by Chris Hayes
Bernard Bailyn, the great scholar of the American colonial project’s first century, calls this period the “barbarous years.” “The savagery,” he once wrote, was driven by “elemental fears peculiar to what was experienced as a barbarous environment—fears of what could happen to civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness . . . in which God’s children,” as the colonists thought of themselves, “were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world around them.”
Within a century or two, settlers and the U.S. government had succeeded in ethnically cleansing, conquering, and corralling the continent’s indigenous people. But there would always be a new enemy at the gate. In the South, of course, it was the constant demographic weight of the slaves under the whip, who so outnumbered their masters that the possibility of revolt dominated the nightmares of the slaver class. The master went to bed in his house every night, protected from dozens of men and women he owned by his accumulated weaponry and his ability to terrorize them.
Revolts happened often enough that southern planters didn’t have to simply imagine what would happen if the scales were to suddenly tip. In 1770 the Virginia Gazette carried an account of a slave revolt in Bowler Cocke’s Hanover County plantation, indicating the cause: “The Negroes belonging to the plantation having long been treated with too much lenity and indulgence, were grown extremely insolent and unruly.” Ultimately a group of about a dozen white men (and two children bearing weapons) confronted the forty or fifty slaves armed with nothing but farm tools:
The slaves, deaf to all they said, rushed upon them with desperate fury, armed with clubs and staves; one of them knocked down a White man, and was going to repeat the blow to finish him, which one of the boys seeing, levelled his piece, discharged its contents into the fellow’s breast, and brought him to the dust. Another fellow, having also knocked down another of the Whites, was, in the same manner, shot by the other boy. In short, the battle continued sometime desperate, but another of the Negroes having his head almost cut off with a broad sword, and five of them being wounded, the rest fled.
Fear, of course, is not all that motivates the settler, the colonizer, the slaveowner. Another inducement, as Ta-Nehisi Coates says, is “plunder.” But the existence of plunder as a motivation, even as the primary one, does not negate the subjective experience of white fear, the terror that individual white people experience and that white writers, preachers, and politicians cultivate socially and politically. That dispatch in the Virginia Gazette was meant to terrify those who read it, and I’m certain it succeeded.
It may seem downright perverse to linger on this kind of fear, the fear felt by enslavers and white colonists. If we point to the fear that motivates a lynch mob, then what are we saying about the moral status of the murder they all committed? Does their fear justify it? The obvious answer is no. The slaves had infinitely more to fear than the slaveowners, and the Indians had infinitely more to fear than the settlers. Even to diagnose and investigate white fear in this period seems an injustice: the fear that should matter to us is the fear of the man who has been murdered, the fear felt by his family and kin and friends and the millions of African Americans across the South who lived through decades of systematic terrorism with essentially no protection from the state. When we think of fear and the lynch mob, we should of course think of the victim, not of the crowd.
But for the Pilgrim in the land of the pagans, the homesteader scratching out a bare existence for a terrified family just a day’s ride from Comanches, the planter patriarch whose family sleeps outnumbered every night, fear is not some excuse for savagery, cruelty, and sadism but is fundamentally inseparable from it. Hurt people hurt people, as the old saying goes. And the truly terrified commit atrocities.
Ultimately the gun is the backstop that prevents the entire social order from being upended. Had it not been for the superior firepower of fearful whites, who knows what would have transpired in American history? You can understand why, in such a situation, certain kinds of white southerners would cling to their guns.
Today Americans still rely on the gun, the power to kill or injure, to preserve the social order in the most fraught and dire moments. Police know their weapon is by their side if the situation they encounter spins too far out of control and they find themselves threatened.
OF COURSE, THE OVERWHELMING majority of police interactions never go near this danger zone. A huge number of calls that come into 911 are complaints not of violent threats but about simple disorder: unruly people on the street, loud music coming from apartment parties, interpersonal conflict teetering on the edge of violence, like the argument that started this book. While law enforcement likes to urge vigilance—if you see something, say something—sometimes, particularly in rapidly gentrifying areas, this ends up being something of a constant headache for police. “So I’m working last week and get dispatched to a call of ‘Suspicious Activity,’ ” reads a post on Reddit’s police message board ProtectAndServe.
Ya’ll wanna know what the suspicious activity was? Someone walking around in the dark with a flashlight and crow bar? Nope. Someone walking into a bank with a full face mask on? Nope. It was two black males who were jump starting a car at 930 in the morning. That was it. Nothing else. Someone called it in.
In the course of the last few years, I’ve had dozens and dozens of conversations with cops, but I’m always struck that for all the training and procedures that accompany being a member of a police force, each police officer has a shocking amount of latitude in any given situation. When I read the above Reddit post, I feel relief that the cop who answered the call to find two guys jumping their car had the good sense not to harass them. But who knows what another cop would’ve done?
At the street level, that autonomy is both an essential part of policing and the source of what so many people in the Colony find so maddening and humiliating. From the cops’ perspective, anything can happen in any interaction—they need the latitude to manage and control whatever they encounter. But for two young black men trying to jump-start a car, no doubt frustrated and late for work, the arrival of a police officer is the arrival of a government agent who may be in a beneficent mood or in a vengeful one. In the moment of his appearance, they go from sovereign to second-class citizens.
