The
phrase “war on cops” is partly correct. There also has been a war of police
against black people. Both have been going on for a long time, and each reacts
to the other.
The
recent argument is that violence is encouraged by black protests, mainstream
supporters and officials who have caused police to withdraw from active
policing, putting them in a defensive position with black criminals on the
offensive. This is a part of the causal pattern, but it is embedded in a much
larger process: counter-escalation of each side against the other. Both
political mobilization and violence play a part in the escalation process, and
this happens on both sides. A key mechanism is the emotions that pervade both
camps: sometimes righteous anger,
sometimes jittery tension that blows up little incidents and feeds the fire
with atrocities.
Only a
small fraction of each side engage in violence; but for their opponents they
become emblematic of the entire enemy camp. The emotions of the most volatile
fringes drive the back-and-forth process.
The
micro-sociology of emotions shows there is something practical we can all do to
de-escalate the conflict. I will discuss this at the end.
Counter-Escalation Theory
Conflict
escalates when whatever one side does gives rise to a counter-attack. This
doesn’t always happen. Some conflicts come to an end. The ones that go on longest are where conflict with an
outside group increases solidarity; we feel a stronger identity, resolve to
fight back harder. The other side does the same. The most dangerous feedback
loop is when the two groups become morally polarized. The other side is seen as
more and more evil; therefore whatever we do against them is morally right; it
is righteous vengeance, it is street justice, it is doing whatever it takes to
beat back the menace.
Individuals
disappear from view; the cop you are ambushing may be one of the good guys who
sincerely believes in community outreach; the black man whose car you are
stopping may be a middle-class citizen. But at the moment of confrontation they
all fade into the category of the stereotyped enemy.
Since
whatever the other side does is seen in the worst possible light, we are quick
to see atrocities in whatever they do to us. Whether their attacks come from
racism, bureaucratic policy, emotions, or sheer accidents of mistaken identity
and poor shooting aim, they are lumped together as atrocities. In our own eyes
we are the good guys, so whatever we do is good; our own mistakes are minimized
and our violence is viewed as proper, righteous and heroic. Since the
psychology of both sides is the same, conflict at a high level of polarization
becomes a war of competing atrocities.
Communities
which are already isolated are particularly prone to escalation. Police tend to
be a closed community, who socialize mainly with each other, and avoid contacts
with ordinary citizens when they are off duty. They have strong solidarity, and
put up a front to outsiders. The result is that police generally refuse to
criticize each other in public, and regard the rest of the society as not
understanding them. Somewhat similar processes occur in the black lower-class
ghetto, except that there is much more internal conflict.
Escalation
does not go on forever, although it may take a long time to run its course. The
level of conflict goes up and down depending on other factors, including each
side’s logistics and its degree of organization. I will weave in these factors
as we survey the sequence of racial violence in the United States.
Gangs and Cops from 1940s to
2010s
The
modern history of gangs began in the late 1940s when the first youth gangs were
formed, initially by Puerto Rican teens in New York City. Criminal gangs
existed before, but those were adults; often they were connected to political
factions in the machine politics of big cities, and their members were usually
white immigrants. The new youth gangs are best described as fighting gangs,
since their main purpose was to project a tough image and to fight against
nearby rival gangs. While 1950s news sensationalism publicized them as
“juvenile delinquents”, youth
gangs were generally not involved in crime for making a living. They were drug
consumers but not yet drug dealers, heroin then being monopolized by adult
syndicates. Gangs were more like neighborhood social clubs for working-class
teens, now pushed out of the labor force by high school attendance
requirements. They evolved an alienated ideology and spearheaded the newly created
teen culture of rock-’n-roll music, blue jeans, T-shirts and attitude. These
styles were regarded as outrageous by white middle-class traditionalists, but
the alienated youth culture soon spread into the mainstream as well. Despite
its racial anchoring, a rebellious counter-culture acquired a large sympathy
population among white youth and urban adults after they grew up, underpinning
a on-going conflict between law-and-order and hipness.
In the
1950s, youth gangs spread in urban black and Hispanic ghettoes, and mushroomed
in the 1960s and 70s. In cities like Chicago, large corporate-style gangs
formed; in Los Angeles and elsewhere, horizontal loyalties to “color” gangs.
Some cities, like Philadelphia and much of the East Coast, continued to have little
street gangs-- which produce high rates of violence because their rivals are so
close by, and they lack bigger organization to restrain them.
Although
youth gangs are almost always ethnic and very racially conscious, on the whole
their violence is aimed not at dominant white society, but at each other. This
has always seemed paradoxical, but is explainable by how violence is organized.
