Police and the misuse of force
The other day in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a police officer, speaking on the phone with a man inside his home, politely but firmly urged him to come outside. The man’s wife standing nearby explained that her husband had threatened to kill himself and harm others. After fleeing the house herself, she said she heard a gunshot which she took as a suicide attempt.
A policeman asked the woman how many guns her husband had in the house. She answered, “I think four or five.”
The police video then shows the man as he walked out the front door of the home. He was wearing shorts. He was both shirtless and shoeless. As he moved toward the officers, he placed a can of beer he was carrying aside. He then walked a few more steps, past what looks to be a late-model pickup truck, to the end of the driveway.
On the video, you hear police tell the man to get down. The man’s hands hang loosely at his side. An officer suddenly rushes forward and tackles the man to the ground. Other officers appear. They are heavily armed.
On his back, with an officer leaning in to him, the man pleads, “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything.” He sounds bewildered and a little scared.
One expert who viewed the incident on tape was reminded of recent video of Black males who have been “taken down using the same language.”
Criminal justice professor Dennis Kenney of John Jay College told the Washington Post, “It looked to me like a guy who probably had too much to drink. When he came out he didn’t look combative.”
It turns out the man had recently lost a job. His world had been turned upside down.
It was Brad Parscale, the former manager of President Trump’s reelection campaign, who was ousted from his post weeks earlier, in the wake of a poorly-attended Trump political rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Parscale is big and burly. He is a white man.
“What are police trained to do?” Christopher Slobogin of Vanderbilt University, a law enforcement expert reacting to the tape, said. “They are trained to use force. Acting completely in good faith and not ascribing any bad motives to them, they do what they are trained to do.”
Instead of systemic racism, maybe police suffer from systemic mistraining. Maybe we require too much of police, especially when it comes to dealing with the mentally and socially distraught and the mentally ill.
Back in 2013, state police killed a man who had barricaded himself inside his residence in Latrobe. He was armed with a .380-caliber semi-automatic handgun and an AR-15 assault rifle. He was suspected of robbing a Latrobe drugstore of several hundred OxyContin tablets.
Police tried negotiating with the man. The man threatened suicide.
Police used a bullhorn. They fired tear gas. They sent a remote-controlled robot into the residences’ first floor.
When police first attempted to storm the apartment, the suspect, a 46-year-old white man by the name of Scott Murphy, fired back, striking one officer whose life may have been saved by the ballistic shield and helmet he was wearing.
A half-hour later police made a second attempt, firing as many as 82 rounds through a door, windows and walls. Murphy was found dead on the second floor.
The county coroner, in clearing officers of wrongdoing in Murphy’s death, said, “I consider this to be a drug-related death due to a person’s addiction….” He displayed a suicide note Murphy had written.
A neighbor told the Tribune-Review that Murphy had been depressed since his wife’s death two year earlier.
In 2009, state police killed a Seton Hill University student who, following a night of heavy drinking, kept police at bay for three hours, firing a rifle out the window of his apartment between 30 and 40 times.
Joseph Briggs was a 22-year-old country boy from near Frederick, Maryland, who was living on a quiet, tree-lined street in Greensburg. A criminal justice major, Briggs was clearly out of control on the morning he died. He was plenty drunk.
State police later said Briggs “may have had personal problems in regard to a relationship,” the Tribune-Review reported.
A friend in Maryland told the Frederick News-Post that Briggs wanted to become a police officer. In the wake of the standoff with police, “he knew he would never be able to fulfill his dreams.” He was “scared,” the friend said.
In the final hours of their lives, Murphy and Briggs were dangerous, desperate men. They needed to be stopped from doing what they were doing: endangering others and themselves.
But did they need to die at the hands of police? Was there a way to defuse their situations other than with deadly force?
Too late for Murphy and Briggs, the answers to these and other questions are finally coming due. The misapplication of policing power is real and urgent.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book “JFK Rising” is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com