We all have these biases. They don’t necessarily make us bad people. They just make us people. Unfortunately, when they are held by someone with a badge and a gun, and the power to take a life, those biases can play out negatively and people who shouldn’t be, end up dead.
I first learned about my own bias as a rookie cop while on a domestic dispute call that evening in Arlington. I was working a DUI assignment when I got the call to assist another officer. So, I hurried over. I met with the primary officer, a woman who was from a nearby police force who was my partner on this call. She brought me up to speed and we walked over to the residence. Since it was a domestic violence call, I assumed we would be meeting a distraught woman, probably crying, possibly injured.
Wrong.
The complainant was a man, average build, about 5-foot-10, possibly Hispanic. He said he had been assaulted by his lover, Leslie, and he wanted Leslie out of the apartment. We both felt it was weird, a man being beaten up by a woman. Still, I’m thinking, This will be simple. Handling a woman is a lot easier than dealing with an adrenaline-charged, probably irate, possibly drunk man. It was dusk when I got the call. By now, it was getting dark. As we headed upstairs to the apartment, my partner and I agreed that she would take the lead for a woman-to-woman conversation. Good plan, I said to myself.
Wrong again.
When we entered the apartment, Leslie was sitting on the sofa. Leslie was a large black man, as wide as a La-Z-Boy. Trust me, Leslie was big. Now, I’m concerned, but not overly so. Back then, I was 6-foot-2 and weighed a well-muscled 260 pounds. Still, I’m mentally rehearsing my training for situations like this, in case of resistance. Leslie was polite. He said he was sorry that he and his lover had created the disturbance that had brought us to his door. Everybody was amiable, and things were going fine until we told Leslie something we knew he didn’t want to hear.
“Sir, your roommate wants you to leave the apartment,” my partner said. “Please stand up so we can go downstairs.” Our reference to Leslie’s partner as his roommate was further evidence of our bias at the time. If it had been a heterosexual relationship, we most assuredly would have referred to the other individual as boyfriend or girlfriend.
“I don’t want to leave,” Leslie responded. “This is my apartment, too.”
He was passionate, but not threatening.
“Sir, you have to leave,” my partner said. “Please come with us downstairs, and I’m sure we can work this out.”
We needed Leslie out of the apartment because it would have been extremely difficult to handle a big guy like him in that small space. Again he said he didn’t want to leave and refused to stand up. My partner asked again. Same reaction. We went back and forth with Leslie for a minute or so about standing up and he told us repeatedly that he didn’t want to leave and how he loved his partner. This was not good. Noncompliance is cause to notch things up a bit. We were now getting close to possibly having to use force, which is always dangerous. Then without warning, Leslie did exactly what we asked him to do. He stood up, and that was when things really got scary.
To be honest, I never really wanted to be a cop. I joined the Arlington County (Virginia) Police Department in 1986, not long after graduating from Delaware State University, a historically black public university in Dover, Delaware. Representatives from the department visited our campus in my senior year and recruited me to join the department. I liked them, but I didn’t immediately commit. Still, I thought, depending on how my initial plans panned out, it could be a good fit.
My goal after graduating college was to become a starting offensive lineman in the National Football League. I played left and right guards and filled in at tackle from time to time. I was big, and I was fast. People, including me, thought I was pretty good. I made the All-Mid-Eastern Atlantic Conference team one year. So, I figured I’d give the NFL a try. That dream, however, was set back significantly when I was cut during tryouts with the New York Giants the summer after my graduation.
I had thought about following the typical career trajectory of guys trying to break into the NFL. You spend the year eating and lifting and running, trying to get bigger, stronger, and faster while working security at clubs and concerts to make ends meet until the next training camp. Some guys make it and others do it for as long as five years before giving in to the reality that they just weren’t good enough. I considered it, but my father, an electrician, and my mother, a secretary, took me aside and suggested it was time to move on with my life and start a career. The offer from the Arlington County Police Department was available and sounding better by the day. So I took it.
Arlington’s was one of the very few accredited police departments in the nation, which made them special. One of the requirements for all accredited police forces is that their officers must all be college graduates. I liked that. I thought it would make any organization much more professional and would mean fewer guys just looking to play cops and robbers. Arlington was also a very affluent area, a lot more than the neighborhood I grew up in. The median household income in Arlington is almost double the median household income for the rest of the nation. Consequently, it was also the highest-paying police department in the Washington, D.C. area, even higher than the police department in the nation’s capital. That particular fact really attracted me to the job.
Which is a roundabout way of explaining how I had come to this moment in time where I might have to shoot someone.
If I thought Leslie was big sitting down, he was a mountain standing up, at least 6-foot-8 and well over 300 pounds. I thought I was buff, but I was nothing compared to him. At this point, my partner and I were at an extreme disadvantage. Somebody could get hurt or worse. The only thing that I had that could really handle him without me or my partner getting hurt was my weapon. In 1986, tasers weren’t as readily available as they are now. So, to collect ourselves and manage a potentially volatile situation, we reversed our instructions.
