“Enough Is Enough”: Walter Scott’s Death Should End Public’s Denial Of Police Victimization Of Blacks
There is a phenomenon in the United States which most of the public is unwilling or unable to fully acknowledge. The killings by police of unarmed black men and boys is akin to climate change – for many, seemingly no evidence will convince them that there is a relationship between race and police violence. The justifiably outraged reaction to the apparent murder of Walter Scott suggests that the denial may be finally wearing off. Now is the time to confront that denial and ask whether the reforms that are typically called for are sufficient to combat an obvious disparate impact on black Americans.
For years black Americans and their allies have been saying that officers are killing blacks with impunity. The common reaction is to dissect each fatal encounter and explain what the deceased did to justify being killed. This allowed the majority of the public to disengage from the conversation and write off each death as the deceased’s fault. What the shooting of Walter Scott tore off was any pretense of a legal justification that he was posing an imminent threat to officer Michael T. Slager.
What is still missing is any evidence of racial motivation. The circumstantial evidence, though, is strong because each questionable death seems to occur when the civilian is black or brown be it on a New York City sidewalk, the back corner of a suburban Walmart, a park in Cleveland or a field in South Carolina. The recent President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing addressed racial bias and recommended better collection of demographic data of police encounters and the racial composition of police departments and adoption and of policies prohibiting racial profiling. Those recommendations have to be expanded upon and implemented.
First and foremost, the dearth of data surrounding lethal use of force must be eliminated. Lawmakers have to force police departments to adopt a culture of transparency where a range of data including the use of force, traffic stops and complaints are made public.
Second, de-escalation tactics must always precede the use of force. The current legal justification for using both lethal and non-lethal force is very broad. As long as an officer can demonstrate that he feared an imminent threat of harm and it appears reasonable, he is not subject to any discipline for the use of force.
Third, addressing implicit bias through training may not be enough. What the Department of Justice investigation of Ferguson, Mo. clearly showed is that the bias can be very explicit. Departments have to adopt zero tolerance for racial bias and dishonesty and remove any officers from their forces when racial motivations or lying is uncovered.
Finally, investigations of deadly force incidents must be far more robust. In far too many troubling shootings, investigators are not willing to ask the officers the tough questions they would ask in any other homicide that did not involve cops but instead let them off the hook with softball questions.
There are no easy answers but the killing of Walter Scott demonstrates once and for all that some cops lie and murder and think they can get away with it. As long as the public was in denial that approach worked, now the burden is on all of us, police departments and their political leadership to say “enough is enough.”
By: Walter Katz, a former public defender, was part of a task force that challenged convictions in cases brought by corrupt Los Angeles Police Officers in the Ramparts case; Opinion Pages, Room for Debate, The New York Times, April 9, 2015
“The Expansive ‘Warrior’ Mindset”: Police Shouldn’t Ask If A Shooting Is Justified, But If It’s Avoidable
Every time a police shooting gets national attention, the difference in the conflicting attitudes that civilians and law enforcement have toward the use of force is glaring. That conflict drives much of the tension between police agencies and the communities they serve.
When cops evaluate a use-of-force incident, they ask whether it was justified, focusing on the legal rule set by the Supreme Court in the 1989 case Graham v. Connor. The Court held that officers may use force so long as it is “objectively reasonable.” To determine whether a particular action was objectively reasonable, the Court held, judges must view the situation through the deferential lens of “a reasonable officer on the scene.”
When civilians evaluate a use-of-force incident, they ask whether it was avoidable. They want to know whether the officer could have done something—anything—else.
The tragic shooting of Tamir Rice last November puts the difference between “justified” and “avoidable” in stark contrast. Officers responding to call that there was a “man with a gun” in a park drove to within about ten feet of their suspect. One officer jumped out of the car and, within two seconds, fatally shot the 12-year-old. Was it justified? Probably, if one narrowly considers the officers proximity to an apparently armed man. Was it avoidable? Almost certainly, when one acknowledges that the officers could have—and should have—parked at a safe distance and approached cautiously by using cover, concealment, and communication.
Why do most officers, charged with serving and protecting their communities, persist in asking whether a use of force was justified rather than necessary? I put a great deal of blame on the expansive “warrior mindset” that has become so highly esteemed in the law enforcement community. To protect themselves, to even survive, officers are taught to be ever-vigilant. Enemies abound, and the job of the Warrior is to fight and vanquish those enemies.
