People shooting at, and being shot by, police in America is, sadly of course, nothing new.
The difference today is made by camera phones and social media. Think back to the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles in 1992. The beating of King by LAPD officers was caught on camera and then shown all over the world. Rioting broke out in LA and other cities across America, and 53 people died. This was long before the advent of the internet and social media.
But it was a glimpse of the future. Today almost everyone carries a video camera on them and a 30-second video of an incident can be filmed, uploaded and viewed by millions almost instantly. The problem is that from that short clip, the Court of Public Opinion decides in an instant what actually happened and who is at fault. But the full facts cannot be seen in such a brief window. This is typical of the modern world of instant gratification: we want to view, judge and condemn in a matter of seconds. Seconds.
We forget that people’s livelihoods – their very lives, even – are at stake, so before we judge, let’s at least get the complete story. Everyone deserves to get their side across, after all — even the police, no matter how much anyone dislikes them. It’s a dangerous world we live in when we decide another’s fate on a 30-second video clip.
The police could do more to help themselves and their cause, I believe. Body cameras would be a start, although there are issues here too. Even when a police shooting is justified and lawful, images of a person being shot by law enforcers can still be emotional and distressing and even cause anger.
Police departments also need to be able to react to and fully explain these videos as quickly they are uploaded. If people are only hearing one side, they may well believe that the silent side is staying silent for a reason.
Yet police face a difficult balance here too. Each case needs to be properly investigated to determine what actually happened and there may be legal issues around releasing information.
The most important thing the police can do is improve their relationships with the people they are protecting. Sir Robert Peel, the founder of modern policing, said ‘The public are the police and the police are the public’. A police officer I spoke to recently, told me that police need to stop acting as though they are an ‘occupying force.’ It was a comment that surprised me because for so many years I had heard police officers saying that the public needed to support and respect them. Mostly, from what I had seen, they got that support and respect. They certainly expected it.
This officer worked in a city with a largely black population. More than anything, he wanted to see officers engaging more with the community – speaking to people when they were at a crime scene, say. From a basic policing perspective, it would be a good way to gather local intelligence, but this approach also would help foster a better understanding and relationship between the people and the – their – police.
Instead, he complained that he saw officers standing around, talking to each other, cracking jokes and pretty much ignoring those people who lived their lives on the streets that the cops policed.
‘The police are the public and the public are the police…’
Sir Robert Peel pic.twitter.com/VLhOKfu7YB— Michael Matthews (@mmatthewswriter) July 8, 2016
Engaging with the community — simply talking to people and spending time with them — is a basic police activity that is often lost when officers are stuck behind the wheel of a squad car and only ever emerge to deal with someone at a crime scene or deal with a traffic violation.
By stepping out into the streets and literally giving people the time of day, so much can be gained — intelligence, of course, but also trust, understanding, and friendship.
The importance of healthy, constructive relationships between police and communities might seem obvious, but it can sometimes be overlooked when cops are busy and feeling weary. Sometimes, of course, no amount of explaining or talking will work.
Take the recent rioting that followed the shooting of an armed criminal in Milwaukee, which was terrible but not altogether unexpected. It almost seems as though any police shooting these days – no matter how legitimate – is met with this kind of disorder. What may have surprised people, however, was the revelation that the criminal and the cop involved knew each other. They even attended the same school.
How can two people from the same place, attending the same school, end up leading such completely different lives? I know an East Coast cop (now retired), who grew up in a working-class neighborhood of a major city and who, as such, led a typical inner-city teenager’s life. He and his friends got into trouble, goofed around, had fights with other kids — trouble, but not serious trouble. But once they reached their twenties, the lives of two members of the group took totally different paths.
My friend joined his local police department, a decision made on the spur of the moment after he was handed a flyer by a cop in a shopping mall. He went on to climb the police ranks, earning a good wage and living a decent, suburban life. At about the same time he joined the police, one of his friends began to experiment with drugs and quickly became a dealer as well as a user. He then began to rob people – including other drug dealers – to fund his habit and lifestyle. Over the years, he spent time in prison and was lucky to survive on the streets at all. Things came to a head when one of his associates murdered a man.
At that point, he decided to clean himself up and his life took a dramatic turn for the better. In their 50s now and both law-abiding citizens, they sought each other out and are now, once again, firm friends. It is bizarre to imagine how they had both operated on the same streets – one on the side of the law and the other as a criminal – and it is perhaps just a matter of luck that they didn’t run into each other while each was working their ‘beat.’ If they had, who knows, perhaps they would have had a similar situation as the cop and the criminal in Milwaukee.
Why do two lives take such different directions? People often say that it is not the fault of the kids, but rather, where and how they grew up. For some, this is indisputably true. But for others, perhaps it has nothing to do with where you are from or the chances you were given as a kid. Perhaps some people are pre- destined for the lives they end up living, simply by how they are made, as well as where they are from.
This brings to mind a moment from my own past as a cop in the UK. One day we raided a known drug house owned by a middle-aged woman who had slipped into a devastating drug habit for reasons I never found out. The home had become a filthy ruin. We searched the property, found stashes of heroin, cash and other drug paraphernalia and made a few arrests of users and dealers. Then I noticed a closed door which, for some reason, no one had yet opened. I asked the owner of the house what was behind it. She said it was her daughter’s bedroom.
The door was locked, so I banged on it until it was opened. I expected to find more drugs and another addict, another tragedy. The house was dirty and run-down. But the room behind this door was the complete opposite, like the cop was to the criminal he grew up with.
This was a clean, immaculately tidy, typical teenage girl’s bedroom. I was astonished. The girl was sat at a writing desk, with books open. I asked what she was doing, and she told me she was studying for her university exams. She was studying to become a doctor. When I expressed my surprise, she said, ‘Do you think I want to end up like my mum?’
While all that drug-taking horror was going on right outside her own bedroom door, this young girl was working to make a better life for herself. She was one of those people being brought up in a world that would offer her little chance in life, yet through her own initiative, had decided to try to be something more, be someone better.
I suspect – and hope – that that girl, growing up in a drug house, studying for her exams even as her own mother was injecting heroin, is now a qualified doctor. Not everyone will have what it takes to achieve that, but with some self-belief, a little luck, and different choices, even those kids growing up in the worst neighborhoods can find a way out. A few will do it for themselves but many others need more help. Those are the ones we need to look out for.
Cops need to talk to people in communities for reasons other than criminal matters or traffic violations.It may sound simple, and it certainly isn’t the complete answer to the current crisis, but if you just police, and stop communicating with the local population, you become less human. You become an occupying force.
Michael Matthews is the author of The Riots and We Are The Cops, published by Silvertail Books
