How many police bullets does it take to stop a man?
Fifty for New Yorker Sean Bell. Six for 92-year-old Atlanta resident Kathryn Johnston. Forty-one for New Yorker Amadou Diallo.
All the police have to do is say that they felt threatened, or they saw something that looked like a gun, or the victim (we prefer perpetrator) resisted the police, and we are ready to dismiss even an investigation.
Many charges of police using excessive force are dismissed by select investigation committees that have little or no connection with the average American minority.
America seems to respond positively to displays of force when it wants to feel righteous; guns and muscle seem to be our most fluent language. We love movies with reluctant heroes like Charlton Heston, Clint Eastwood and Kiefer Sutherland in "24" who have the power to kill, show some reluctance at first, but, when pushed, turn into sadistic killing machines.
We lap it up. There seems little we admire more than the fig leaf of reluctance before our heroes go berserk.
Here at home, our reluctant heroes are the police. We fawn over them as we lap up their displays of power. We can feel our adrenalin rise as we learn of one more bad guy, shot to death as our men and women in blue defend themselves.
Those of us who belong to the power groups feel it anyway. The minorities have a different, often ignored, take on the same scene.
A few days ago, I read of the trial of the three policemen who together put 50 bullets into an unarmed man. One officer shot the man about four times, another about 11 and the third emptied three magazines into this most dangerous man.
Sure, they were tried, but how many others are never charged with using too much force?
By no means is this the only such event. It is not the last, and, sadly, not even the latest. News stories abound about cases in which our police have opened fire when, in my opinion as a civilian, they should have held off shooting, perhaps even ducking from an attack to see if a non-fatal alternative can be used.
Our police have shot children to death, believing the child to be holding a gun. There are also stories of people being shot to death as they lunged at the police with a bat or a knife or just "something that could have been a gun".
The problem is not with the individuals who wear the police uniform and join the forces in order to help keep the peace, the problem is with their training. The problem is also with the servile way our politicians interact with the police as a group as well as the acquiescent manner in which we deal with their often-corrupted unions.
Police unions have wrested lots of privileges: the police get far more protection from the law than any civilian ever does. In cases of wrongful deaths or other police misdeeds, the accused officers get two days in which they may not be questioned: union rules... now get your story straight.
The police academies have a very war-like approach to their training.
Prospective officers are trained in a mentality where they start believing that they are in a "war zone" and their lives are of paramount importance. This of course, allows them to reach for the gun more easily than if they were told they have to protect the public first.
Over-concern for their own safety, certainty that they are always the good guys and right, coupled with the training to seize control is what leads good police officers to respond violently to real and perceived threats. More and more police forces have started responding to situations where they believe violence might continue in armored personnel carriers.
Our national character is mostly responsible for the tough character of our defenders.
Our police need to consider our safety as the first order of the day, even when the perpetrator looks guilty. We need to take the force out of law enforcement and get back to public safety.
Then we can get on the road to successful community policing.
Jafar Siddiqui may be reached via editor@sdistrictjournal.com.[[In-content Ad]]
