“Set phasers to stun”

Last updated on: February 26, 2015 at 10:52 pm by Jane the Actuary

“Set phasers to stun” 2015-02-26T22:52:59-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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(Second of two hasty posts on the policing controversies.)

What do the Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown cases have in common?

No, not that white police officers and vigilantes are systematically stalking innocent blacks. Not that blacks are all a bunch of thugs who are rightly killed.

But I think they demonstrate that we, collectively, have an unrealistic view of how self-defense/police apprehension should work, based on watching Star Trek.

The phaser — that modern marvel, the weapon which allows its user to take down his adversary with no consequences other than a temporary incapacity — doesn’t actually exist.

But people — in letters to the editor, in blog posts and comments, in protests — sure seem to think that it does.

“Police officers should be trained to ‘shoot to wound,’ not ‘shoot to kill,'” ran a letter to the editor in the paper the other day, failing to understand that it simply is impossible for a police officer to, in thse sorts of situations, aim for and shoot an assailent’s hand or thigh.

“He should have tased him/used mace/pepper spray.” (Never mind that tasers can be deadly, too, for medically fragile people, and harmful for others.)

Of Zimmerman, beyond those who deny that Martin was fighting Zimmerman at all, there were those who seemed to think that Zimmerman’s proper response should have been, if he couldn’t fight back with his fists, to just endure the beating with the expectation that the worst that would likely happen would be blacking out and maybe a black eye or two.

With respect to the Eric Garner case, so far as I can tell, the situation is even murkier. Reports that I’ve read say that it was not that a “chokehold” literally choked him to death (after all, a man who is being choked can’t call out “I can’t breathe” repeatedly) but that he died due to the fact that he was pushed to the ground and even had one or more officers on top of him, which compressed his chest — and which, even so, would not have been a problem in an ordinary situation, but was deadly for an obese man with asthma. Vox.com quotes the medical examiner: “Garner was killed by “the compression of his chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police,” said medical examiner spokesperson Julie Bolcer.”

What is the answer? on Eric Zorn’s blog, commenters are suggesting that standards be raised for the police they recruit — requiring a 4-year degree (because sitting in a classroom will make a difference?), demanding higher IQs (I didn’t know IQ testing was allowed), and so on — all made possible by higher salaries, presumably. But the only thing that I can really see making a difference is more and continued training, especially a lot of role-playing, to enable officers, at that moment when they need to make a snap decision, to put some alternate training into play. (“This guy is big but it looks like he’s in poor physical shape” or the like.)

Besides which, it also makes me curious: in the TV cop shows, any cop can outrun a suspect, no matter how much a head start the bad guy has, and even a woman has no difficulty taking down a male suspect. But imagine that Eric Garner hadn’t been asthmatic but had been strong and had fought back. What story would we be telling then?

(Oh, and by the way: the fact that cigarette taxes in New York City may or may not been too high, and laws against evasion of those taxes may be excessive, is not the point here. Garner could have been doing any number of things when he was arrested.)

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