Lack of Skills Leads to Violence : Law Enforcement: How can we expect to end unnecessary citizen-police shootings if officers are inadequately trained?
Sometimes, no matter how appropriately police act, the people they deal with leave them no choice but to kill or be killed. Conversely, in many cases, no matter how badly police behave, nobody is hurt because citizens give officers lots of leeway.
Condemning police for killing in life-or-death situations is an act of betrayal. Overlooking sloppy or inappropriate police work because it has not resulted in immediate violence reinforces mistakes that will eventually hurt somebody.
Critics should also recognize the distinction between extralegal violence and unnecessary violence. Extralegal violence is intentional and brutal. It is the beating in the back of the police station, the unjustifiable shooting that is whitewashed. It is tough to determine how often extralegal violence occurs because it involves officers who take care to see that their wrongful acts occur out of public view. My sense, however, is that it has all but disappeared from American policing.
Unnecessary violence is different. It occurs when well-meaning officers lack the skills to resolve problems without resorting to violence. In the worst cases, they put themselves in trouble and then must shoot their way out of it. Thus, when analyzing police shootings, we should not be quick to approve officers’ actions merely because their lives were in imminent danger the instant they pulled the trigger.
Instead of viewing shootings as still pictures in which the instant of shooting can be separated from all that went before, we should view them as movies that begin when officers become aware that they are about to confront potentially violent situations. When we do this, we can determine whether inappropriate actions by the officers may have made it inevitable that their “movies” would end in shooting.
Extralegal violence can be minimized fairly easily. Police departments try to do so by hiring only the best people, by supervising them carefully and by holding them accountable for their actions. On occasion, however, extralegal police violence has been tolerated--or even encouraged--by police leaders. In such cases, citizens must eliminate the extralegal violence; sue the rascals, and throw them out of office.
The problem of unnecessary violence is much more difficult. It is inadvertent and public, and it usually appears in the press just as it happened. Also, while no reasonable person can offer justification for extralegal violence, police officials find it difficult to criticize unnecessary violence. It is one thing to condemn a cop who has beaten a confession out of a prisoner, but a police chief who criticizes an officer whose own life was at risk in a situation that led to unnecessary violence leaves himself open to charges of “Monday morning quarterbacking.” Even though unnecessary violence is not intentional or sinister, media coverage and police defense of such action have made it a great source of friction between police and the community.
Unnecessary violence is a sign that officers are inadequately prepared to deal with the wide variety of people and problems we assign them to confront. The police are human-service workers who must deal with everybody--white, black, brown, yellow, red, sober, drunk, high, young, old, rich, poor, crazy, nasty. Worse, they must do it now , out on the street and, often, in front of third parties who are quick to make judgments. Officers answering street calls cannot refer their cases to specialists, or to people who relate better to their client.
No other human-service worker confronts the variety or volatility of problems at the heart of everyday police work. Yet the training in even the most sophisticated police departments is a fraction of that required of social workers, schoolteachers, psychologists or lawyers.
From my seat 3,000 miles away, I would not presume to make judgments about the recent violence in Los Angeles involving members of the Nation of Islam and law enforcement officers. I do know, however, that many of the tragedies that come out of police work involve unskilled officers rather than evil officers. Until we acknowledge that, and until we demand that our police officers’ skills be honed by training and preparation more comparable to that provided social workers, schoolteachers, psychologists and lawyers, we have little hope of reducing unnecessary police-citizen violence.