To better understand how cops learn to wield this authority, I traveled to New Jersey, to spend a morning in the Morris County Sheriff’s Office. I wanted to experience firsthand how recruits are trained to navigate the irreducible uncertainty of being out on the street in the office’s state-of-the-art virtual reality simulator.
I am standing in the center of a dark, circular room almost entirely surrounded by screens. I am outfitted with a receptor on my chest that can receive gunshots fired from actors playing roles on the screens in front of me. When I am hit, I will feel a shock. I have a nine-millimeter handgun that has been converted to fire an infrared signal at the simulator screens but retains its original action and noise.
At the controls behind me stands Paul Carifi. A bald and jacked forty-nine-year-old white man with the compact intensity of a human bulldog, he’s been overseeing training for years. I cannot conjure in my mind someone who’s more of a cop’s cop. Later I will learn he’s also a Republican member of the Parsippany town council.
On the computer system, he can pull up any one of eighty-five different scenarios and then manipulate it in real time as I interact with the scene in front of me. Actors on a video screen will speak to me. They will appear to respond to my commands, though really it’s Carifi making dynamic selections from a menu of responses available on the computer. Each scenario begins with a call from dispatch giving me some cursory information about what I’m being summoned to, and then a few moments later, there I am confronting the scene alone.
“So you want to maintain control, some semblance of order,” Carifi tells me before I start. “You want [your suspects] to stay in one spot. You want their hands out where you can see their h
ands. You don’t want people moving around, sticking their hands in their pockets, in their jackets, because now you don’t know what they’re grabbing for. . . . You want to be able to maintain a calmness, so when you’re talking to people you’re not getting upset, getting riled up. And if they are, you want to calm them down.”
In the first scenario I happen upon, a white man, probably in his late fifties, is standing in the back of a pickup truck, throwing junk from his flatbed into an empty lot. He’s not hurting anyone. There’s no one else around, but what he’s doing is a clear violation of the law, and I have to get him to stop. I don’t know what law he’s violating, and I have a sneaking suspicion that a rookie cop might not either.
I summon my best commanding voice and ask the man on the screen before me what he’s doing.
“Great,” he says. “I knew someone was gonna call you guys.”
“Yeah, uh, what are you up to here?”
“Why you gotta give me a hard time?”
“Well, this is not a dumping ground.” I don’t actually know if that’s true. But would a real cop in my position who just showed up know the ins and outs of dumping laws?
“This is my friend’s lot. I can dump here.”
Again: maybe true! Who knows? I press on. “Uh, no. I’m going to have to ask you to pack up your stuff and go.”
“My friend owns this property.”
“You got any proof?”
“Shut up, you dumbass.”
I freeze for a moment. Obviously, I can’t let this dude call me a dumbass and tell me to shut up. But what exactly is my recourse? I mean, I suppose I could try to slap some cuffs on him for disorderly conduct or resisting arrest. Instead I say, “Uh.”
“Relax, man. It’s only a little fucking concrete. It ain’t gonna kill ya.” He holds a cinder block in his hands.
“Okay, can you drop that please for me?” I attempt to affect a voice of authority, even though I’m asking a question. Which I probably shouldn’t do. And then just to make sure he understands which precise implement I’m asking him to drop, I add, “That concrete block.”
“You want me to put the block down?”
“Yeah. Yes, sir.”
“Put the block down. Yeah, I’ll put the block down.” At that point he raises the cinder block above his head as if to throw at me.
I respond by drawing my weapon and aiming it at him.
The simulation ends.
Carifi asks me if I was right to draw my weapon, and the obvious embarrassing answer is no, of course not. The man is far enough away that he can’t really hit me with a cinder block. This, of course, delights Carifi. We’re only one scene in, and already the self-righteous liberal pundit has drawn his weapon on an unarmed man holding a cinder block.
“I probably didn’t need to go to my gun,” I say somewhat sheepishly.
“You don’t. You see that especially with some of our newer trainees. They want to go to the gun right away.”
For Carifi, and for the good folks of New Jersey law enforcement and beyond, this is already mission accomplished. Police officers dislike being second-guessed by politicians, activists, and journalists who’ve never had to do their job, and in this context the exercise is designed to beat some humility into loudmouth pundits like myself. See—it’s not so easy, right?
We continue to another scenario: a pimp yelling at and verbally threatening a sex worker who seems strung out. The pimp tells me to scram, and when I hold my ground, he takes off. I stay behind to help the sex worker, who briefly threatens to stab me with a hypodermic needle, but I don’t take the bait this time. My weapon stays holstered, and she ultimately puts the syringe down.
In the next scenarios, I pull over a group of kids who look stoned out of their gourd blasting metal in a car in the parking lot of a mall; confront a couple whose neighbors have called in a noise complaint about music blasting from a garage; and enter a chaotic scene at a suburban home in which a man’s ex-girlfriend has parked her SUV in front of his driveway. She’s yelling at him and refusing to let him and his new girlfriend leave.