“Sir, could you please sit down?” I said.
Leslie looked at me, confused. “I don’t want to sit down,” he responded. “She asked me to stand up, so I’m standing up.”
Now, we have this huge, possibly violent man standing in front of us and not following our command for him to sit down. Things were not good, and then Leslie heightened the tension. He said he needed to see his lover downstairs. Now that was not going to happen. We certainly weren’t going to allow a person who is accused of assaulting someone back into close proximity to the alleged victim. So, again we asked Leslie to sit down. He ignored us. We asked again. He refused. We asked again. He refused again.
My partner and I knew that we would be hard-pressed to arrest Leslie without additional support, based solely on his size. I had resigned myself to the fact that once we put hands on this very large man, if his noncompliance continued, lethal force might be necessary. We had choices to make. If we tried to handle him physically, we could both be hurt badly. If we had pulled our weapons at this point, our actions likely would have been defensible, and if, at some point in a struggle, we had shot Leslie, we probably would have been justified.
“I feared for my life” would have been my defense, and it would have been reasonable, though not completely accurate. That’s what the higher-ups tell officers to say when something goes awry. You learn it in the police academy and it becomes the mantra of every officer when any shootings occur. And who can prove that you weren’t in fear for your life, even if the fear was caused by something improper that you yourself did.
Here’s an example from a true story. On a winter afternoon in New York, an 18-year-old black male was seen leaving a local store. A police officer radioed in that he saw the teenager tugging at something in his waistband, possibly a gun. The teenager, however, was unarmed. Other police began to follow the man. The suspect didn’t know he was being followed. As the teenager neared his apartment building, police say they told him to stop but he ran into the apartment building. Video of the incident, however, shows
the man casually walking into his home as though he never heard a command. The officers then tried to kick down the front door of the apartment building so they could get to the kid’s apartment. Remember, this was a teenager who might or might not have a gun, but police were trying to kick down a door to an entire apartment building.
When that didn’t work, two officers went to the back of the building, where they were let in by a first-floor tenant. They located the teenager’s apartment. The teenager was living with his grandmother. Officers went to her apartment, and she let them in. When the teenager saw the police, he ran into the bathroom and tried to flush a small bag of marijuana down the toilet. When he turned around, an officer shot him in the chest. The cop said, “I feared for my life.” We all agreed that at that point he may have actually feared for his life. Who could say otherwise? But here’s the other side. He created the situation that caused him to fear for his life and shoot that youngster. There was no reason to chase that kid into his house. The kid hadn’t committed a crime. There was no need to try to break down the door of the apartment building, home to numerous residents. Also, why did the officer go into the bathroom? The suspect had already been cornered. He was trapped in the bathroom, so why not wait outside? What if the kid did have a gun and was waiting for the officer to come in? Then the officer might have been killed, or there might have been a shootout and the grandmother might have been inadvertently killed. Now an unarmed man was dead, a family was grieving, and the officer was facing a disciplinary hearing, possibly a trial, possibly loss of his job. And for what? A few bags of marijuana?
My partner and I were trying to avoid a similar stupid mistake. So we were at a stalemate. We really didn’t want this encounter to go awry. We didn’t want to shoot an unarmed man over a lovers’ quarrel. The man who called us didn’t want his lover shot. But we were very, very close to some kind of force being used.
So I was standing at the ready. So was my partner. I could see her widening her stance almost imperceptibly in preparation for a struggle. Leslie was just looking at us, confused and frustrated. Then, right before we started taking things up a notch, Leslie began to weep. He put his face in his hands, tears running down his cheeks, and sat down. Inside, I breathed a deep sigh of relief and my sphincter muscle relaxed. We eventually convinced Leslie to walk out on his own, where we arrested him without incident.
The point of the story is this: Leslie was big, and he was black, but did that make him bad? I am big and I am black. Does that make me bad? I ask that question, because bad was the term a Tulsa, Oklahoma, police officer used to describe Terence Crutcher, an unarmed African-American man and father of four on September 17, 2016, just seconds before another Tulsa officer shot and killed him. The video of the incident has been seen by millions around the world.
Crutcher had stopped his vehicle on a Tulsa street when police received a 911 call a little after 7 p.m. about an abandoned vehicle in the middle of 36th Street North just west of Lewis Avenue. One caller said: “Somebody left their vehicle running in the middle of the street with the doors wide open. The vehicle is still running. It’s an SUV. It’s like in the middle of the street. It’s blocking traffic. There was a guy running from it, saying it was going to blow up. But I think he’s smoking something. I got out and was like, ‘Do you need help?’ He was like, ‘Come here, come here, I think it’s going to blow up.’”
The other caller said: “There is a car that looks like somebody just jumped out of it and left it in the center of the road on 36th Street North and North Lewis Avenue. It’s dead in the middle of the street. Nobody in the car.”