In the 1950s, gang ideology was anti- “squares”-- i.e. middle-class white
people with their respectability and support of the police. In the 60s, gang
ideology aligned themselves with the civil rights movement against white
dominance, but scorned the tactics of non-violence and political reform. On the
other side, Irish youth gangs made a point of representing whites and acted as
a violent militia to resist school integration. Nevertheless, the vast
proportion of gang violence was against other gangs of their same race. Andrew
Papachristos shows that virtually all gang killings in Chicago have been
black-on-black, Hispanic-on-Hispanic, or white-on-white.
Why so much black-on-black
violence?
Similarly
among the most militant groups on the violent fringe of the 1960s civil rights
movement. The Black Muslims, or Nation of Islam, held an ideology that the
devil is a white man and that the world is heading for a final war of black
against white. Nevertheless, Black Muslims did virtually all their fighting
between rival factions, invading each other’s mosques and assassinating leaders
like Malcolm X. Their angry anti-white rhetoric upset the mainstream but there
were virtually no attacks on whites. Why not? In the segregated society of the
time, blacks rarely appeared in white spaces except in the role of service
workers; it was a lot easier to carry out attacks on one’s on turf. Black
Muslim temples were heavily guarded by a elite members called the Fruit of
Islam, on the lookout for attacks; in this atmosphere of suspicion,
confrontations escalated and mosques found themselves in local wars with each
other. Similarly, the first “color” gang, the Crips, was formed in L.A. in the
early 1970s during the height of the civil rights period as a movement to stop
violence among black gangs, and channel it into war against whites; in
practice, this meant Hispanic gangs.
Within two years, the Crips alliance split, with the Bloods breaking off
into a rival color gang (red emblems vs. blue or black); henceforward, the main
concern of gangs in these two alliances has been to fight against the other.
(There have been more sub-splits and alliances, but the pattern remains the
same.) The parallel between youth gangs and religious militants shows something
deeper going on: ideological hatred of a strong distant enemy turns the weaker
side to violence against more accessible local targets-- against rivals similar
to themselves rather than enemies who operate on a different scale of
organization.
This is
in keeping with general theory of violence. Despite rhetoric of bravery,
dedication to fighting the enemy, and self-sacrifice for the cause, most violence
is successful when it attacks a target weaker than oneself. In street violence,
bigger groups attack smaller ones they happen to encounter; in riots, it is
mainly isolates who get beaten up by larger clusters. The preferred tactics of
violence on all scales are to catch the enemy off guard, to establish surprise
and momentum; to beat the enemy psychologically before beating them physically.
Thus burglars prefer to break into houses in their own neighborhood, even if
there is better loot to be taken in richer places; but burglars from the ghetto
feel uneasy about being in the suburbs, and more psychologically empowered on
their home turf. Armed robbers tend to stay close to home, too, but will
venture out to no-man’s-lands like semi-deserted commercial districts, or look
for isolated victims in interstitial areas with little street traffic. Having a
gun is not sufficient to feel strong; feeling dominant in the setting is even
more important.
This is
one reason why black street gangs virtually never take part in mass shootings
in schools; this is a phenomenon among alienated white youth in all-white
schools. Black gang violence almost always takes place on their own turf-- on
their street, or the streets adjacent to it, the turf of a familiar rival. On
the whole, more distant parts of the city are a mystery to local gangs, since
they rarely venture there. Although they may have an anti-white ideology, it
rarely comes into play as a practical opportunity for violence.
So far,
this has been about small group violence, usually armed with no more than
handguns. In the world of better organized violence, military and police forces
can range more widely; so do insurgent groups like terrorists. Fighting further
away from your home base requires more organization. It needs more logistics,
ammunition, transportation; better planning and intelligence; more
organizational backup to call in for help or to extricate you. And it requires
more organizational solidarity-- groups which continually motivate each other to
adhere to an ideology and to commit themselves to the emotionally difficult
task of confronting the enemy, especially when taking the attack to their turf.
Big organizations like armies and police usually undertake such ventures when
they have overwhelming numbers and weaponry. Small terrorist groups need the
support of closed-off cells, living clandestinely, obsessively planning their
moves. Casual street gangs have none of these resources and little of their
tight, dedicated organization. Hence their rhetorical commitment to toughness
and violence can only come out against easy targets, like themselves.
An
escalated war against the police needs more social resources to go on the
attack.