That’s not the right attitude for police. Our officers should be, must be, guardians, not warriors. The goal of the Guardian isn’t to defeat an enemy, it is to protect the community to the extent possible, including the community member that is resisting the officer’s attempt to arrest them. For the guardian, the use of avoidable violence is a failure, even if it satisfies the legal standard.
Society invests a tremendous amount of trust and responsibility into our police officers. Policing is a difficult job, not least because of the potential for violence that cannot be predicted or, in many cases, prevented.
But in the long run, it would be safer for everyone if officers saw their role as guarding the community, not defeating enemies.
By: Seth Stoughton, Professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law affiliated with the Rule of Law Collaborative. He served as a city police officer and state investigator: Opinion Pages, Room for Debate, The New York Times, April 9, 2015
“Republican Fear Campaign Running Out Of Steam”: Obama Dares GOP To Help The Middle Class In His State Of The Union
Can you remember a time when the political zeitgeist has ping-ponged the way ours has in just two months? The day after last November’s election, Barack Obama was finished. Now, two positive jobs reports and a 60-odd-cent-per-gallon drop in gasoline prices later, he’s the president again. And the Republicans have just taken power and have run Congress for only two weeks, but suddenly they’re kind of on the defensive.
Of course this isn’t to say that Obama is going to get a single plank of the ambitious agenda he laid out in the State of the Union Address through Congress. The Republicans still hold those cards.
But what’s happened in the last couple of months, and what Obama seized effectively with this speech, is this. The mood has changed. The public is open to ideas it wasn’t open to a year ago; even two months ago.
Politics in this country is really about only one thing at a time, and that one thing favors one party or the other. In 1981 and for a few years thereafter, it was about how oppressive the federal government was. Advantage Republicans. For a short time in the late 1980s, it was about how we’d vanquished the Soviet Union (and won a little side war). Advantage Republicans.
For a while in the 1990s, it was about building a future-oriented economy. Advantage Democrats. After 9/11, it was about security. Advantage Republicans. And so on. It’s a little more complicated than this, because thrown into these cycles we have the scandals and the social changes that all have some impact on how people think about things, but basically, this is how American politics rolls: We go through these eras, and the eras make the majority of people decide that one party or the other is better equipped to do something about the challenges.
And now, we seem to be—seem to be—entering an era in which the chief debate is going to be about expanding prosperity downward from the people who’ve enjoyed the lion’s share of the prosperity of the last 30 years. Not positive about that. But that’s the smell. Look at all those minimum-wage initiatives that passed on ballots last November, passed even by a comparatively conservative electorate. Look at Mitt Romney talking empathetically in recent days about the people he didn’t seem to care much about in 2012. Something has turned.
Obama has helped turn it—with a few speeches over the years, and certainly with some of his policies, like health care, which he defended in an impressively in-your-face way in this speech. But even a president can’t turn it himself. He needs luck. And finally he’s had some—the gas prices, the energy explosion, the jobs reports, all of them culminating in a sunnier public mood.
All that adds up to an atmosphere in which a majority of Americans are finally starting to add two and two and get four. The Republicans didn’t give them much. The Great Recession, most notably. Obama, to most of them, still hasn’t given them all that much either, but at least we’re out of that mess and things are finally looking up.
And when things are looking up, people are less anxious, and they can start thinking about things like free community college. In lousy economic times, free community college sounds to your average person like a bunch of airy-fairy liberal nonsense. Like something they’re going to be stuck paying for. In better economic times, it sounds to your average person like a not-half-bad idea, and something they or someone they know might even benefit from.
It’s all public psychology. We liberals have a hard time accepting this. That’s because of Keynes. Keynes, see, has taught us the concept of counter-cyclical investment: that when the economy is in dire straits, that is exactly when the government should be spending a boatload of money. It makes economic sense, to people who read a lot. But to average people, it doesn’t make any common sense. Common sense tells average people that when the economy is in dire straits, you tighten your belt and spend less. This is right for a family, but wrong for a government, which is the opposite of a family, economically speaking. And Lord did it infuriate liberals when Obama himself played into it. He gave these speeches—what, 2010, maybe—when he likened the government to a family sitting around the kitchen table deciding what expenses it needed to cut out.
No! Wrong, wrong, wrong, in economic terms. But in real-life political terms, he was right at least insofar as you can’t get people to think about longer-term economic goals when they’re out of a job, or underemployed. But once that’s turned, you can.
