Police actually do show restraint—when they’re facing armed white guys
4th May 2015 · 0 Comments
By Charles D. Ellison
Contributing Writer
(Special from The Root and New America Media) – As a ceaseless flat line of tragedies snuffs out the lives of young brothers, one peculiar parallel trend emerges: For every unarmed Black man who dies at the hands of white police officers, it seems as if there’s one armed white man who survives such an encounter.
In a way, that flies in the face of a popular national narrative that police officers are having some trouble restraining their trigger-happy selves. The excessive use of force by police is at the core of that discussion: Recently, for example, the Justice Department applauded the Seattle Police Department’s implementation of mandatory “de-escalation training” program for new officers. The force used “must be both reasonable and necessary,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta in a statement last week. “[T]his training will provide valuable guidance to officers when they make split-second decisions about when and how to use force.”
The problem, however, is that we assume that cops have a restraint problem. But judging from a growing number of confrontations between police and armed white guys, it’s reasonable to conclude the killings of African-American men and women may have another cause. And in the rush to a future full of body cameras, training, diversity hiring and other essential tools for modern law enforcement, we should probably find out what it takes to change that.
Going viral recently is a body-cam-captured video of rookie New Richmond, Ohio, cop Jesse Kidder talking down a young, armed and white 27-year-old Michael Wilcox, who is accused of killing his fiancee and best friend hours before. Wilcox challenged Kidder to “shoot me!”
Kidder did not. He reasoned Wilcox into a peaceful arrest, earning himself all sorts of national props for showing “great restraint and maturity.” And who knows? Maybe policing in the post-Ferguson, Mo., world made Kidder rethink the situation.
And maybe it didn’t. Instead, Wilcox ended up joining the pantheon of armed and dangerous white dudes who stayed alive even after police identified them as homicidal suspects on killing rampages. One unfortunate week might find us gripped in national outrage over the untimely and unjustified deaths of Freddie Gray in Baltimore or Eric Harris in Tulsa, Okla.; but highlighted less are numerous confrontations between cops and rather dangerous white guys with guns who have already massacred people or are about to commit domestic terrorism.
This raises deeply disturbing but necessary questions that hint at a need for more than just a “de-escalation” program: What exactly is going on in the minds of some cops that frequently prompts empathy for armed white men but unleashes lethal fury on unarmed Black men?
Take Eric Fein, for example, a white 31-year-old sitting comfortably in jail on charges of killing one Pennsylvania state trooper in September and wounding another before forcing state police into a 48-day manhunt. Or still-alive 41-year-old Ryan Giroux, a white supremacist who is accused of killing one person and injuring five in March during a shooting rampage in Mesa, Ariz. Cops finally caught up with him and took him into custody after tasing him. And let’s not even get started on the jaw-dropping actions of Adam Kokesh, a gun-rights activist who not only loaded a shotgun across the street from White House grounds but also videotaped and posted the whole thing online.
Perhaps one of the more notorious armed white guys involved in mass murder is James Holmes of Aurora, Colo., who, even after allegedly slaughtering a dozen people and injuring 70 in a movie theater shooting in 2012, managed to survive the police response and is on trial.
In almost half of all active-shooter situations, police didn’t even kill the shooter. According to a September 2013 FBI briefing on a study of 160 mass-casualty, “active shooter” incidents between 2000 and 2013, most ended once the perpetrator stopped shooting, either because he fled or took his own life.
Curiously, the FBI details every demographic, geographic and casualty-type of data in its compelling 47-page study, even telling us that only six of the shooters were female, but fails to disclose one critical shooter characteristic: race.
The Congressional Research Service, however, did some legwork for its own March 2013 paper, “Public Mass Shootings in the United States” (pdf). Despite an annoying lack of data, that study did conclude that the “the gunmen generally acted alone, were usually white and male.” Of the 81 shooters in this report, 41 died by suicide and 10 at the hands of law enforcement.
Police restraint is employed frequently when officers run up against gun-carrying white dudes engaged in all forms of villainy. Yet we’ve seen unarmed and ultimately innocent Black men and Black women find themselves either badly hurt or dead just for looking suspicious or being in the wrong place at a particular wrong time.
Most frightening is the issue of why. There’s never really a clear answer for that beyond our 400-year knowledge of state-sanctioned violence against African Americans. White officers, in particular, would never admit to any subconscious bias pegging Black men as subhuman.
What recent studies do show is that public perceptions of Black people do not help. When white people aren’t generally associating Black people with criminal activity, they are viewing people of a darker hue as otherworldly. The Sentencing Project’s 2014 “Race and Punishment” study shows that most whites support criminal punishment for Blacks and Latinos because they perceive people of color as most likely to commit crimes.
Meanwhile, the Religion News Service’s “2012 American National Election Study” and Associated Press polling showed that most whites still harbor a view of Blacks as less hard-working and less intelligent.
But an even more recent and troubling study, published in November 2014 in the journal Social, Psychological & Personality Science, appears to offer some insight. Researchers determined that white attitudes have shifted dramatically over generations, from once perceiving Blacks as “three fifths of a human” to now being “superhuman.”
Respondents in surveys were more likely to link terms such as “ghost, paranormal, spirit, wizard, supernatural, magic, mystical” to pictures of Black people than they were to ascribe those qualities to whites, who were linked to more “human words,” such as “person, individual, humanity, people, civilian, mankind, citizen.” The authors of the study worried that “[p]erhaps people assume that Blacks possess extra (i.e., superhuman) strength which enables them to endure violence more easily than other humans.”
Perhaps, for reasons still unknown, there are white police officers who think that brothers are faster than bullets and speeding trains. Maybe—and we don’t know—an armed white guy receives more lenience because there’s a chance he could be exercising his rights as a “citizen.” For now, all we have is instinct, polls and a growing list of sad stories.
Charles D. Ellison is a veteran political strategist and regular contributor to The Root. He is also Washington correspondent for the Philadelphia Tribune, chief political correspondent for Uptown magazine, Sunday Washington insider for WDAS-FM in Philadelphia and a panelist on MSNBC’s Hardball With Chris Matthews. Follow him on Twitter.
This article originally published in the May 4, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
