A theme of protest
demonstrations since late May 2020 is that police violence persists despite
previous episodes of public outrage and efforts at reform. The problem has not
been solved, including by the protests themselves.
Police violence was
prominent in triggering the uprisings of the 1960s. The two most destructive
riots were both started by police arrests: Newark in June 1967 (26 dead); Detroit in July 1967 (43 dead).
In Newark 5 days of riots began after a taxi driver was arrested; in Detroit,
when police attempted to raid a popular after-hours club, patrons fought back
by attacking police cars; backup was called and eventually the National Guard;
fighting with snipers, arson and looting lasted 4 days. The pattern continued
in riots over the acquittal verdict in the Rodney King beating by the LAPD in
1992, and a long series of highly publicized cases through the Ferguson
Missouri protests of 2014 and down to today.
There have been
occasions where police have been adulated; notably in the public ceremonies so
prominent in the months after the 9/11/2001 attacks, when police and
firefighters were repeatedly honored for their sacrifices at the Twin Towers.
On the other side of the ledger, there are a series of reasons why large
portions of the public -- not just African-Americans-- dislike the police, and
will join in protests against them.
[1] Police are used for collecting fines for municipal budgets. This
has been a long-standing practice in speed traps, where heavy fines are levied
on drivers, usually on highways outside of town; since locals know where the
speed traps are, it falls mostly on strangers (similar to resting your budget
on hotel taxes in popular tourist destinations). Cities where there is strong resistance
to tax increases, or which have serious budget short-falls, often explicitly
adopt the policy of increasing fines for all sorts of infractions. It then
becomes the police duty to seek out offenses, however trivial; they are
expected to produce at high rates, sometimes with quotas set by police
officials (Moskos 2008). This was a notorious practice in Ferguson, where the
protests began after police shot a young man who defied an order about walking
in the street.
In Philadelphia, Alice
Goffman (2014) showed how computerization of court records and police
communications has intensified pressure on persons (mostly minorities in the
ghetto) who have some kind of previous record. Offenses may range from drugs to
violence to gang association; police stops on the street immediately run a
computer check in their car, above all for outstanding warrants. These often
involve failure to appear for a court hearing, or failure to pay fines, since
the penalties for everything include fines. It becomes a vicious cycle as fines mount up. The
courts are overburdened, and this combined with attempts to reduce
over-sentencing to prison, results in most offenders being released but
required to make future appearances and pay fines which they can’t afford.
Persons caught up in the system no longer can get a bank account, a legitimate
job, or driver’s license -- which generates further fines. Police, as the
front-line enforcers of the system, are understandably unpopular. On their
side, police also regard the criminal justice system as a revolving door.
[2] Police are used for enforcing unpopular regulations. A long history
includes prohibition on alcohol (now mostly passé except for prohibitions on
young people); prohibitions on marijuana (ditto). All of these promote
counter-cultures of defiance. There have been many examples during the
stay-at-home lockdowns during the coronavirus plague. Public parks have been
closed, playing ball prohibited, beaches and/or their adjacent parking lots are
closed; children’s playgrounds roped off. In many instances, ordinary people
find these prohibitions inconsistent or irrational-- areas closed even if
people maintain their distance; young people who have heard the statistics and know that their chances of surviving
the coronavirus are above 99 percent. It appears that another counter-culture
of defiance is building up today, likely to become exacerbated during the phase
of opening up public activities under a regime of masking and social
distancing. To a considerable degree, this coincides with conflict between age groups.
What many people regard
as trivial offenses can escalate when officials enforce the rules. In San
Diego, a black man walking his dog in a state park (actually the old Spanish
settlement) was accosted by park rangers; when he refused to leave, they called
police backup, who arrested the man; when exiting the police car downtown, he
slipped his handcuffs, ran away, and was shot and killed. His mother said he was
schizophrenic and did not understand the order to wear a face mask. (San Diego Union-Tribune, May 6,
2020) This is the archetype of
many such events: one damn thing leads to another.
[2a] Police hypocrisy and cynicism. In both
[1] and [2] police are required to carry out the dirty work of government. When
this becomes the primary part of their job, it makes them cynical and hardened.