That is what’s turning now—not turned, but turning. And that is what is about to make our political conversation be about this new one thing: sharing the prosperity. The speech was not a great speech, a speech for the ages; but it did understand that, and it did tap into that. People are now willing to start thinking about longer-term economic goals. A quickie CNN poll found that the speech was extremely well-received: 51 percent very positive, 30 percent somewhat positive, only 18 percent negative.
That really should worry Republicans, no matter how many seats they have in Congress. Our politics is becoming about one big thing on which the Republicans have nothing to say. Actually, they do have something to say, and it’s “No!” They looked ridiculous, sitting on their hands, refusing to applaud simple and obvious things that have 60, 65 percent public support. I have a feeling more such moments await them.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 21, 2015
“Mitt Flips On The Very Poor”: Is Romney The Guy Republicans Want Talking About Poverty?
Nearly three years after he famously said he was “not concerned about the very poor,” former presidential nominee Mitt Romney told Republicans in a speech Friday night the party must focus on helping “lift people out of poverty.”
Welcome to Mitt 3.0: The Mitt who cares.
His comments on the very poor—not to mention the 47 percent—may have played a major role in his 2012 loss, but don’t tell that to Romney. The issue is now among the hottest debates in politics—and he seems determined to be part of that conversation.
Of the three topics the Romney stressed in his brief address to the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting—during which he also confirmed he was thinking about a third campaign for president—two had to do with the less fortunate.
“First, we have to make the world safer,” Romney said. “Second, we have to make sure and provide opportunity for all Americans regardless of the neighborhood they live in. And finally, we have to lift people out of poverty. If we communicate those three things effectively, the American people are going to be with us—be with our nominee and with our candidates across the country.”
But why the change of tone?
Over the past three years, the issue has changed in ways that favor a more progressive approach. The poverty rate has actually gone down since Mitt 2.0—the economy fixer—lost the race in 2012.
According to U.S. Census Bureau data, the official poverty rate went from 15 percent in 2012 to 14.5 percent in 2013. The last time the poverty rate dipped was in 2006. That’s not to say things have gotten markedly better, the number of people in poverty—45.3 million—has remained statistically the same.
This problem is hardly a new issue. The poverty rate was on the rise in 2007, when Romney first ran for president as Mitt 1.0—the Conservative. But even though it spiked from 12.5 percent in 2007 to 13.2 percent in 2008, only then-Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) chose to make the issue a centerpiece of his campaign.
But one thing that has changed is public opinion on the issue. Recent polling shows a more compassionate country when it comes to the poor. A June 2014 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed fewer people blamed the poor for their financial situation. When asked “which is the bigger cause of poverty today?”, 46 percent of those polled attributed poverty to “circumstances beyond people’s control” as opposed to 44 percent who blamed “people not doing enough.” In 1995, 60 percent blamed “people not doing enough” for their poverty, while 30 percent blamed “circumstances beyond people’s control.”
Back in 2012, it wasn’t as if the Romney campaign completely ignored the poor—poverty was a key issue for his then-running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Romney, himself, routinely talked of the rising number of people on food stamps and other government programs as evidence President Obama’s economic policies weren’t working.
But it was what he said behind closed-doors that caused any poverty message he tried to ring hollow. His campaign was never able to shake his comments about the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay income tax made during a Florida fundraiser.
“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them,” Romney told a group of donors during a closed door meeting. “These are people who pay no income tax. … My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
When a recording of his remarks leaked, it became a public relations disaster for Romney, solidifying the image of him as an out of touch millionaire in the minds of voters. Even after he lost the 2012 race, Romney doubled down during a call with donors, blaming the Obama administration for giving special interest groups—like African Americans, Hispanics and young people—“gifts” to get their vote, according to the New York Times.
“In each case, they were very generous in what they gave to those groups,” Romney said, according to the Times.
He blamed the so-called gifts for overshadowing his campaign about “big issues for the whole country: military strategy, foreign policy, a strong economy, creating jobs and so forth.”
With wages stuck in neutral for many, poverty and income inequality will likely be a major issue of the 2016 campaign. But Republicans have to think—is Mitt the guy they want talking about it?