Race riots and politicization
Riots
are an opportunity for mass participation. Although gangs may take part in
them, a much larger proportion of the local population is involved: In the
biggest race riots of the 1960s, 10-15% of black men took part, and another 30-40%
were spectators and sympathizers .(Collins, Violence:
520) As usual in most kinds of
violence, a small percentage of the crowd does most of the violence, but the
part of the crowd that merely acts as spectators adds to the emotional
atmosphere of breakdown of ordinary law. This is what creates a “free space” or
“liberated zone” where the police, for a time, do not intervene. In fact,
violence between authorities and rioters takes up a relatively small amount of
the time during a riot; looting and burning give the crowd something to do,
prolonging the dramatic atmosphere that would otherwise disappear if there were
nothing to do but go home.
A
paradoxical result is that American race riots always take place in the
minority ghetto, usually on its borders and main commercial streets where there
are stores operated by non-black ethnics. The 1992 L.A. riot after the Rodney King verdict was largely property
attacks on Korean and other Asian store-owners; photos show widespread
participation by black and Hispanic crowds. The Crips and Bloods called a truce
in their normal hostility so that they could take part in the riot.
Riots
publicize ideologies of protest. But whatever the slogans and the statements of
spokespersons who are quoted in the news, at the line of confrontation
mainstream society is always represented by the police. The police are often
the only visible presence of white
society in what Elijah Anderson calls “black spaces.” Much of the time they are
regarded as an occupying force. A riot not only brings about a confrontation of
masses of local people against masses of police, but it is one of those rare
moments when locals have enough numbers and enough emotional dominance to be
able to defy the police.
The
precipitation point for riots has usually been a confrontation with the police.
The Detroit riot of July 1967, which lasted 5 days and resulted in 43 killed,
2000 injured, and 7000 arrested, began when police raided an after-hours bar on
a hot summer night; in the atmosphere of the civil rights struggle, bar patrons
fought back and the small police party retreated. When they returned several
hours later with reinforcements, locals pelted police cars with bricks, again
causing them to withdraw. The June 1967 Newark riot (26 killed) began when a taxi
driver was arrested and rumors of police atrocities spread among taxi drivers.
Although the issues of a riot may be framed as white vs. black, or mainstream
society vs. criminals and radicals, on the ground the main conflict is between
police and locals; and this sets the pattern for polarization within those
groups as they perceive each other. *
*
Sometimes also the Army is called out to end a riot. But in the US the army is
a national institution with a lot of legitimacy; occasional killings by the
army (such as Kent State in 1970) do not give rise to anti-army ideologies.
Things are different in this respect in Mexico, and in many Latin American,
African, and South Asian states, where the army is widely regarded as a
political instrument or a corrupt organization. In the US, however, most
collective resentment is acted out against the police.
Rioters
always lose in the end, but riots give memories of pride and defiance. Their
residue over time is to escalate long ground-swells of rebellions, in whatever
form they come out.
Riots are
better able to make a political statement than gangs. Although they almost
never invade white territory, riots attract universal public attention; and
although their threat of “the fire next time” is just rhetoric whose reality
consists in burning their own neighborhood, the city and usually the nation has
to at least temporarily pay attention to the racial divide. This is also an
opening for political movements and non-violent demonstrations; the
radical-flank effect of riots is to give the moderates more claim to make
reforms, lest the violent fringe grow stronger. Liberal politicians and even
some conservatives reacted by making reforms in the 1960s, dismantling the
legal institutions of segregation. The movement for racial integration also
improved the situation of black and other minorities in the middle class.
It left
a lower-class black population that continued to be segregated and in an
increasingly dead end economic situation. Poverty itself does not mobilize
well-organized rebellion, since mobilization needs resources. The inner-city
ghetto devolved into the land of the gangs, creating an underground economy of
the drug trade, and in some places like Chicago, big corporate gangs taxing the
off-the-books economy of the poor. For several decades, riots and
demonstrations declined, while the crime rate surged, above all in black
neighborhoods.
In the
relatively peaceful period without riots to mobilize political concern, the
black-vs.-mainstream divide deepened and entrenched. Civil rights reforms on the
legal level mainly benefitted a minority middle class. The worst part of the
ghetto has remained black-- that is to say, African-Americans, descendents on
the historic slave population; newer dark-skinned immigrants from Africa and
the Caribbean on the whole have done better at acquiring middle-class jobs.
