by Rosa Brooks
In the early to late 1980s and early ’90s—during the height of the crack epidemic—Washington, DC, was the homicide capital of the United States, with 479 homicides in 1991. By the late 1990s, DC police officers had one of the highest rates of officer-involved shootings in the nation—MPD officers reportedly fired at suspects more than twice as often as officers in other major US police departments. MPD invited the Justice Department to evaluate its practices, and the results of the investigation led MPD to enter into a memorandum of agreement with the Justice Department, promising an overhaul of use-of-force policies, training, and investigations. The reforms made a substantial difference: When an independent review team examined MPD’s use-of-force practices in 2016, the audit concluded that MPD had “plainly” become “a very different, and much better, law enforcement agency” than it was in 1999, when the Justice Department investigation began. While the review team identified some ongoing issues, it found that MPD no longer had a problem with using excessive force.
This was consistent with my experience in MPD. While I saw much that troubled me when I patrolled, I never saw an officer use what looked like unnecessary force, and with only a handful of exceptions, the officers I worked with showed courtesy, professionalism, and restraint, even in situations where things could easily have gone wrong, such as with angry, aggressive suspects, or when the unexpected suddenly occurred. The man who started to struggle and shout threats when arrested for assaulting his girlfriend, for instance, was hustled into the wagon by officers holding each of his arms, but they still took the time to warn him to duck his head so he wouldn’t hit it on the top of the doorframe. Responding to a call reporting a man with a gun inside a supermarket (perhaps a common phenomenon in some states, but alarming and rare in DC, which has some of the nation’s most stringent gun control laws), officers approached the suspect calmly and courteously, with their own weapons still holstered.
Early in my field training, my partner and I were dispatched to an apartment to investigate a possible burglary: the burglar alarm had sounded. The dispatcher told us that the tenant was out of town and the apartment was supposed to be unoccupied. But when we arrived, we found the outer door open a crack. No light or sound came through. My partner Jake was a former marine. He looked at the darkness behind the door and looked at me, then unholstered his weapon and held it down at his side. I followed suit, and we tiptoed into the apartment.
The living room was empty, and we were about to move toward the inner hall when there was a sudden burst of light in the hall, and a silhouetted head and torso popped into our line of vision. Jake and I both startled, and the figure at the end of the hall gave a yelp and vanished again.
In the simulations we went through during firearms training and our twice-a-year re-qualification courses, this was the kind of situation in which bullets immediately started to fly, and I remember thinking: Oh shit. This could end badly. I wasn’t planning to shoot anyone, but I had no idea how Jake would react to having someone suddenly jump out from the blackness in an apartment undergoing a possible burglary.
But after his first slight twitch of surprise, Jake stayed calm and kept his weapon at his side, pointed down. “Hi there,” he said, his voice slow and relaxed. “MPD. Sorry to startle you. We got called over here because the alarm went off. Do me a favor, would you, and step out here so we can see you?”
“I, uh, can’t,” said a voice. The voice was male, nervous, and young.
“Why not?”
“I got no clothes on.”
Jake and I looked at each other.
“You live here?” Jake asked.
“Uh, no, it’s my dad’s place. I live with my mom. I just came over to do my laundry and take a shower. So all my clothes are in the wash and I just got out of the shower.”
“Well, could you maybe put something on real quick, like a towel?” Jake suggested.
“Um, yeah, okay, yeah, I could do that.” There was a pause, then a boy stepped out, eyes wide as saucers, torso still naked and dripping, clutching a towel to his waist. He looked to be fifteen or sixteen. Jake and I holstered our weapons.
“Okay, thanks,” Jake said. “Your dad know you’re here?”
“Uh, I dunno.”
“See some ID?” The kid retreated back into what I assumed was the bathroom—clouds of steam were billowing out—then reappeared, holding out a wallet. I glanced at his school ID, then we radioed in and asked the dispatcher for the tenant’s phone number. A few minutes later, we had the tenant on the line. He confirmed that he had a son by that name, and asked to speak to him. I handed the kid my phone, and after a short conversation (annoyed voice on the other end of the line, embarrassed voice on the kid’s side), he handed it back to me.
I put the phone to my ear. “Everything good, sir?” I asked.
“Yeah, everything good, I just told him he needs to remember the damn alarm code, and close the door next time.”
It was a short encounter, and from the perspective of the official record, it was a nonevent—since there was no burglary, no report was required; we cleared the call and went off to the next assignment. But I’ve often thought about that night, and how easy it would have been for things to end differently. What if a different officer had been my partner? What if it had been Reid, the officer who nearly drew his weapon on a girl reaching into her purse in her own living room? It wasn’t hard to imagine someone jumpier than Jake shooting first and asking questions later.
