Today I pulled up a video of a police confrontation on Youtube, and before I realized it was filmed in the U.K., I thought: the cops are going to shoot this man.
But then I realized it wasn’t filmed in the United States, and I immediately felt better — this took place in England. With English police. And English police don’t normally carry guns.
In the video, police are seen responding to a belligerent, scary, giant-looking man wearing what looks like his grandmother’s fur coat. Oh, and he’s armed with a machete. The man is clearly having a psychotic episode, or is perhaps high on PCP. But the video is eminently watchable. Why?
Because nobody died.
I’m posting this because I think we, in America, all need to be reminded what policing looked like before guns.
It may even come as a shock to us, but it is not actually a policeman’s job to kill people—even dangerous people. The police are not military. When police kill someone, they’re executing an American citizen without a trial. That doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as a defensible shooting — but it shouldn’t be something that happens all the time.
And it does happen all. the. time.
The hyper-masculine, stubborn, and toxic attitudes seen in certain officers is not a matter of, to quote the famous copout phrase, “a few bad apples.” These numbers reflect and prove that a murderous attitude is endemic in the force. American police seem to think that it’s a main part of their job description to kill, and police leadership is often only too happy to enforce this idea. The system within which police are trained is one of suspicion and aggression—not of public service. The training’s focus is: hey, you’re a cop, so may have to kill someone, at some point, inevitably. And thus, cops show up to their jobs every day prepared to do just that.
What a misunderstanding of what policing is meant to be.
The ranks of policemen are supposed to be filled with the best and most law-abiding among us. How did we end up with a force full of violent, twitchy, corrupt, power-horny, trigger-happy bros. And before you say “not every cop is bad,” please know that I’m aware of that. But when you watch a policeman shove an elderly man to the ground, and then watch every single one of his fellow officers step over that man’s bleeding body, it gets harder and harder to make excuses for the group. And let’s be honest: “not all cops are bad,” is a shitty excuse for inaction.
Just try to imagine our American cops reacting to this video of British police. Can you hear them? I can. “What a bunch of pussies,” they laugh. “Just shoot him.”
But cops who don’t use deadly force are the furthest thing from cowards. They’re putting themselves in danger to protect the public while avoiding killing a citizen. Bringing them in without loss of life. Yeah, it’s not as cool as shooting someone in the face. And yes, it’s dangerous to bring someone in without the use of lethal weapons. But that is supposed to be their job. They are meant to be public servants. It’s even in the slogan. The laughably defunct: “protect and serve.”
Too often American cops would prefer to use deadly force than have a dangerous confrontation like the one in this video—but, from the way they tell it, you’d think there’s no other way to handle things, and that other countries are lame-o’s for doing it differently.
Anyone with any concept of honor, in any culture or society, would balk at the idea of shooting someone armed with a lesser weapon—let alone someone who is completely unarmed, as is what happens all the time here in the United States. A British officer in this video tried to knock the machete out of this guy’s hand with a wheeling garbage can (or as the English call it, a wheelie bin). Did it work? No it did not. Was it brave? Yes it was. It was fucking brave. It’s a whole lot more brave to go up against a machete-bearing man with nought but a wheelie bin than it is to empty your clip into a person twenty feet away from you. Our police show such a profound and deadly lack of imagination. No American officer would have considered a non-lethal weapon in this scenario. Why? Because it’s gun, gun, gun, gun, gun, gun, gun.
Who, exactly, is the coward if you shoot a man armed with a lesser weapon because you “feared for your life”? Who is the coward if you pull the trigger before you even see a weapon?
And if you pull over a black man in a traffic stop and shoot him seven times through his car window, you’re not just a racist, you’re an absolute coward. Someone who has no business at all with a deadly weapon. If you’re so trigger happy that you’ll shoot a man with his back to you, or a man with his hands up, or a 12-year-old boy playing with a toy gun in a park, then you should not be a police officer. If your first instinct is to shoot someone so that you don’t have to face even the possibility of a threatening situation, then you’re the exact opposite of what you need to be a cop.
People have forgotten that it’s a policeman’s job to bring people to justice within the justice system. Too many American cops bypass that system, acting as judge, jury, and executioner in the streets. This fatal misunderstanding of policing comes from police culture, and from the military gear and big guns we give them (and from the multitudinous bad cop dramas where tough-talking, law-bending, sharp-shooting cop heroes makes every cop think they, too, can be Dirty Harry).
As John Oliver said this week: if you give someone shoulder pads and a helmet, they’re going to play ball. Sadly, when American police play ball, they crack heads—and because of the police union, and qualified immunity, they are able to kill with impunity.
Did I laugh when one English policeman charged at the fur coat-wearing psychotic with a wheelie bin? I did. I even imagined him yelling “for Queen and country!” as he ran. But I was able to laugh because I knew that this confrontation was not going to end with a body bag. This is how we WANT confrontations to end. Why do American police have such an aversion to avoiding the use of deadly force? Perhaps it’s because shooting someone is more glamorous. Perhaps it’s because pulling a trigger from a distance is a lot easier than getting your hands dirty.
But we know that in some situations cops are able to do their job correctly and bring criminals to justice without the use of deadly force. We know because of all the mass murderers that have carried out violent shootings and safely apprehended without a scratch on them. All of them white.
Dylann Roof, Mark Boisey, Matthew Bernard, Patrick Crusius.
Being a cop is a tough job. But their job should be to deal with the worst of us, not BE the worst of us. And in no other profession does having a tough job excuse murder.
The reality is, we don’t have a few bad apples in the police force. We’ve got a bad barrel, with some good apples that have managed to withstand the rot. But that is not how this article started. This article started with guns. In America, many of our problems begin and end with guns. And it’s guns that make our police problems so much more deadly.
What is every cop’s built-in excuse for shooting someone?
I thought it was a gun
I thought I saw a gun
I thought that rock was a gun
His wallet looked like a gun
He was reaching for something I thought might have been a gun
It could have been a gun
Personally, I’ve never been able to figure out why cops, as a group, are so overwhelmingly pro-gun when there’s nothing that threatens their lives and safety more.
But now I’m beginning to wonder.
Perhaps it’s because, without guns, they’d never have a good reason to shoot someone.