Everyone Makes Mistakes, But When Cops Make Mistakes, The Guns Come Out

Failures

from the this-is-just-how-we-do-it-here dept

There’s a massive gap between how the policed view “reasonable” policing and the view held by those who do the policing. While most of us would prefer more accountability, transparency, and de-escalation, those who claim to “serve and protect” seem to prefer the polar opposite.

We get opacity, violence, and insular behavior any time we question why cops need to treat even the most routine of interactions with implied — if not actual — deadly force.

And that dichotomy has once again been clearly illustrated by victims of undue force deployment. While this stop does involve a license plate, it does not involve the tech (automated license plate readers [ALPRs]) normally associated with suspicionless stops that soon escalate to guns-out encounters with “reasonably scared” law enforcement officers.

Instead, it deals with normal human error. But when cops screw up, it’s the people they serve who can end up dead. At the very least, human error by cop means the casual terrorizing of people who’ve done nothing wrong. And so, as is detailed here in this report by Rebecca Carballo for the New York Times, the end result is people who’ve probably never broken a law in their life being treated like violent felons by government employees who can’t even possibly imagine they’re in the wrong.

Demetria Heard was driving with her family from their home in Arkansas to a youth basketball tournament in the Dallas area on July 23 when she noticed that a police officer had been following her for several minutes.

She told herself it was probably nothing, but soon the siren was on and the cruiser’s lights were flashing. She pulled over, and the next thing she knew, an officer was pointing a gun at her Dodge Charger.

Body camera footage later released by the Police Department in Frisco, Texas, north of Dallas, shows an officer ordering Ms. Heard to get out of the car and walk backward toward officers on the side of the closed freeway. Officers then instructed her son, who is in the sixth grade, to do the same.

These cops screwed up. But that didn’t stop them from doing what they did. The problem here? The officer entering the license plate number while trailing the car punched in “AZ” instead of “AR.” There’s a massive amount of miles between the two states and an even larger difference when it comes to entering license plate numbers.

It was only several minutes after ordering everyone out of the car at gunpoint that the officers discovered the error. And while it’s nice the department has offered an apology to the traumatized family, no one on the law enforcement side has even suggested officers should hold off on the deployment of (at least threatened) deadly force until they’re sure they’ve got all the (accurate) information they need.

Understandably, there’s a lawsuit on its way. The Fourth Amendment does not allow this behavior unless the officers can show they had reasonable suspicion to perform the stop and probable cause to escalate to detaining people at gunpoint.

The seemingly positive reactions from the involved officers and their employers are inextricably linked to public coverage of their actions. If they were truly concerned they’d screwed up, the officers and their department would have reached out long before this stop made national news.

Like I noted at the opening of this post, it’s human to err. (Forgiveness is still divine, so it’s not “reasonable” to expect that from anyone, especially the people who were manhandled at gunpoint because a cop punched in the wrong state code.) The difference is that, for most of us, our errors rarely lead to us pointing guns at other people with the implicit intent to kill. At best, most of us create minor inconveniences for coworkers and customers.

But law enforcement operates in an entirely different reality. While some of its actions can be justified by its law enforcement utility, many of its actions are propelled by so-called “training and expertise” that drills into officers the belief that everyone they interact with is a possible criminal, and likely a dangerous one at that. But even with our insane incarceration rate, the most logical conclusion is that 99% of people stopped by cops aren’t criminals. And that’s what should guide their responses, rather than the assertions of training personnel who choose to portray millions of innocent people as anthropomorphized loaded guns constantly aimed at the heads of the Boys in Blue.

For once, automated tech isn’t to blame for a guns-out traffic stop. But that’s hardly good news when human error results in the same reaction.

Filed Under: police, police brutality, police mistakes, police violence