In fact, it wasn’t even hard to imagine an officer like Reid telling us that our slowness to point our weapons had placed us in serious danger, and our survival was pure dumb luck. I could hear his voice in my head: “You just walked right in! You should have called for backup the second you saw that open door. Then you should have made a tactical entry like you were taught in the training center, with one of you sweeping left with your weapon, one sweeping right, then clearing each room in turn. Your weapons should have been up and ready. Sure, it turned out to be just an unarmed kid, but you didn’t know that. What if you had interrupted an armed burglar and he had come out pointing his gun at you? What if there were other armed guys back there too? Or what if the kid went back inside and got a gun when you let him out of your sight to go get his ID? In any of those situations, you’d have been sitting ducks. How would your kids feel if you didn’t come home because you took a stupid risk?”
If Reid had been there to say all that, he wouldn’t have been entirely wrong. We had taken some risks. We could have called for backup. We could have done a tactical room-clearing. We could have kept our guns at the ready position, our fingers on the triggers. We could have shouted at the kid to get down on the floor, cuffed him, and kept him cuffed until we were sure there were no weapons or other potential assailants present. If we had encountered someone armed and violent, having our own guns ready would have lessened the odds of one of us getting killed. And yes, I would hate to look down from the afterlife and see that my children were motherless because I had been too trusting and slow.
But I’d do the same thing again, and I hope my partner would too. Perhaps we had risked our own safety by not having our guns up—but keeping our guns down had decreased the risk to someone else. All in all, I’d rather my children lose their mother than make another mother lose her child. If my gun had been up and ready when that figure popped out from the dark hallway, I might have pulled the trigger out of pure reflex—at the range, when a target faces, you fire—and then there would have been a dead kid.
It wouldn’t have been too hard to justify such a shooting, at least as far as the law is concerned. By now, I could easily compose the bureaucratic prose in my head:
On the above-listed date and time, officers were dispatched to investigate a report of a possible burglary at the listed location. After ascertaining that the authorized resident was out of town and being informed by the dispatcher that the apartment should have been unocc
upied, we arrived on scene and noted that the front door of the residence was partially open, indicating, based on my knowledge and experience, that a burglar might have effected an entry and remained on the premises. Being aware that the neighborhood in which we were located had experienced a high rate of violent crime, including multiple recent homicides and several recent burglaries in which a firearm had been used by the perpetrator, I drew my service weapon and entered the apartment while holding my weapon at the ready position as I had been instructed to do during my training. The apartment was dark, and without warning, a male figure appeared from behind a closed door and appeared to lunge in my direction. I had only a split second to make a decision. I believed that my life was in imminent danger, so I fired three shots: two to the body, one to the head, as instructed during my training.
While it later transpired that the suspect had not been armed, this could not have been determined for certain at the time due to the speed at which events unfolded and to the poor lighting conditions, which made it impossible to determine detail. Given the totality of the circumstances, I reasonably believed that my life, the life of my partner, and potentially the lives of other innocent people in the building were in imminent danger and that the use of lethal force was therefore justified.
There would have been street protests, of course, and the chief of police would have issued a statement calling the shooting a tragedy, and the department might have rapped me on the knuckles for tactical failures, such as neglecting to call for backup. But I wouldn’t have gone to jail. Even today, after the mass protests of 2020 and the outpouring of public pain over police killings and racial injustices, prosecutors rarely pursue criminal charges in such circumstances, and when they do, juries rarely convict. It was a dangerous neighborhood. Violent crimes and armed burglaries were all too common. The apartment was supposed to be unoccupied. The burglar alarm had gone off. The front door was partially open. The apartment was dark. Someone jumped out at us without warning.
This is why police in America end up killing so many people. It’s not that they’re sadists, or that they don’t care about the lives of black Americans (this may be true of a few, but not of most). It’s just that everything in police training and culture tells them to expect danger from every quarter. Officers are trained to be hypervigilant and respond to potential threats instantly. They’re told they have “a right to go home safe.” Too often, they forget that other people have a right to go home safe too.
In some ways, it’s a surprising aspect of police culture. No one tells soldiers that they have “a right” to go home safe. On the contrary, when you sign up for military service, you’re agreeing that your right to preserve your own life is secondary to the nation’s needs. Soldiers are trained to take reasonable precautions, but ultimately, they accept that accomplishing their mission is more important than staying alive.
Police too should be trained to view their first mission as preserving the lives of members of the public. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t defend themselves—but it does mean that officers should be encouraged to think in a different way about risk, and about who should bear the cost of mistakes.
This is what it comes down to. Police training tends to focus on risks to officers and the potential costs—to officers—of taking risks and making mistakes. This is why trained police officers are often so sympathetic to cops who end up killing people. When you’re trained to believe that potential threats can come from anywhere, you start seeing threats everywhere. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, a person reaching into a pocket during an encounter with police is doing so for innocent reasons—but police training tends to encourage a fixation on the one time in a thousand that someone is reaching for a weapon, making cops prone to overreact whenever anyone reaches into a pocket (or a glove compartment, or a purse), and inevitably making some cops decide that it’s safer to just pull the trigger.