This class-race-ethnic combination is the core identity for the contemporary
race war. Although many black people are middle class and most are not gang
members or criminals, * the police
widely perceive themselves as facing a hostile enclave in the midst of the
larger society. The cops are not even necessarily white European ethnics; many
are Hispanic, some are Asian and a few are black. But on the whole these ethnic
groups identify with mainstream society and historically have conflicted with
blacks. Cops (whether they are seen as heroes or racists, and whether or not
they are white) and black men (whether as dangerous criminals or innocent
victims) have become the two counterpart symbols of everyday conflict in
America. The African-American lower-class gang culture is the image that
outsiders have of where the trouble comes from, and the atmosphere of
polarization generalizes this image to all ambiguous encounters with blacks.
* The
proportion of the black male population of teens and young adults who belong to
gangs is about 10-12%. Calculated
in Collins, Violence: p. 372.
Escalation of police tactics
Police
tactics against crime in the ghetto have gone through a series of developments.
Traditional policing in the era of official segregation in the South meant
white police would arbitrarily enter any black dwelling looking for suspects.
But on the whole, crime of blacks against each other was not regarded as very
important. In the North and especially in the era of the civil rights movement,
police tended to abandon the ghetto. Elijah Anderson reports that in the 1980s
and 90s the ghetto was largely unpoliced; both in the sense that police did not
patrol there often and that they were slow to answer complaints; moreover when
police did arrive at a scene of robbery or violence, they were peremptory
towards everyone. In scenes with a good deal of angry talk, the victim or
complainant could easily find oneself being arrested. Accordingly, ghetto residents
were wary of calling the police. In this atmosphere, residents attempted to
provide their own protection, what Anderson calls “the code of the street.” The
stance was for everyone to appear tough, especially men but also women,
dramatizing by voice and gesture they were ready to use violence. Anderson
emphasizes that for the majority of people, the street code is a front, an
effort to head off violence; only a minority within the ghetto would actually
“go for street,” carrying weapons and living as predatory criminals. As noted,
only a fraction, about one-tenth of black male youth belong to gangs, but the
“decent” citizens (Anderson describes this as a folk term in some northern
cities) also give off a protective veneer, that could impress outsiders that
they are dangerous. Thus the street code, meant to act as a show to fend off
being a victim, in the eyes of the mainstream and the police, made most ghetto
residents appear indistinguishable from violent criminals.
Another
tactic, largely by white politicians, was to create severe penalties for drugs.
These laws were increasingly enforced, both for sale and for possession,
leading the huge growth of incarceration of blacks and Hispanics by the 1990s.
Since the drug laws fell on both the criminal segment and many of the “decent”
segment of the ghetto, they added to racial polarization. Prisons became the
center for spreading the antinomian culture. Severe sentences did not much
affect the drug business itself, since those most likely to be caught were low-level
dealers, who could easily replaced since they were one of the few prestigious
career paths in the ghetto.
The high
volume of drug arrests also had an effect on the police. As Peter Moskos shows
in his ethnography of the Baltimore police force, and Philippe Bourgois in his
research on north Philadelphia drug markets, police know the justice system is
overcrowded, and that prosecutors and judges let many suspects off. Police
become cynical about the revolving-door process, as well as exasperated by the
defiant attitude it fosters among those they arrest. Police respond with their
own informal punishment. This includes the tactic known in the culture of
Eastern police forces as “a rough ride”-- leaving a prisoner shackled but not
secured to a seat in the police wagon while they are roughed up by wild
driving. This is apparently the scenario in April 2015 by which Freddie Gray--
a black man who been in and out of court multiple times for minor offenses and
parole violations-- ended up dying from a broken spine after being arrested by
Baltimore police.
Around
the year 2000 came a reversal in police tactics. Previously they tended to
neglect ghetto crime except for easy busts for drugs. Now computerization added
new weapons. One version was COMSTAT, a centralized system put in place by the
New York Police Department, that compiles crime reports not in old fashioned
monthly or yearly statistics, but in real time; now police commanders could see
where crime was surging in the city and flood that area with cops. COMSTAT is
credited with having reduced the crime rate in New York City from one of the
higher to one of the lowest big cities; it resembles the “surge” that General
Petraeus used in Iraq to secure areas from insurgent forces. The main
limitation of COMSTAT is that it is expensive to implement. The NYPD is unique
in the size of its police force (35,000), and its ability to move forces
around; most smaller police departments lack the manpower for local surges.
