How can I be writing this, given that when I tried to talk sense into someone yesterday, he shot me dead? I hadn’t even drawn my gun.
Fortunately, both our guns lacked bullets, and just made a big noise. We (“media” folks, city councilors, city employees, and a few state legislators), were in the Las Cruces Public Safety Building attempting police training scenarios, wearing protective equipment and under close supervision.
Police must know dozens of specific legal cases and state or federal laws. They must know ‘em better than prosecutors or defense attorneys. Lawyers can research a law’s details before citing it in a brief or going to court. Police officers must decide on the spot, sometimes in nanoseconds, under pressure, whether or not to put a foot in the door to prevent a man who may or may not be abusing his spouse from closing that door, or how to handle a shirtless trespasser who is acting in bizarre and threatening ways outside Costco.
Our state courts have (mostly correctly, I think, but challengingly for law enforcement) interpreted our search and seizure and other constitutional provisions and laws as more protective of individual rights than analogous federal provisions.
The landmark 1989 U.S. Supreme Court case of Graham v. Connor (as interpreted by later cases) governs police use-of-force cases. The Court unanimously held that all excessive-force claims should be analyzed under the Fourth Amendment’s “objective reasonableness” standard, not a generalized “substantive due process” standard. Were the officer’s actions objectively reasonable in light of the facts and circumstances confronting them? Courts judge reasonableness from the viewpoint of a reasonable officer in the moment, not using hindsight. Relevant factors include the severity of the suspected crime, the immediacy of any threat to anyone’s safety, and whether the suspect is actively resisting (or trying to evade) arrest.
One could note that we didn’t see the other side of the coin, when police officers step over lines and harm people unnecessarily. While officers spoke of the basic rules, I thought about situations from just a few years ago in which failure to follow those rules led to deaths.
I also saw again the video from the camera Officer Jonah Hernandez was wearing when a man to whom he’d spoken politely just rushed him, without warning or provocation, and knifed him to death. It’s hard to watch. It’s hard not to reflect on, afterward. It must have been incredibly painful for Chief Story and others who knew him well.
For me, the proper response to the session (which wasn’t my first) is NOT to express unqualified support for whatever police officers do in whatever circumstances; but I do view their actions with greatly enhanced sympathy and understanding. We owe them optimum training, equipment, support, and oversight.
We should recognize that we make them deal with all the hardest problems we are too weak, lazy, or blasé to fix: that modern society seems to drive more people mad, that a capitalist society involves a lot of poverty for those the system can’t use; and that most people are wonderful, by nature, and others are somewhat vicious. Whether that’s caused by God or the devil or getting beaten too badly by Papa, trying to talk such a person into acting benignly, without violating his or her rights, or seeing anyone injured, is a tough problem you and I rarely have to face.