To foreigners, many videos of American police stops are notable for their volume. The cops yell at the citizen until the poor bugger is overwhelmed by a cacophony of rapid fire and contradictory commands — especially as the subject is often terrified, possibly drunk or high, and sometimes mentally ill.
The contrast with European law enforcement is stark. Take the British police. The murder rate in the UK may be low, but the British are notorious brawlers — think soccer hooligans. Yet the police exercise restraint. In one example, a distressed man, waving a machete at the responding officers, is subdued and taken to the hospital. In the US, the chances are he would have ended up in the morgue.
Here is a video of the confrontation.
Psychologists and many parents know that behavior breeds behavior. If you want someone to remain calm, you should stay under control. Here the cops practiced de-escalation — rather than throw gas on the fire, as American cops often do.
The results are stark. In the US, the police kill over 1,200 people annually — 1,403 in 2022. In the last ten years, cops in England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland report separately) have killed 24 civilians in total — on average, less than three a year. If you account for the population difference, the per capita rate in the US is 585 times greater.
So why are American police so tragically aggressive?
According to David D. Kirkpatrick, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a Times series about police violence and fatal traffic stops, the answer stems from an analysis of cop killings that relied on the testimony of 50 cop killers. In an article for the New Yorker magazine, The Police Folklore That Helped Kill Tyre Nichols, Kirkpatrick writes,
“Thirty-four years ago, near the crest of the crack-cocaine-fuelled crime surge of the early nineteen-nineties, two F.B.I agents began a novel investigation of threats to police. One agent was a former police lieutenant in Washington, D.C. The other was also a Catholic priest with a doctorate in psychology. Together, they plunged into the prison system, interviewing fifty convicted cop killers. Most criminologists today call such research pseudoscience. A sample size of fifty was almost anecdotal, and why should anyone trust a cop killer, anyway? The agents also had no benchmark—no comparable interviews with criminals who had complied. Yet the sweeping conclusions of their study, “Killed in the Line of Duty,” made the front page of the Times, and, through decades of promotion by the Department of Justice, became ingrained in the culture of American law enforcement.”
This sloppy analysis has led to excessive force and countless unnecessary killings by the police for three decades. How? Because the authors claimed that cops acting like decent human beings were more likely to get killed.
“At the top of an inventory of “behavioral descriptors” linked to officers who ended up dead, the study listed traits that some citizens might prize: “friendly,” “well-liked by community and department,” “tends to use less force than other officers felt they would use in similar circumstances,” and “used force only as last resort.” The cop killers, the agents concluded from their prison conversations, had attacked officers with a “good-natured demeanor.” An officer’s failure to dominate—to immediately enforce full control over the suspect—proved fatal. “A miscue in assessing the need for control in particular situations can have grave consequences,” the authors warned.”
This orthodoxy, based on a specious study of dubious rigor, creating a myth, is a twin to the anti-vax hysteria that has its roots in Andrew Wakefield's equally dismal medical study connecting the MMR vaccine to autism. In plain English, both conclusions are bullshit. And yet, for many, both have become common wisdom.
Exacerbating this misguided policing philosophy are glaring deficiencies in police recruitment and training. Often, cops have a trail of racist social media posts predating their hiring — and continuing afterward. Hiring managers must thoroughly vet potential cops for bias. No one should get a law enforcement job without a deep dive into their online history. And on the job, police management should periodically review officer behavior.
Conservatives and others who favor police violence will whine that this will strip cops of their first amendment rights. Hardly. The authorities are not denying candidates the right to say what they will. But free speech does not guarantee freedom from the consequences of that speech.
If an applicant for a police position says they cannot stand Blacks in an interview, they should not — and hopefully will not — get the job. And few people would have a problem with that. So why should they be protected if they say it on the internet instead?
In addition, police hiring should involve civilian review. Police chiefs can decide if the candidate is technically qualified for the job. However, non-cop professionals should determine if the applicant has the personality and character to do the job. Cops are not bank tellers or electricians. They carry guns and have “qualified immunity” and other legal protections that make it hard for citizens to get judgments against abusive police.
Lastly, any cop fired for cause should never again be able to work in law enforcement.
Next, police training has to stress de-escalation over excessive force. American police departments have started to pay attention to the British model of restraint. For instance, they train cops to start with moderation and a calm tone. This policy does not take screaming and violence off the table — but they are no longer the primary tactics to resolve an interaction between law enforcement and civilians.
We need better police because we cannot do without law enforcement. When well-meaning citizens reacted to the murder of George Floyd by increasing the demand to “defund the police,” they were both onto something and misguided. On the one hand, cops are not mental health professionals. Police departments should reallocate money to fund people qualified to work with the mentally ill.
On the other, crime exists. And we need police to deal with criminals. Plans to reduce crime by investing in community programs to address social issues like poverty, homelessness, and mental disorders are welcome and needed. But should the money be spent, it will still take years, if not decades, for these programs to bear significant fruit.
And no matter what we do, murder, robbery, burglary, domestic violence, drunk drivers, et al, will exist. No country is free of crime. And even countries with enlightened policing and low violent crime rates often have high property crime rates.
In the US, the highest crime rates are often in minority neighborhoods. And it seems reasonable that people who are most frequently the victims of crime would want police around. However, those officers should be well-trained, unbiased, respectful, and tending to non-violence. They should look more like the community (even though that did not help Tyre Nichols) and be honestly dedicated to protecting and serving.
Policing will never be without some problem officers because no profession with 665,380 employees can be free of rotten apples. But Americans deserve police departments that do a far better of weeding out substandard workers and never hiring them in the first place.