Computerized
record-keeping has been put to a different use in other cities. Patrol cars now
have on-board computers, which officers can use-- not only at any arrest or
encounter with a suspect, but at any contact with a civilian. Infractions as
minor as driving with a broken tail-light or selling cigarettes on the sidewalk
now routinely result in a records check. Many minorities living in the gray
economy have past infractions; and these are often compounded by failing to
appear for court appearances, or failing to pay fines. As Alice Goffman shows in
her ethnography of a small Philadelphia street gang, the court system tends to
nickel-and-dime poor people to death-- metaphorically, of course, since these
are generally fines in the hundred-dollar range that poor people have a hard
time paying. The fines mount up since failure to appear or failure to pay
results in yet another fine. Everything compounds each other in this system of
city administration, policing, and antinomian street culture. Any innocuous
police stop can result in arrest on outstanding warrants; it is still a
revolving door but the police now are a constant, annoying presence in people’s
lives, spreading the feeling that everyone is a suspect. The court system
supports itself with fines, encouraged by city administrations under the pressure
of mainstream resistance to raising taxes. And not only big city courts and police forces use this
strategy of controlling the poor by collecting fines on them. Towns like
Ferguson, Missouri use a version of old-fashioned speeding traps on passing motorists,
now updated with computerized records to fine the poorer citizens of their own
town for minor offenses and accumulated penalties.
The
result is escalation on both sides. The police are now more actively harassing
the poor, and the poor are exasperated and defiant like the man in Ferguson who
walked away from an officer and was shot in the back.
Middle-class
tax revolt, revenue-strapped city administrations, and the predatory use of
police as a cash-collecting machine blend together into a Kafka-esque system of
feedback loops. Legitimation was given to the process by the “broken windows”
theory of crime control, which encourages police to crack down on small
offenses like urinating in public in order to eliminate signs of being places where
laws are not enforced. Modern day computerization and so-called “best
practices” have their worst effect on the street where the two most exasperated
components of the system come together: cops and poor black people. *
* Other
kinds of escalation in police tactics have happened, such as the militarization
of police equipment since the late 1990s. But helicopters, armored vehicles,
and body armor are used mainly for crowd control and riots, and probably have
little effect on the tensions of everyday policing. Demonstrations and riots,
as noted, are occasions where the anti-police constituency gets better
organized and more politically effective; so the threatening face of heavy
military equipment probably is no more than false comfort for the police.
Escalation of gang weapons and
insurgent resources
On the
other side, escalation of weapons and tactics has also gone on. In the 1950s,
gangs mostly fought with handmade “zip guns” firing single shots. Their most
dramatic weapon was the switch-blade knife, which made a sinister motion as the
blade whipped out-- but was not itself particularly deadly, since knife fights
are mostly for show and usually inconclusive. Gangs became more deadly, and the
murder rate picked up in the 1970s and 80s as more guns came on the scene.
Nevertheless,
for the most part gang weapons do not produce much firepower. The accuracy of pistols is poor beyond a few
dozen yards; while at very close range, the adrenaline surge tends to produce
wild firing. Urban gang members rarely practice on a shooting range; and most
patrons of gun ranges are white. There is great admiration for guns in the gang
culture, but most gang members are not gun experts. The guns available in the
illegal market are often of low quality-- here too the poor tend to get shoddy
products. In the gang milieu, these defects don’t matter so much, since most of
the time what happens consists of blustering and showing off. Close
ethnographic observers of the gang scene find they display their guns, even
gesture with them, far more than they fire them. Shoot-outs with rival gangs
usually are brief , and getting hit is mostly a matter of chance. Not
surprisingly, when shots are fired they often hit bystanders, including
children; this is particularly likely in drive-bys where members of one gang
fire at a gathering in a park or street that includes members of a rival gang.
Hitting innocent victims is sometimes welcomed by gang members since it
enhances their reputation for being ruthless.
The low
quality and low competence of gang firepower is one reason they use it mainly
against each other. Rarely do they attempt to shoot it out with the police,
since they are almost always outgunned, not to mention the capacity of police
to call in reinforcements to almost any level necessary to prevail. *
* The
most organized violence against the police was by the Black Panther Party
during 1967-70, in ambushes, gunfights, traffic stops and police raids. A total
of 1 officer was killed and 4 wounded, while the Panthers lost 10 killed. By
1969-71, the Black Panthers were mainly involved in internal violence against
splits and rival groups, with another 10 killed. The Panthers began as a group to monitor police violence by
armed patrols, but turned into a combination of political movement and gang,
financing themselves by a tax on robberies and extortions carried out by
members.