They know that it doesn’t necessarily make sense to punish harmless violations,
or that they are lying when they say their city-mandated increase in traffic
stops are purely in the interest of public safety. In their own work lives,
they are under a regime that demands hypocrisy; after a while, this unpleasant
feeling turns into a bitter that’s-the-way-it-is. Like prison guards who have to play the role of the bad guy,
they embrace the tough-cop image. (Striking descriptions of this are in
Jennifer Hunt’s 2010 close-up ethnography of the NYPD.) Citizens who argue with cops about
these things increase the tension;
one reaction is to be more aggressive. Taking videos of the police is felt as
threatening them; and this can lead to attempts at retaliation.
[3] Police
dislike defiance. Jonathan Rubinstein (1973), a sociologist who joined the
Philadelphia police in order to study their everyday life (similar to Peter
Moskos in the Baltimore PD 30 years later), found that their number-one
priority is to be the person in control in all encounters with civilians. For
the most part, a cop is out there alone, or with a single partner; they are
almost always outnumbered by civilians. Particularly in areas where they know
they are unpopular, they feel it is imperative to not let things get out of
control. They want to be the one who starts and ends the encounter, who sets
the speaking turns (micro-sociology of conversation), who sets the rhythm of
the interaction. Acts of defiance, whether micro-actions on the level of voice
and gesture, or more blatant words and body movements, will cause a cop to
increase their own aggressiveness in order to maintain dominance (Alpert and
Dunham 2004). This a reason why trivial encounters with the police can escalate
to violence far beyond what seems called for by the original issue.
[3a] Inner-city black code of the street
emphasizes defiance. Elijah Anderson’s ethnography of black street life
(1999; also Krupnick and Winship 2015) point out that in dangerous areas, where
the police are distrusted, most people adopt a stance of being hyper-vigilant
about threats and disrespect, and portray themselves as ready to use violence.
Anderson says this is mostly a Goffmanian frontstage, a pretence at being tough
designed to avoid being victimized. When dealing with the police, this leads to
another vicious circle. Black people, particularly on their home turf, are more
defiant of police than are whites; often this is no more than a confrontational
way of talking, but these are micro-interactions that arouse police
aggressiveness. Anderson notes that one reason people in the ghetto are wary of
calling police is that they themselves may end up being arrested, because of
the tone of these micro-interactions. Donald Black (1980), who pioneered
observer ride-alongs in police cars, found that police arrested black suspects
more than whites, but this happened when black people were defiant, which was
more often than whites. Martín Sánchez-Jankowski (1991) in his gang
ethnographies (including black, hispanic, and white) describes the culture of
gang members as “defiant individualism.”
The pervasiveness of the street code in black lower-class areas, even
among the majority who are not sympathetic with a gang life-style, hardens
mutual hostility between citizens and police.
[4] Police dislike property destruction. Anne Nassauer [2019] who studied protest demonstrations in
the US and Germany by compiling videos of these events, was able to pin-point
the conditions that led to a turning point where violence broke out. One of the
major conditions was when police could see protestors destroying property, but
were unable to do anything about it; this happened if they were under orders
not to respond, or when they had relatively limited forces compared to the
numbers of protestors. Normally police are concerned to prevent robbery and
vandalism; it is one of their more favored duties, since they get to be the
heroes protecting people. But now they are in a situation where they have to
stand by and let it happen. This builds up their frustration. Although they may
perceive that only a small part of the crowd is doing the destruction, they
dislike the crowd for providing the opportunity to get away with it. Given further
trigger events during the protest-- more on this in [5]-- police will take out their tension and
anger on whoever is nearby in the crowd.
Property destruction in
a mass demonstration puts police in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t
dilemma. If they take action against looters and arsonists, they get accused of
whatever violence they use and casualties they cause. If they stand by and let
the destruction happen, they are accused of neglecting their duty and not
caring. Eye-witnesses to such scenes are particularly likely to be outraged
(see letters to the editor in recent days).
[5] Adrenaline
overload and forward-panic attacks on unresisting targets. When tension
builds up, humans experience rising heart rate, driven by adrenaline. At a high
level, perception narrows in, time becomes distorted, fine motor control is
lost. Nassauer found that the level of tension is visible in videos: whether
the police are in relaxed or tense postures, and similarly with the crowd. When
tension builds up, from escalating gestures of confrontation, unexpected
movements by crowd or police units, police getting surrounded and cut off, a
trigger point sets both sides in action. Adrenaline is the fight-or-fight
hormone; it produces generalized arousal of the large muscles of the body, but
in what direction will it go? Police, like soldiers, are trained to respond to
high adrenaline arousal by attacking. Most civilians, of the other hand, will
run. But the one reaction feeds back on the other. The crowd suddenly running
away is felt by the police as a release of their own tension into action.