Judging by the 911 calls, police clearly knew something was wrong, even if they didn’t know exactly what. They had a car blocking traffic and possibly either a confused or high or disturbed man in the vicinity. None of the callers, however, mentioned a weapon or a threat of violence.
Officer Betty Shelby arrived on the scene first. Crutcher was standing in the road outside his car. Shelby exited her vehicle and almost immediately pulled her weapon. She gave Crutcher a series of verbal commands. At one point, he had his hands in his pockets. She told him to take them out. He did. Crutcher, however, didn’t say a word. Shelby had called for backup. Crutcher put his hands in the air in a surrender pose and began to walk back to his car. By now, at least four officers were at the scene in addition to a police helicopter overhead. Shelby drew her gun and she and another officer followed Crutcher as he walked to his car with his hands in the air. The other officer had his taser out. Shelby was the only officer with a gun drawn.
Officers in the helicopter overhead, which included Shelby’s husband, filmed the incident. With tensions high, an officer in the helicopter looked down at the scene and made this assessment: “That looks like a bad dude.” Two seconds later, Crutcher was shot dead—with one hand in the air and the other by his side. He was unarmed and there was no weapon in his car. When I saw the video footage, the comment from the cop in the helicopter really stuck in my head. It made me question everything that had happened.
What evidence made the officer conclude that Crutcher, 40, was a “bad dude”? He had never seen the man before, so he had no previous encounters on which to base his claim. He had not run the license plates on the car. If he had, he would have found that the car had not been stolen. He would have also found that Terence Crutcher, who was the registered owner of the car, was not wanted for any crime. Additionally, Crutcher had made no verbal or physical threats to anyone, not to the people who made the 911 calls, nor to any of the officers on the ground. Crutcher had no visible prison or gang tattoos, nor other visible markings that might indicate he was dangerous. He wasn’t wearing biker gear or clothing that glorified crime or violence. So, what made him a “bad dude”?
For the officer in that helicopter, Crutcher did have one telltale marking. He was a “male black.” Crutcher, like so many black men, was dead because too many of us view an African-American man as the real-life boogeyman. We are imbued with diabolical attributes and devious motives. Consequently, black men are suspected of wrongdoing, locked away, or gunned down.
In the court proceedings that followed, Shelby testified that she shot Crutcher because she feared for her life. There’s that ubiquitous phrase again. “I thought he was going to kill me,” she told a court. How did she come to that conclusion? For what reason would Crutcher want to harm Shelby? He was not an escaped fugitive. He was not wanted for any crime. He was not trying to escape or elude arrest. There were no signs that he was armed. He had not made any threatening gestures toward Shelby or the other officers. If anyone should have been in fear for his life, it was Crutcher. Shelby had her gun trained on him. He was surrounded by armed police. What reason could Crutcher possibly have had to want to harm Shelby? It strains credulity.
So, where did things go wrong? Let’s review the Crutcher shooting through a law enforcement lens. The goal of every law enforcement confrontation with a citizen should be to gain compliance in a situation that is safe for the person and safe for the officer. As an ATF agent and an agent training instructor at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia, I’ve taught hundreds of officers how to handle themselves in these situations. In every encounter, officers should go through what we call a use-of-force continuum. There are five steps in the continuum. The officer’s first step is to establish presence. This is in some ways the most important step in the interaction between the officer and the people he or she is addressing. It’s sometimes called command presence. If officers present themselves well, no force is required in most cases. Presence encompasses the officer’s appearance and attitude. It should be professional and nonthreatening. It’s the way you look, the way you dress, the way you stand, the way you walk and carry yourself. You should exude confidence, but not arrogance. You need to look like you’re in command of yourself and you can handle whatever situation arises. You can be friendly and engaging, but you cannot appear to be someone who is not in control.
The next step is verbalization, which refers to the officer establishing verbal contact with the individual. The officer should give very clear, concise, nonthreatening instructions. If the officers have not established command presence, however, verbalization may not work. The guys on the corner or the couple in a domestic squabble have already dismissed you as out of touch or ineffective. So, nothing you say matters. That’s why I say command presence is so important. As you talk with people, your tone should be polite but authoritative. People need to know you mean business. “Good morning. I am Officer Matthew Horace. We are responding to a request for help. What seems to be the problem? You, sir. I need you to take 10 steps back and stand there. You, miss. Please go to that corner and my partner will talk to you.” Sometimes you must shorten commands or raise your voice. Unfortunately, some cops arrive on the scene and immediately start shouting commands, addressing people disrespectfully, and treating victims like suspects. African-Americans and Latinos know this response all too well.
The next step up is empty hand control. Now, you are using bodily contact to control the subject in a way that protects the individual and you. You may need to place one hand on the person’s back and grab the person’s arm with the other. You may be using that to move him to a different place temporarily or to put the person in a posture that is more secure for you and the person.
The Black and the Blue Page 2