from. But you get what you pay for. At standard salary rates, cop shops don’t exactly have the luxury of culling through the cream of decision-makers.

The cop who killed little Tamir Rice in Cleveland, blasting away before he even got out his car, was regarded as so dismally ill-equipped to make good decisions he was let go from a small town force before catching on with Cleveland’s finest … which never looked at the details of his work history.

I quote his previous commander’s assessment: “ … he would not be able to substantially cope, or make good decisions, during or resulting from any other stressful situation.”

Put bluntly, the guy was/is fundamentally unstable and in a sane world should never have been issued a gun permit, much less given what amounts to a license to kill.

Ditto Darren Wilson in Ferguson. A reading of the grand jury testimony paints a fairly clear picture of an insecure tough guy wannabe, his swagger bolstered by the goods on his hip. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of doubt left that Wilson incited the confrontation and then panicked when Brown (unwisely) told him to “[bleep] off.”

But had he, or the dimwit in Cleveland been firing rubber bullets or chemical darts, no one involved would be dead today, and the courts could have gone about their usual business of … exonerating the cops.

As for Eric Garner’s chokehold death on Staten Island, where would that story be if the cops weren’t on an arrest quota, a la “The Wire”? The guy’s back selling cigarettes. Write him a ticket and find something better to do.

Toxins and Taboo in Ferguson

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterIt is very hard to see how the situation in Ferguson, Missouri gets better before it gets worse. Several of the most virulent toxins of modern American culture have induced a powerful infection.

Our racial/class divide has again been ignited by gun violence. An entertainment-based news media umbilically linked to images of violence, the more violent the better, has descended in numbers equivalent to a Super Bowl, and political leaders better suited for managing profit and loss ledgers are at a baffled for what to say and what to do next.

As the spectacle nears the two-week mark, the situation is as over-heated and overwrought as the last days of the Rodney King trial in LA in ’92. And that was before CNN had 24/7 competition. The toxic brew is so bad its hard to imagine even an indictment against the white cop, Darren Wilson, will do a lot to tamp down the protests, the posturing and the overreactions. (Only an event more irresistible to the cable outlets will make them reconsider their all-hands-on-deck Ferguson deployment. Think: Beyonce trapped on a cruise ship without adequate plumbing.)

No one knows what exactly happened when Wilson shot Michael Brown, and the expectation is that no one ever will. That is often what happens when these things get as politicized and celebritized (made that one up) as this. The truth becomes what it needs to be to “restore order”, which of course to the legitimate protestors in Ferguson means “business as usual’, where an overwhelmingly white police force will continue to routinely shake down every black kid dressed like a rap star.

One area of discussion that has remained largely taboo amid all the talk of the “militarization” of American police forces, with their surplus tanks and Hollywood-looking SWAT gear (the latter used most for over-the-top drug raids, like the one in St. Paul last month) is the character quality of those paid to “protect and serve”.

Recognizing that police work is A: Dangerous, as we saw again in the killing of Officer Scott Patrick recently; B: Thankless, unless you count the occasional “atta boy” award from the chief; and C: Poorly compensated, because the menace of public employee benefits, including pensions, is at least as serious to pandering politicians as street crime, the “bulldog” media is extraordinarily reluctant to question whether certain individual cops should ever have been in uniform to begin with. (That and the reality that ripping the notoriously tight brotherhood of cops means a kind of sourcing death for offending reporters and their newsrooms.)

The suspicion at this point is that Darren Wilson was/is an unremarkable ordinary suburban cop … and that he panicked when Brown pushed back at being collared for walking across a street. (Even the cops have said Wilson didn’t know about Brown boosting the cigarellos.)

My point is that I doubt guys like Wilson go into police work for the money. Most likely they need a secure job, they like the idea of doing something useful, something that commands a level of respect, and … work that comes with a community, a like-minded brethren that they relate to day in and day out. It’s within that brethren where things get funky, especially when the predominantly white “us” is given loaded-gun authority over a nearly all black “them”. With such a brethren you earn respect is a number of ways, not all of them attractive to or publicly condoned by polite society. Occasionally you overreach with someone (a big guy like Brown in this case) who is in no mood to take it and has his own bull moose machismo to display for his peers.

A truly honest discussion of all the factors culminating in Wilson killing Brown should include what it would take to cull out the weakest, least stable, most thuggish of cops and replace them with people in better command of their ego and emotions.