If Police Are Armed Like The Military, They Should Be Trained & Constrained Like The Military
In the last decade, American has witnessed an unprecedented militarization of its local police forces. What's really going on here?!!!
Sensational images like those that came out of the Ferguson protests showed police equipped with body armor, assault rifles, camouflage uniforms and armored personnel carriers. It also showed how devastatingly unprepared those same police were to use such equipment and tactics efficiently, effectively or morally. This is because the police in America lack the proper training and legal constraints.
The best-case scenario for both police and those they serve would be for police forces all across the country to immediately de-militarize. The case for this is clear: militarized tactics are less effective than traditional and community policing, the tactics and equipment increase the potential for violence, this strategy disproportionately affects communities of color, and has polarizing, adverse psychological effects on both police and citizens.
You would think, in the face of all this evidence, police departments would de-militarize voluntarily, given that experts have nearly unanimously concluded that this was a grave mistake. Outside of rare SWAT cases (for which police absolutely should reserve special equipment, tactics and training, to be used by their most elite officers when necessary), both the state and its citizens would be measurably better served by returning the equipment to the federal government and declining any further offers. Unfortunately, there has been, as of yet, no such mass movement on the part of police departments to do so. And the federal government currently shows no sign of taking their equipment back.
Police are armed like the military. It they're going to behave like the military, and are going to kill both suspects and innocent people doing nothing illegal at all, as though they were at war with us, and as though we were not the very citizens they are meant to serve and protect, then for their sake and ours, they need to be constrained in the same way as the military. They need to be given a mission not just to protect Americans, but to win back our hearts and minds - especially those of black Americans, who have been historically oppressed and brutalized by police. They also need to be forced to adhere to far stricter Rules of Engagement (RoE) before killing a citizen.
RoE are an extraordinarily important tool for any armed force. In an operation that requires the cooperation of the civilian populace in order to be effective, it is not just morally repugnant to kill innocent people. It is deeply counterproductive.
To be clear, police departments already have RoE - internal rules that govern the behavior of their officers and tell them when it’s acceptable to use force and when it’s not. The problem is that these RoE aren’t strict enough to keep up with the modern police force’s equipment, tactics or mindsets - as evidenced by the constant news stream of reports of police killings.
In the military, RoE change depending on the situation, but they are quite strict. Most of them contain provisions that are similar to the following:
Soldiers have the right to use force to defend themselves.
Soldiers have the right to return hostile fire or to fire when an armed person clearly presents hostile intent.
If someone is hostile, but unarmed, soldiers have the duty to use the minimum force necessary under the circumstances, and only force that is proportional to the threat.
Soldiers may not seize property to accomplish their mission.
Detention is only authorized for security reasons, or in self-defense.
Compare that to police in America:
Police have the right to use force to defend themselves.
Police can seize your property and money even if you’re innocent of wrongdoing.
Detention is authorized at the police officer’s judgment. Stop-and-frisk is still a legal practice in most places - even New York City, where it still happens, despite a judge ruling that their particular way of doing it was unconstitutional due to racial profiling. Now the Trump administration has called for it to be implemented nationwide.
If police were constrained by military RoE, Philando Castile, Michael Brown and many other victims of police violence might still be alive. The American people would be hundreds of millions of dollars richer. Police currently take more money and property from people than burglars do every year. And hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of people would no longer have to worry about being detained or harassed simply because the color of their skin or what they are wearing makes a police officer suspicious.
The case for military RoE, in that sense, is clear. But in order to effectively work under these constraints, it would require combat training for all of our police officers. Currently, police officers are regularly exonerated for killing unarmed citizens. It is more likely that a white police officer will win the lottery or get struck by lightning than that they will serve time in prison for killing a black person.
When police officers are on trial for killing unarmed people, they often assert a common argument in their defense: They were scared, they felt threatened, they thought the suspect might have been armed, and they made a snap judgment in self-defense. A police officer has no less right to defend themselves than anyone else. When they are scared, they go into a fight-or-flight mode, and they fight. To the average person, this seems defensible.
However, the first problem with snap judgments is that they rely on our biases. Science is clear that our implicit biases - which we are not conscious of - affect our split-second decisions. A DoJ report released two years ago examined a concept called “threat perception failure” by testing police officers’ ability to make a lightning-fast judgment about whether to shoot someone based on what they might be holding in their hand. Is it a gun? Is it a cell phone? Is it nothing at all?