In
recent years, there are occasional postings of cell-phone photos of gang
members carrying heavier weapons such as AK-47s. Nevertheless, this looks like
the usual blustering, since one rarely hears of such weapons being used in gang
fighting, or against the police. Long guns are more accurate than pistols, and
can deliver a higher volume of fire. On the whole, they have been used in overt
race war only when the local situation gave temporary emotional dominance to
insurgents. In the 1967 Newark and
Detroit riots, snipers with rifles fired at police and National Guard troops
from their home base in the ghetto. The July 2016 Dallas sniper represents an
exceptional level of escalation of firepower, producing a total of 12
casualties. He came from a suburban area and never participated in the gang
lifestyle-- which as we have seen, is very poorly adapted for fighting with the
police. In this respect, the Dallas sniper more resembles the isolated school
rampage shooter, amassing weapons in secret; the difference being both his
target-- police rather than school children-- and his military training and his
practicing weapons tactics. The Dallas sniper, in effect, was more assimilated
into white society, and he used white weapons and followed a white scenario of
mass killing.
The
strongest similarity is to the so-called “Beltway sniper” in October 2002, who
fired on white people from a car, killing 10 over a period of weeks. This turned out to be a black military
veteran, who (unlike gang members) trained for sniper skills, including with
his 17 year-old protégé, who did the firing from a peep-hole in the trunk of
their car. The motives and tactics of gangs, armed robbers, and grudge-obsessed
rampage killers are different. But such tactics propagate by imitation,
especially when they are highly publicized in the media. In a situation of
emotional escalation of black-vs.-police conflict, one can expect cross-overs
as the most militant individuals pick up the most lethal tactics.
The most effective escalation:
communications and multi-pronged mobilization
The
biggest weapon in escalating black insurgency has been, not weaponry, but
publicity and politics. During the
civil rights period of the 1960s, victories were won because different styles
of organization fought on different fronts. Non-violent protests by Freedom
Riders, church-led alliances, and direct-action organizations like CORE,
created a certain amount of attention, especially when they became
well-publized martyrs to segregationist violence. Riots engaged more of the
black population, and created an unavoidable sense of national emergency. A
fringe of individuals and organizations (SNCC, Black Panthers, Black Muslims)
emerged that openly advocated violence. Most of the actual gains, however, were
won by the most conventional part of the movement, the NAACP and the Urban
League, whose lawyers challenged segregated arrangements in the courts. It was
more of a tacit coalition than an explicit one, since most of these
organizations disavowed at least some of the others. But their combination
created the sense of national crisis that eventually moved the balance point of
American politics and the judiciary towards integration.
The same
pattern is reemerging in the current war of cops and blacks. The side against
police violence includes legal organizations, some politicians, organizations
of non-violent demonstrations, as well as a violent fringe of militants. We
should also count the gang violence of the black community as part of the
larger movement or atmosphere of resistance, along with the antinomian thrust
of the youth culture. The big difference from the 1950s and 60s is now there is
a national mobilization on the other side as well. The civil rights movement
was opposed by a mainly Southern segregationist bloc. Today there is a
widespread national constituency for cracking down on what is seen as
out-of-control lawlessness.
Escalation and counter-escalation have been occuring on both sides. Both
sides have gotten more sophisticated in recognizing each other’s tactics. The
pro-police side sees that the black insurgency operates in tandem with
political and media fronts, and has tried to counter them as abettors of
violence.
The
major new weapon on the side of the anti-police insurgency is in the realm of
communication: the cell-phone camera. This had its analogy in the 1950s and
60s, when on-the-spot television news was just appearing, and police attacks on
civil rights marches made sensational coverage, especially when reporters were
also attacked in the mêlée. The new phase of mobilization against the police
began in 1991 when Rodney King’s beating by a group of police was filmed by a resident
with a new product, the video camcorder. The cell phone camera has made videos
recording ubiquitous, and the decentralized social media of the Internet has
made it hard for authorities to crack down on it.
Mobile
videos of the police in action are not the whole story; they only work in
tandem with the range of other tactics and organizations-- demonstrations,
riots, political movements, law suits. The police recognize videos as an
escalation against themselves. Confiscating cameras becomes a new side-issue
and flashpoint for further conflict. There is some validity in arguments that
videos capture only a part of the encounter and miss the verbal lead-up to the
confrontation; the solution to this, however, could be more recordings,
including voice, of police encounters with citizens. It is also true that
police body cameras can be dysfunctional or deliberately turned off. All such
recording devices become an expanding battleground. One can anticipate there
will be more things to fight about in the future.
Counter-escalation
on both sides spins off from the same technical innovations. Cell phone cameras
and the social media come from the same IT revolution that brought squad-car
computers and police tactics of running the record on everyone they stop. Both
police and citizens use their electronic networks to call for backup; the
police in a more organized way, with greater weaponry and authority; the street
people in a more sensationalist way, seeking backup in the form of collective emotions, demonstrations,
and politics.