In interviews (reported
by Nassauer and others), police say they can see the crowd is divided between
peaceful demonstrators and a small number of trouble-makers; but when the situation
boils over, the crowd is infected by the violent ones. --This is how the police
perceive it; what happens is that the panic of the crowd running away puts the
police in an over-the-top rush of adrenaline in which their own perception is
narrowed. When police rush forward, they become likely to strike those who have
fallen down, or are screaming uncontrollably. The content of what people are
saying is lost; all that is heard is the sounds and sights of out-of-control
people. Since the police are trained to operate as a unit, officers who rush
forward with their comrades tend to imitate what they do; if they are striking
someone on the ground, it must be for good reason, and they will join in or
protect them.
I have called this
“forward panic” because it is like a panic flight where the overwhelming
emotion of the crowd increases individuals’ adrenaline level; but in this case,
the adrenaline is driving them forward, towards an easy target who have their
backs turned, running away or falling down.
Police who have been in
shoot-outs generally report that their senses are blurred, they have
tunnel-vision, can’t hear the sounds of their own guns, don’t know how much
time is passing (Artwohl and Christensen 1997). They also tend to fire wildly,
with poor aim, and with an overkill of bullets as they empty their magazines.
It is similar with those who deliver a large number of blows with their batons,
or put their full weight on a captured suspect’s neck. It is the same in military massacres
(with a higher level of casualties because of more weapons). There is the same time-sequence: a
period during which tension has built up on both sides; a sudden tipping point
when the tension is released; one side becomes incapable of resisting (because
they are caught in a traffic jam, fallen in the mud, turning their back,
running away); the result is hot
rush, piling on, overkill.
In real-life situations,
violence is usually incompetent-- in the sense that it often fails to hit its
intended target, or hits the wrong target, or is disproportional to what is
necessacry to prevail. Soldiers
and police are much more accurate shooters on firing ranges than they are in
the emotional conditions of real-life confrontation.The clichés of military and
police officials refer to “surgical strikes” and proportionate response. But
the military is all too aware of “collateral damage”, especially in
counter-insurgency warfare, where violent enemies hide in the civilian
population. This is a close
analogy to confronting peaceful protests in which aggressive militants cover
themselves.
[6] Police training for extreme situations. Police training tends to emphasize the worst-case scenarios.
Knowing that firing in real-life situations is encumbered by high adrenaline,
weapons instructors tell them to aim middle-mass-- the center of the body;
don’t try to shoot for extremities like arms or legs (the cowboy movie myth of
shooting a gun out of someone’s hand never happens). The result is, police
shootings tend to be deadly. Emphasis also is on rapid reaction; in the
worst-case scenario, the suspect is armed and dangerous; you have to train your
muscle memory to react as quickly as possible.
There is sometimes
training in how to calm dangerous situations, but this tends to be overshadowed
by the quick reaction scenario: your life or someone else’s life is in danger;
train yourself to react automatically.
Another process that
enhances the atmosphere of worst-case scenarios is police communications. When
police call for backup, they tend to emphasize the danger of the situation.
When the call is propagated more widely, the message is propagated just as
rumors are: the distinctive elements are dropped out as the message is
repeated. A man on a highway overpass threatening suicide by jumping, will get
transformed into the cliché-- suicidal and threatening to take someone else
with him -- into armed and
dangerous. This is how individuals end up getting shot dozens of times by an
aroused network of converging cop cars. The distortion may start when a
civilian calls in, starting with an ambiguous situation, which the police
dispatcher (a civilian employee), transforms into the more conventional
warning. This was the case with the famous incident in 2009 when a Harvard
professor, a black man, arrived home and had difficulty getting his front door
open, getting the taxi driver to help un-jam it. A well-meaning Harvard
secretary passing on the street phoned to say a possible burglary might taking
place, but did not mention anyone’s race on the 911 recording and said: “I
don’t know if they live here and they just had a hard time with their keys”.
The dispatcher transformed this into a house-breaking by two black men; the cop
who showed up was restrained at first but reacted to the irate professor by arresting
him.
Lesson: police training
needs to be drastically reformed. And training for police dispatchers, as well
as from one police car to another, needs to be instructed on how rumors are
formed; and procedures to avoid inflammatory worst-case clichés.