I do my best through all of them, but I keep coming back to ask how much training I would want to have in order to feel prepared to intervene confidently and appropriately in some of the situations I encounter in the simulator. I imagine cops have to mediate between exes having loud confrontations all the time, and I also imagine that, say, someone with years of conflict resolution and psychological training would have a pretty clear road map for how to best resolve a situation like that without having to make an arrest, use pepper spray, or god forbid, unholster his weapon.
“There’s an old saying,” retired NYPD cop turned author Steve Osborne once told me, “that in police work, a cop`s mouth is his greatest weapon. To go into a chaotic situation where everybody is yelling and screaming, sometimes there`s alcohol, there`s drugs involved—to be able to talk everybody down. When you see a real experienced cop do that, it’s a magical thing.”
But as true as that is, the fact is that most cops are going to encounter these scenarios with little more training than I did—and I talk for a living! The typical cadet training involves sixty hours on how to use a gun and fifty-one hours on defensive tactics, but just eight hours on how to calm situations without force.
It made me think of the stories I’d heard from soldiers about the high-water mark of counterinsurgency in Iraq, when General David Petraeus (to much acclaim) took over the mission. He attempted to orient America’s occupying soldiers toward cultivating political alliances and building the new state’s governing capacity. Readers of American news outlets were treated to an endless stream of photos of camo-clad soldiers sitting on rugs with Iraqi men drinking tea and listening to them air their grievances.
Some of the soldiers I spoke to enjoyed this work, believed in it deeply, and felt they excelled at it. Others felt the whole thing was ridiculous. But the brute fact remains: soldiers aren’t judges or mayors or bureaucrats who have the experience, language skills, or basic relationships of kin and country to be able to navigate the extremely fraught local politics of a place they’ve never set foot in until their deployment.
Sure, there were many incredibly talented, humane, creative American troops who managed to improvise, listen and learn, and play some kind of constructive role in the area to which they were assigned. But there was a fundamental mismatch between what the military as an institution is created and trained to do and what this military in this moment was being asked to do. The military exists to use violence to destroy enemies. That is its essence. It can also do many things that aren’t that (build dams, deliver relief, develop technology), but to ask twenty-year-olds in a war zone to play cultural ambassador underneath fifty pounds of gear in 110-degree heat while not speaking the language is, well, a stretch.
And as I navigated scenario after scenario in the training room, it felt like it’s in many ways the same for cops. We ask police to be social workers, addiction counselors, mental health workers, and community mediators. We wouldn’t hand a social worker a gun and have them go out into the streets to apprehend criminals, but we do the opposite every day.
So what happens when police officers are called upon to handle a volatile person in the midst of terrible psychological torment? It happens all the time in America, and many police, whether through luck or accrued wisdom or basic empathy, handle it with grace. But many don’t, or worse. In March 2015 a maintenance worker in an apartment complex in the Atlanta suburbs saw twenty-seven-year-old Air Force veteran Anthony Hill naked, banging on neighbors’ doors and crawling on the ground in the throes of a bipolar episode. The worker did what many, maybe most, of us would do: he called the cops. What else would you do? This is precisely the type of disorder we look to the cops to resolve. (Another woman who saw Hill called 911, hoping to get medical personnel to respond.)
The police arrived, and in less than ten minutes, Hill, who was black, was shot dead. He had been unarmed and, his family says,
suffered from PTSD after a deployment to Afghanistan. The officer who shot him claimed that Hill charged him, and he was convinced he was on some drug that would’ve rendered his Taser useless. That officer was charged with murder.
But take a second and ask yourself why this was considered something for the police to handle to begin with. “If a mental health unit with paramedics, nurses, or even doctors had been sent to help Anthony (instead of an officer with a gun) he would still be alive today,” local activist Asia Parks told Think Progress. “Mental illness should not be the reason a person is condemned to death or prison.” According to statistics compiled by the Washington Post, in 2015 a full quarter of those shot and killed by police were suffering from mental illness.
None of my scenarios in New Jersey involved people suffering from mental illness, although I was hardly in a position to make that determination. (Again: how would I know unless I had been trained to spot it?) One simulation stuck out, however, probably because it ended with me getting shot.
I show up in response to a complaint that a man is revving the engine of his motorcycle in his garage. When I ask about the noise, the man stops revving the engine and responds, “Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me! Again?!” I stand in the driveway looking into the garage, where the man and his wife take turns arguing with each other and cursing at me. I try to control the situation, but after maybe thirty seconds of this kind of back-and-forth, the man and the woman start arguing more strenuously. Then suddenly, someone starts firing a shotgun at me. I am hit before my hand even reaches my sidearm. Despite being shot, I manage to draw my gun and fire wildly, but by that point I am (virtually) dead.
Carifi approached me and asked me how many people were in the scenario. I said two, the man and woman arguing. I had managed to entirely miss a third man who’d entered the scene and been the one to pick up the shotgun. To add insult to injury, he noted the screen that marked where I had returned fire: my constellation of misses hadn’t even come close to the man actually trying to kill me.