Understanding Police Violence as a Mutual Problem

This past Thanksgiving, I was in Chicago visiting family when a cellphone video of a police officer taking down a man hit the local airwaves. The images showed an officer using an emergency maneuver that resulted in the man’s head hitting the pavement. There was an immediate outcry; it was said that the takedown was unwarranted, yet another case of “rogue policing.” Lost in the clamor was that the man was intoxicated and had verbally threatened, licked, and spit on the officer. The man further refused ambulance transport, and the officers themselves took him to the hospital for care. At the time of this writing, two officers remain under investigation, while the man was bailed out of jail (he had outstanding parole violations) amid claims that he was “thrown onto the sidewalk with no regard for his life” (https://bit.ly/37piikW).

Is this another example of police violence or simply an officer trying to protect himself? If all politics are local, then most opinions are personal. I will freely admit that my view of law enforcement comes from more than 20 years of working night shifts in the emergency department, watching officers and deputies protect society’s most vulnerable. To be quite honest, I am most often impressed at the restraint police officers exhibit when dealing with violent and abusive people and when faced with imminent threats to life and limb. The idea that unthinking violence is somehow basic to law enforcement system seems contradictory to my lived experience. Individuals and institutions within the law enforcement community want to do right, and while one might argue that they do so not out of goodness but out of fear of public backlash, everyone recognizes that law enforcement officers can only do their job well if they do so with restraint, impartiality, and integrity. There are bad cops, just as there are those ill-suited to any profession, and sometimes people who clearly do not belong in police work can slip through the cracks. But it is a certainty that within law enforcement nobody likes a bad cop.

WHAT IS POLICE VIOLENCE?

Part of the problem is that we do not know what “police violence” really is or the true scope of the problem. Obasogie and Newman note that the exact definition of police violence is vague, and is most often a subjective interpretation of the constitutional minimum that the “use of force must be reasonable.”^1(p286)

Statistics on police violence as a whole are hard to come by, but data on police shootings are more available. The 2015 Police Violence report from the Mapping Police Violence Web site indicates that there were 1152 people killed in police shootings that year. The context of the event is also important: more than 1000 of these fatalities were reported to be armed (https://mappingpoliceviolence.org). In these cases, a true threat may well have been perceived at the moment of the use of deadly force. The threat to law enforcement officers is real; 42 officers were killed by gunfire in 2015 (https://n.pr/2rEKFg8).

While research clearly shows that racial minorities are disproportionately more likely to be the recipients of deadly force, other works describe the disparity in prevalence as a result of the assumption that Blacks and Whites are equally likely to encounter police. It seems a reasonable middle ground to presume that these disparities, while unquestionably present, themselves are a function of the population encountered by law enforcement; unfortunately, this population is highlighted by overrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities rooted in socioeconomic factors also common to disparities in income, education, and health.

What is “reasonable force” is in the eye of the beholder, and more often than not that beholder is a Monday-morning quarterback of a situation they never truly understand. It is easy to jump on the bandwagon that police are agents of violence while one is sitting in the stands.

NEEDING EACH OTHER

That is why I am surprised that the public health community, which places value in community, collaboration, and understanding stakeholders’ views, writes in the first sentence of the 2018 American Public Health Association (APHA) policy “Addressing Law Enforcement Violence as a Public Health Issue,” that “Physical and psychological violence that is structurally mediated by the system of law enforcement results in deaths, injuries, trauma, and stress that disproportionately affect marginalized populations . . .” (https://bit.ly/37iFrFD). The text of the document reinforces this adversarial message while failing to recognize any of the challenges of police work.

While the position statement does make positive recommendations, most notably the need to address the underlying social determinants of health, those points are lost in the rhetoric sure to set law enforcement on the defensive. That is not the way to build collaboration. It is no wonder that the Statement of Policy on Police Violence and Racism from the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), a group comprising public health leaders who work with law enforcement on a daily basis, takes a much different tone, emphasizing understanding of police roles and mutual collaboration while making similar points (https://bit.ly/2TBrYW8). Surprisingly, the hostility espoused by the APHA does not seem to exist on the law enforcement side, with works highlighting ways in which our worlds can align and support one another through growing awareness of our interconnections.^2–5

SOLUTIONS

There is no doubt that police departments can do better. Obasogie and Newman provide a content analysis of use-of-force policies that provides a theoretical grounding for terms and conditions that apply to these critical incidents.¹ The Mapping Police Violence project has also demonstrated that changes in use-of-force policies can decrease the numbers of fatalities that result from police shootings. Effective measures include requiring officers to use all other means before shooting, requiring that all use of force be reported, banning chokeholds and strangleholds, establishing a continuum for the use of force, and requiring that de-escalation techniques be brought into play (https://mappingpoliceviolence.org). Each of these measures has its own implications for officer selection and training, and they appear to be measures that may be agreed to by all parties with a minimum of disruption to current law enforcement programming. More importantly, they can be promoted in a spirit of collaboration to concurrently reduce risks to both police officers and the community. I believe that these measures are best advocated at the community level, where relationships between local officials already exist, with public health agencies taking the lead in establishing community consensus around workable solutions.

A few years ago, NACCHO developed a badge-shaped logo to represent public health (https://bit.ly/37mfWnh). The shape linked us to the other members of the public protection family who wear the badge, including fire safety, emergency medical services, and law enforcement. And the family does a lot better around the Thanksgiving table engaging in mutually supportive dialogue than in hurling invective at the quality of the stuffing.

Making police violence an issue of inherent bad faith and racism, where one party is thought morally superior to the other, does not facilitate solutions. Understanding police violence as a mutual problem to be resolved just might.