[7] Racism among police. Some cops are racists. How many are there, and
what kind of racists they are, needs better analysis. What kind? There is a
difference between white supremacists of the pre-1960s period; stereotyping
racists who think most black people are potential criminals; situational
racists who react to black people in confrontational situations with fear and
hostility; casual racists who make jokes. These aren’t insoluble questions; if
ethnographers followed people around in everyday life and observed what they
talked about and how they behaved in different situations, we would have a good
picture. And there still remains
the further question, does one or another degree of racism explain when police
violence happens?
My estimate is that
racism among police is less important a factor than the social conflicts and
situational stresses outlined in points [1-6]. To put it another way, if we got
rid of racist attitudes, but left [1-6] in place, how much would police
violence be reduced? Very little, I would predict.
What can be done? And how likely is it to have
effects?
Let’s go through the
list.
[1] Collecting fines for municipal budgets. Getting rid of this corrupt
practice would be important for reducing hostility between police and citizens;
especially since it is a version of color-blind racism insofar as it targets
poor black areas. But how to get municipal officials to forego money that can
raised without taxpayer consent?
[2] Enforcing unpopular
regulations. A solution would be to legalize more prohibited substances. It
does raise a problem of trade-offs, such as deaths from fentanyl. And there are
other kinds of prohibitions being invented from time to time, as in the
coronavirus period. Some conflict of this sort is going to be with us for a
long time.
[2a] If police don’t
have to do the dirty work enforcing unpopular policies, they’d be a lot less
cynical and hard-assed, and we’d get along better with each other. This depends
on what we do about [1] and [2].
[3] The code of the street, ostentatious defiance. I think this is
declining already, with the growth of a black middle class. On the whole,
recent protest demonstrations are more civil than those of the late 1960s.
[4] Police anger at property destruction. This is a genuine dilemma;
either way, bad feelings are created. If we had fewer riots -- if some of the
other conditions get better-- this would be less of a problem. Caveat: racism
and police violence are not the only things riots can be about; for example,
the anti-globalization riots of the past decade in the US and Europe. We may
well be headed towards increased class division in the future, among other
things between the computerized elite (now riding out the coronavirus working
from their nice homes) and the other two-thirds of the population whose jobs
are steadily being replaced by computerized robots.
[5] Forward panic violence in policing demonstrations. There are ways
that police (as well as everyone else) can learn techniques to monitor their
adrenaline level, and to not rush into action until they have a clear
perception of the situation and have reduced their heart rate by breathing
exercises. This one is solvable. http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2016/10/cool-headed-cops-needed-heart-rate.html
This could go along in
tandem with:
[6] Reforming police training. More than reforming police departments,
we need full-scale investigation and reform of police academies. They need to
get away from the emphasis on worst-case scenarios and the quick-trigger,
muscle-memory approach to weapons training. As noted, civilian dispatchers as
well as cops need better training about rumor propagation and its tendency to
revert to stereotypes as messages pass along the chain.
[7] Police
racism. If we have enough of
these kind of reforms, this will take care of itself.
As of now, most calls
for reforms reiterate long-standing demands for independent review boards and
stronger penalties for police misconduct. Having a reform-oriented black police
chief in Minneapolis did not solve the problem. It is dubious that the top-down
approach would solve it, as long as the everyday conditions of police work go
unchanged.
References
Alexis Artwohl and Loren Christensen. 1997. Deadly Force Encounters.
Geoffrey Alpert and
Roger Dunham. 2004. Understanding Police
Use of Force.
Elijah Anderson. 1999. Code of the Street.
Donald Black. 1980. The Manners and Customs of the Police.
Donald Black. 1989. Sociological Justice.
Randall Collins. 2008. Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory.
Randall
Collins. "Cool-headed
Cops Needed: Heart Rate Monitors can Help." [posted 10.05.16]
http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2016/10/cool-headed-cops-needed-heart-rate.html
http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2016/10/cool-headed-cops-needed-heart-rate.html
Alice Goffman. 2014. On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American
City.
Jennifer Hunt. 2010. Seven
Shots: An NYPD Raid on a Terrorist Cell and its Aftermath.
Dave Klinger. 2004. Into the Kill Zone. A Cop’s Eye View of
Deadly Force.
Joseph Krupnick and
Christopher Winship. 2015. “Keeping up
the front: how disadvantaged black youth avoid street violence in the inner
city.” in Orlando Patterson (ed.), The
Cultural Matrix.
Peter Moskos. 2008. Cop in the Hood.
Anne Nassauer. 2019. Situational Breakdowns: Understanding
Protest Violence.
Jonathan Rubinstein.
1973. City Police.
Martín Sánchez Jankowski.
1991. Islands in the Street.