Across the board, regardless of whether the officers were white, Black or Latino, they made a snap judgment to shoot unarmed black citizens more often than white ones. This is past the point of laying blame at the feet of any race or any individual. This is just observable, replicable, empirical science. We - by that we mean all of us, independent of our race - have a problem. How many unarmed black people need to die before we are willing to acknowledge and fix it?
The second problem with snap judgments is that they are not the only kind of judgment available to a human being in a dangerous situation. In fact, in the military, if “making a snap judgment” results in the death of an innocent civilian, a soldier is charged with negligent homicide. “I was afraid” is no defense for taking a life, or for breaking the law.
A heavily armed police officer only needs to feel fear and perceive a threat, however non-existent, to justify shooting an innocent person, and to be exonerated for it. They’ll be placed on paid leave, and go to work at a desk. They may even go on a national speaking circuit where they may defend their actions in front of sympathetic audiences. The dead get no such platform. This may not be the official position of police departments across the country, but the numbers suggest that it’s the reality.
A heavily armed soldier, on the other hand, is not only expected to be brave in the face of fear, but is required by law to do so. The military understands that the only time a person can be brave is when they are scared.
Soldiers are well-served in their need for courage by extensive combat training. The military inculcates in them the psychological grit needed to keep their wits about them with a variety of techniques, including building their distress tolerance through emergency conditioning, consistently focusing on developing their situational awareness, learning how to spot hostile intent, and others. This training effectively raises the threshold for threat that a soldier can tolerate, in order that they might still utilize their rational capacities in a combat situation. They can feel the fullness of their fear, and they can still make a conscious judgment, rather than a snap judgment. They can choose to be brave, rather than be overruled by their fear.
With appropriate combat training, police would better understand their capabilities and equipment, and could develop the ability to make wiser decisions when they feel their lives are in danger. Combat veterans who have left the service and become police officers have proven this. Consider the case of Stephen Mader, a Marine Corps veteran and rookie police officer in Weirton, West Virginia. Last year, he received an emergency dispatch while in his squad car, alone. He responded to the situation and found a man with a gun in his hand.
“Before you go to Afghanistan, they give you training,” Mader told National Public Radio. “You need to be able to kind of read people. Not everybody over there is a bad guy, but they all dress the same.” He went on, “For me, it wasn’t enough to...take someone’s life because they’re holding a gun that’s not pointed at me.”
He was still following the Rules of Engagement he learned in war, and relying on his combat training. He was waiting for a hostile intent before opening fire. When his backup arrived, however, his fellow police officers got out of their cars, drew their weapons and started screaming. The disturbed man started waving his gun around, and one of the officers opened fire, killing him. Later, they would discover that the gun was empty and the man intended to commit suicide by scaring a cop into shooting him.
Mader would almost certainly have been held blameless if he had unconsciously reacted and killed the man. Rather, he consciously responded, by attempting to de-escalate the situation, despite the fact that the man was armed. He was a warrior first and a cop second. For his impeccable judgment and laudable restraint, Mader was fired from the police force.
Modern police culture insists that the modern police officer is a “warrior cop.” This is their mindset. But they do not seem to understand the sacred role and responsibility of the warrior. If they were warriors, they would swear not only to take up the mission of serving and protecting, but they would be prepared to give their lives for that mission. A failure of courage would not be an acceptable excuse for taking another person’s life. Leadership would recognize that in most of these cases, the failure of courage is not a personal failing on the part of the officer, but a lack of training, and would get them the training that they need.
If police officers had to follow stricter rules of engagement, it may very well be true that more of them would die in the line of duty. They would be asked to willingly lay down their lives in order to save innocent people.
A true warrior does this gladly.
All of this is horrifying to contemplate - that police would think of themselves as warriors in the first place; that the relationship between citizens and police should so closely resemble a war; that the line between police and paramilitary force should even be in our sight, much less be so difficult anymore to ascertain; that that state should have to implement rules of war in their dealings with their own people. The officers we rely on to protect us should not be at war with us.
Yet, military tactics and military equipment are used against the American people every single day. If it is not a war, it has all the ingredients of one, and all of the tragic consequences. Police militarization is a fact of modern American life. So we as citizens have two choices: We must either face up to the reality that this experiment has been a counterproductive, dangerous failure and pressure our governments to undo it, or we must accept that our police are now militarized, and that they need to be trained and constrained like a military force. Both options come with heavy costs, but as long as we persist in fantasy and refuse to choose between them, we will reap the consequences of both and the benefit of neither.