Are there any paths to
de-escalation?
After
every highly publicized incident, whether the casualties are among the people
or the police, mainstream figures call for calm and reconciliation. These calls
have little effect on de-escalating the overall situation. Most violence and
conflict in all forms is carried out by small fractions of the population.
There is always an array from the most militant fringe, through the seriously
committed partisans, to those who are less involved. Between the two sides of a
conflict, those nearer the center are the ones most willing to listen to a
message of reconciliation. But it
is the extremes who carry on the fight, and drive the level of escalation.
The
flashpoint is the police on the streets.
Cops are under tension every time they stop a suspect. Tension is higher
if conflict has escalated recently by previous incidents; higher if it is a
neighborhood with a high crime rate; higher if there has been a chase, or
alarming reports over police radio links.
Tension
rises sharply when the citizen isn’t cooperative or is defiant. Richard
Rubenstein, a sociologist who worked in the Philadelphia police force, reported
that the first thing an officer wants in any encounter are signs that the
person will not make trouble. He insists on taking the initiative, and
controlling the situation in little details, since these are the warning signs
for bigger trouble. Donald Black, who pioneered ride-along observations in
patrol cars, calculated that the chances someone would be arrested did not
depend on race per se, but on whether
the person was defiant-- and in the 1960s black persons were more defiant to
the police (not surprisingly, since this was the era of the civil rights
movement). Car chases and running away increase officers' tension even more,
since these are also acts of defiance. Citizens who turn their backs and refuse
to stop are acting defiantly, even if the initial order was something trivial
like “move to the sidewalk” (the first step in the 2014 Ferguson shooting).
Adding
together any or all of these factors increases tension. Bodily this is
experienced as adrenaline rush, the flight-or-fight arousal. The biggest danger
with an adrenaline spike is the loss of perception and fine motor control. When
heart rate races to 150 beat per minute or more, fine motor control is lost. An
officer may reach for a gun when he thinks he is reaching for handcuffs or a
taser. Trigger fingers produce wild or uncontrollable firing. Officers in
shootouts report time distortions like going into a bubble, vision turning into
a blur or tunnel vision on only one part of the scene. Hearing often goes out
so that they don’t hear their own gunshots; voices become incomprehensible. It
is a situation ripe for miscommunication and misperception.
Adrenaline-produced
distortions explain why shooting incidents happen where it turns out the
suspect did not have a gun, or was reaching for an ID; situations where stops
for trivial reasons blow up into killings. Since adrenaline takes time to
subside, the cop may empty the magazine of his gun, even after the suspect is
motionless on the ground. Catching these details on video certainly looks like
an atrocity.
Teaching awareness of body signs
and emotional control
What can
be done? The key is training cops to keep their bodily tension under
control. Sociologist Geoffrey
Alpert found that officers who are better at controlling the escalation of
force have a more deliberate and refined sense of timing in the moves of both
sides. More attention to such micro-details should train more police officers
up to a high level of competence.
Individual
officers vary widely in their use of force. About 10% of police account for the
bulk of all force reports; and less then 1% fire their guns in multiple
incidents. (Collins, Violence: 371)
The polarized viewpoint see cops in general as being out of control; but the
real issue is to make better officers out of the fraction that cannot control
their emotions and physiology.
Adrenaline
can be lowered, for instance by breathing exercises described by Army
psychologist David Grossman. Police training should incorporate more explicit
awareness of the distortions caused by tense confrontations. Weapons training
tends to go in the opposite direction, stressing quick reaction, and training
for automatic “muscle memory” in the default scenario that saving lives depends
on rapid action. Police tend to be trained for extreme situations rather than
clear assessment and self-control.
In the
field, police dispatching and radio calls tend to turn situations into
scenarios where the suspect is regarded as extremely dangerous. Citizen calls to the police may say,
someone might have a gun; or that someone might be engaged in a burglary. The
dispatcher tends to turn this into a simpler form, there is a gun or a burglar.
When messages are transmitted from one patrol car to another, the process by
which rumors are propagated takes over. As psychological experiments have
shown, each link in a chain of oral reports tends to simplify the message,
leaving out any special qualifications and turning it into the most obvious
cliché. In the case of police
transmissions, the more cars called to a scene, the more likely the message is
to turn into an extreme threat; weapons are definitely asserted to be present;
hostages tend to mentioned whether they exist or not and the suspect becomes
reported as saying he will won’t die alone.