By: Jackie Kucinich, The Daily Beast, January 19, 2015
“A Pro-Torture Propaganda Campaign”: How Political And Media Elites Legitimized Torture
Since the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, numerous commentators have gestured to opinion polls that show significant levels of public support for the practice. They conclude that the American people are at least partially responsible for the fact that torture was (and probably will be again) formal U.S. government policy. Christopher Ingraham argues in The Washington Post that most Americans are “fine” with torture, while Peter Beinart argues in The Atlantic that torture is “who we are.”
These arguments are partially correct. A majority of Americans (especially Republicans) do support torture in the abstract. And Beinart is particularly correct to note that America’s historical legacy is violent in the extreme — torture and a dozen other brands of systematic violence are central to American history. The fact that nobody in power is going to enforce the law, for the obvious reason that it would be politically inconvenient, is a great stain on American democracy, as David Simon, the creator of The Wire, argues.
But it’s something of a cop-out to blame the American people. In fact, political and media elites are to a very great degree responsible for the state of public opinion on torture. Insofar as torture has been partially legitimized as an American practice, elites are deeply implicated.
But first, we need to deal with the question of the efficacy of torture. There is an ongoing argument among anti-torture advocates about this question, with one side arguing (as Dan Drezner does) that making this case is important on the merits, and the other side (including Nathan Pippenger) saying that such a debate inherently legitimizes the practice. The implication is that if it did work, we would have to consider supporting it.
If torture were, in fact, a great method of producing intelligence, then this would be a queasy question indeed. But we don’t live in such a world. In fact, torture is absolute garbage for intelligence work. This fact is firmly established; look no further than Darius Rejali’s massive book on torture, which is the last word on the subject. I think it would be rather foolish to ignore this, given how solidly we know it to be true. As Daniel Larison writes, we can hold two thoughts in our head at once: “torture is absolutely wrong and absolutely useless.”
But Dick Cheney and many other Republican elites are out there loudly defending torture as good practice. Those assertions, baseless as they are, are reflected in the polls — but that’s not the half of it.
Polls are also at fault. In a fascinating and highly disturbing study from 2010, Rejali and several co-authors compiled a comprehensive list of every poll that asked people about the use of torture against suspected terrorists. They established that when polls provide specific descriptions of the worst kinds of CIA torture, anti-torture sentiment spikes dramatically. When the truth is spelled out, as opposed to being wrapped in the generic term “torture,” the American people are much more strongly opposed to what the CIA has done than is popularly supposed.
It gets worse, though. The authors found that these surveys strongly loaded the questions in favor of torture:
Crucially, in these surveys, the respondent is not asked whether they think torture is effective. The effectiveness of torture is presumed in the question. Respondents are told that the person in custody may be a terrorist and may have information about future terrorist attacks… These are conditions in which it would seem almost patriotic to affirm torture (and dangerous to oppose it). [Symposium: Terrorism and Human Rights]
As we know, this is a false presumption. What it means is that for the last decade mainstream American polling organizations have essentially been conducting pro-torture push polls.
The American entertainment industry has been behaving in a similar fashion. Movies, TV shows, and videogames are swimming in depictions of torture as a quick and easy way of gathering reliable intelligence. A recalcitrant detainee giving up the goods after being beaten is now a reliable action movie trope. The show 24 is probably the worst offender, but there are hundreds of other examples, including Zero Dark Thirty, which claimed, as a matter of the historical record, that torture led to the death of Osama bin Laden. Even Captain America 2, which takes a strong civil liberties stance, has a mock execution sequence. (24 also popularized the ticking time bomb scenario, which we also now know isn’t remotely connected to reality.)
Knowing as we do that torture does not work like this, such depictions and polls are ethically monstrous. The American political and media elite have been, in effect, conducting a blatantly false, pro-torture propaganda campaign, one which, unfortunately, did not stay in the popular culture sphere. As Dahlia Lithwick wrote in Slate years ago, “The lawyers designing interrogation techniques cited [24’s Jack] Bauer more frequently than the Constitution.”
In another piece, Rejali, Paul Gronke, and Peter Miller note that though pro-torture opinion has trended upwards a bit in recent times, Americans are still strongly against techniques like waterboarding, electric shock, and sexual humiliation. They chalk up the conventional wisdom that Americans support torture as “false consensus…a coping mechanism long known to psychologists whereby we project our views onto others.”
Instead of blaming the American people for the mainstreaming of torture, political and media elites should acknowledge their own guilt.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, December 15, 2014
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