Most encounters between police officers and members of the public contain a degree of uncertainty and ambiguity, and it’s not difficult for an officer to make a mistake when assessing the degree of threat. But at the moment, both police culture and the law push the costs of mistakes onto members of the public. If a police officer misreads an ambiguous situation as a threat and shoots someone, the law generally excuses the shooting as long as the officer’s mistake was “reasonable.”
That’s not a high standard, and it’s inherently subjective. The Supreme Court has held that while an officer’s use of force must be “objectively reasonable” to pass constitutional muster, “the ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” Is it “reasonable” for an officer to fear that a suspect who reaches without warning into a hidden compartment could be reaching for a weapon, or that a suspect who suddenly raises a hand containing a dark object is raising a gun? Under the Supreme Court’s standard, the answer is nearly always yes. The officer may be mistaken and may end up killing an innocent person armed only with a wallet or cell phone, but the mistake, in this view, is reasonable.
Imagine changing how we think about who bears the costs of mistakes. What if instead of telling officers they have a right to go home safe, police training focused on reminding officers that members of the public have a right to go home safe? What if we reminded officers that they are voluntarily taking a risky job, and that if someone dies because of a mistake, it’s better that it be a police officer who is trained and paid to take risks than a member of the public?
No question, more police officers might get killed if police training shifted to emphasize acceptance of risk and protection of the public. And I’m okay with that. Police officers are trained and paid. When Jake and I walked into that dark apartment, we could have had our guns up. That might have protected us if there had indeed been an armed assailant on the premises, but it would also have increased the risk that one of us would end up mistakenly shooting someone who posed no threat. In the end, to me it came down to the odds. What were the odds of encountering an armed and violent assailant? And what were the odds of mistakenly shooting someone harmless? I knew the statistics: the likelihood that Jake or I would be killed was statistically low—much lower than the risk that we’d shoot someone ourselves.
Most important, it was our job to accept some risks. We knew when we signed up that being a police officer meant accepting some danger. But the kid taking a shower in his dad’s empty apartment hadn’t signed up to take risks. He was just a kid.
10-99
It is during the field training period that probationary officers form the critical behavior patterns and work habits that will provide the foundation for their law enforcement career.
—MPD General Order 201.33, Field Training Program
Full-time MPD officers usually finish their field training in twelve to sixteen weeks, but since I only worked part-time, it took me nearly a year and a half to complete the 480 hours of patrol duty required for certification. All told, I had put in almost nine hundred hours of MPD volunteer time in the eighteen months after graduating from the academy, but roughly half of those hours were spent on non-patrol activities such as training workshops and special event details, which didn’t count toward patrol certification. When I graduated from the academy I was considered a level two reserve officer, meaning I was permitted to carry a firearm, patrol, and make arrests while in 10-4 status—that is, accompanied by a more senior officer, as uncertified officers are not allowed to patrol alone. After certification, I would become a level one reserve officer, able to patrol alone, in a 10-99 capacity, and entitled to wear my service weapon even while off duty. (I never saw the appeal of walking around with a gun, but in a city with some of the nation’s most restrictive gun control laws, this was a perk many reserve officers valued.)
The certification process involved several steps. First, I had to assemble a
field training binder containing photocopies of all the incident, offense, and arrest reports I had produced during my 480 patrol hours, together with copies of traffic tickets, run sheets, and field training forms signed by my shift partners, who were considered my de facto field training instructors for reserve corps certification purposes. After each tour of duty, field training officers were supposed to provide written feedback and numerical ratings of their trainee’s “professional demeanor,” “knowledge,” “field performance,” “radio usage,” “safety,” “court procedures,” “use of force,” and “guiding principles.” In typical MPD fashion, most of my partners declined to do more than sign their names at the bottom of the forms, leaving the page reserved for remarks blank and instructing me to give myself whatever numerical ratings I considered appropriate.
At the beginning, I modestly gave myself a lot of 2 ratings: “average” (though I couldn’t resist immodestly declaring myself a 4, “outstanding,” when it came to “Reports: spelling and grammar”). My “personal appearance/uniform” could hardly be viewed as other than “average,” since I was constitutionally averse to ironing boards and never polished my boots or belt buckles; and my radio usage, I thought, was only so-so. On the other hand, I thought I was pretty good at “accepts criticism” and “customer service.” I gave myself a 3 on those.
My partners were appalled by my low self-ratings, however. “You got to rate yourself higher,” Jake ordered. “Otherwise people will think I’m an asshole.”
“Well, you do the ratings, then,” I retorted. “So you can prove you’re not an asshole.”
“No way. Boring. You do it. Just give yourself a mix of threes and fours. Make it all fours and people will think I’m soft, but don’t put down anything lower than three, or people will wonder why I’m not teaching you anything.”