The
combination of these processes explains events like the incident in
Cleveland in November 2014. The officer
who shot an adolescent carrying a toy gun on a playground had raced to the
scene and fired within 2 seconds after jumping from his car. Better trained
officers would be aware of their own body signs and the danger zone of
perceptual distortion, and would not attempt to fire until they had a clear
view of the situation.
Such
events are preventable. The answer is not so much after-the-fact criminal
charges and court trials-- these rarely result in conviction, and focus on
punishing individuals rather than on the improvements that can be made in
police procedures. Better training can be undertaken at local initiative by
police forces willing to do so. This should include techniques for becoming
aware of one’s own adrenaline level and heart rate-- body signs monitors like
those used in physical exercise would help here. And techniques should be
emphasized for getting adrenaline under control. There also should be better training of police dispatchers,
to make them aware of the distortions they introduce into messages; and making
patrol officers aware of the rumor-like exaggeration in their own chains of
messages to each other. A useful role of Federal and State governments would be
to review police training programs, to assess whether they are sufficiently
teaching bodily and perceptual awareness of the distortions of adrenaline rush.
Emphasis needs to be upon best methods for calmly and accurately assessing the
situation before escalating it.
What
about the other side of the counter-escalation, the anger, hostility, and
defiance in the black community? I have focused on what can be done by police
to control their use of force, because this is where public policy might be
implemented. But escalated conflict is driven by the extremes at both ends of
the distribution, and the tough guys of black and Hispanic communities
would be harder to reach. Nevertheless, the message is much the
same. Be aware of one’s own
adrenaline, one’s rush of emotions, the situational blurring of attention to
everything but the impulse to dominate. And be aware of the same processes
going on inside the person on the other side-- awareness of how to calm police
down rather than rile them up. A glimmer of optimism comes from group
psychology programs in California prisons, where convicted murderers learn to
re-experience the events that led to their imprisonment, and to focus on better
control of their emotions. Prisoners who completed the program and were released
on parole had a re-arrest rate much lower than usual. It is not impossible that
in the future self-training in micro-situational awareness could spread even in
the most violent part of the population.
Framing
the issue as racism doesn’t solve it. Cops without racist attitudes, under
these kinds of tense situations, and with their adrenaline out of control, can
trigger off violent atrocities. The answer isn’t in the attitudes; it is in the
micro-techniques of how to behave in confrontations. There is a workable
solution. Whether we will implement it or not is another question.
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Civil War Two, Part 1
by Randall Collins
Giveaway ends May 24, 2018.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.
REFERENCES
Randall
Collins. 2008. Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory.
Randall Collins. 2012:
“C-Escalation and D-escalation: A Theory of the Time-Dynamics of Conflict.” American Sociological Review
Eric C. Schneider. 1999. Vampires, Dragons and Egyptian Kings: Youth
Gangs in Postwar New York.
Martín Sánchez-Jankowski. 1991. Islands in the Street.
Scott Decker and Barrik van Winkle.
1996. Life
in the Gang.
Richard
T. Wright and Scott Decker. 1994. Burglars on the Job.
Richard
T. Wright and Scott Decker. 1997. Armed Robbers in Action.
Elijah Anderson.. 1999. Code
of the Street.
Elijah Anderson. 2012. The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility
in Everyday Life.
Deanna L. Wilkinson. 2003. Guns, Violence and
Identity among African American and Latino Youth.
Sudhir Venkatesh. 2006. Off
the Books. The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor.
Sudhir Venkatesh. 2008. Gang
Leader for a Day.
Randol Contreras. 2012. The Stickup Kids.
Andrew Papachristos. 2009. “Murder by Structure: Dominance
Relations and The Social Structure of Gang Homicide,” American Journal of
Sociology.
Joseph Krupnick and Christopher
Winship. 2015. "Keeping Up the Front: How Black
Youth Avoid Street Violence in the Inner City" in Orlando Patterson and Ethan Fosse (Eds.), The
Culture Matrix: Understanding Black Youth.
Alice Goffman. 2014. On the Run.
David Skarbeck. 2014. The
Social Order of the Underworld. How Prisons Gangs Govern the American Penal
System.
C. Eric Lincoln. 1994. The
Black Muslims in America.
Jonathan
Rubinstein, 1973. City Police.
Donald Black. 1980. The Manners and Customs of the Police.
Peter Moskos.
2009. Cop in the Hood.
Dave Grossman. 2004. On
Combat. The psychology and physiology of deadly combat in war and peace.
David Klinger. 2004. Into
the Kill Zone. A Cop's Eye View of Deadly Force.
Geoffrey P. Alpert and Roger G.
Dunham. 2004. Understanding Police Use of
Force.
