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Status Quo

It was nearly 10 years ago when Eric Garner was selling loosies (individual cigarettes) on the streets of New York. Eric Gardner was a man who was barely getting by. He was in poor health. He was morbidly obese. He had been arrested multiple times for minor infractions. He was selling individual cigarettes in order to make money. On this particular street corner, he was actually known as a peacemaker.

On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner, a Black male, had just broken up a fight. The police were called. They saw Eric Gardner. They confronted him with regard to the sale of individual cigarettes. (This is illegal because it is not taxed.) Officer Daniel Pantaleo tried to handcuff Eric Garner. Mr. Gardner resisted. The police officer then wrestled Eric Garner to the ground using an illegal chokehold. Mr. Gardner was allowed to lie on the ground for seven minutes. Motionless. He was completely unresponsive. He was declared dead several minutes later on arrival at the hospital. No one went to jail.

In July 2016, Philando Castile was pulled over by police because he (and his girlfriend, who was also in the car) “look like people that were involved in a robbery.” It was 9 o’clock at night. Maybe, the police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, had x-ray vision. Maybe he had one of those biotic implants that the television character, Steve Austin, had in the hit show the $6 Million Man. In what can only be described as the worst misunderstanding of all time, Yanez asked for Castile’s license and registration. Castile mentions that he has a gun in the car. He reaches for his license and registration. He states that he is not pulling a gun out. Yanez repeats, “Don’t pull it out.” “I’m not pulling it out.” Then Yanez fires seven shots at close range. Mr. Castile is killed on the spot. Although Yanez was indicted, the jury voted to acquit.

Tyre Nichols was a 29-year-old Black man. He was stopped for reckless driving. Exactly what this means is unclear. Without any explanation, you know what happened. Basically, there is a confrontation with Black police officers. Mr. Nichols tries to run away. There is another confrontation in which it appears that all five Black police officers beat Mr. Nichols. Mr. Nichols is declared dead at the hospital hours later. After an investigation, the police officers have been fired. They have also been arrested on multiple felony charges.

A video has been released by the Memphis Police Department. This shows the death of Mr. Nichols. I will not be watching the video. There is nothing in that video that’s going to calm my nerves or change my mind. An unarmed American should not be beaten to death because of reckless driving. It is that simple.

Change, Reform
It has been almost 10 years since the Eric Gardner tragedy. Yet, I’m hard-pressed to think of any major reforms that we’ve seen over the last decade. We’ve had protests. We have had heated rhetoric in State Capitols. At the end of the day, not much has changed.

Many Americans were shocked that Mr. Nichols was beaten and killed by Black officers. While race may play a minor part in many of these tragedies, I believe that the majority of these incidents revolve around respect and authority. The police officer desperately wants to be treated as a respected member of our society. At the same time, the person of color, who is usually a person of color, wants to be treated as an American citizen. How do we fix this problem?

We must recognize that we are all human. I know this sounds corny. It sounds like a cliché. But I don’t think it is. Instead, we must recognize that humans act differently in intense, high-pressure situations. Once our brains perceive that we are in a life-and-death situation, rational thought is shut off. We have now initiated the “fight or flight” response. Neurochemicals are released, which cause us to act differently. We are now in survival mode. In my opinion, this is why these five police officers acted like a pack of animals. (Arthur McDuffie was a Black man and ex-marine who was pulled over for speeding. He led the police on a high-speed chase. When he was caught, he was beaten to death by four police officers. This occurred in 1979!) This is why officer Yanez shot an unarmed man. As soon as he heard there was a gun in the car, he perceived a serious threat. His ability to rationally take in stimuli, verbal stimuli, was gone. So, the answer to this puzzle is to avoid putting police officers in these positions where they think they are in mortal danger. Allow them to retreat to their police cars and call for backup. As they’re waiting for backup to arrive, the immediate threat lessens. Their blood pressure and pulse will slowly return to normal. Their ability to think rationally will return. Police officers must be better trained to de-escalate situations.

These “elite” police squads are a huge red flag to me. On TV, these police officers always make the right decisions. They never go over the line unless it is absolutely necessary to apprehend the bad guy. These squads have been the source of intimidation, fear, abuse, and lawlessness in the real world. In Detroit, in the 70s, there was an elite squad that was given leeway to clean up crime. They abused citizens, and they planted evidence. Their low point was when they raided a “drug deal.” The drug deal turned out to be a card game between off-duty Black police officers. Several officers were shot. One was killed. This squad was disbanded. There are examples of these squads across the country – from LA to New York to Memphis. Memphis had its own elite unit called SCORPION, from which all 5 police officers were members. All of these elite units end the same way, with mixed results in combating crime but a clear history of abuse and killing American citizens at an alarming rate.

But we know this. Right!?!? We know that if you give humans control of another group of humans without oversight, abuse will occur. In a simple psychological experiment performed at Sanford in the early 1970s, volunteers were randomly assigned to be prisoners or guards. Within days, the guards were treating the jailed as lessors. The experiment was stopped on day 6 because the guards were inflicting extraordinary abuse on these prisoners. The lesson from this experiment is that we as human beings can be cruel and inhuman if we are not given supervision. Now, let’s give a group of police officers – super status. District attorneys and judges will look the other way just as long as these super cops are getting results. This is not a formula for community trust. It is a formula for disaster.

By ecthompsonmd|2023-03-21T12:43:37-04:00March 21st, 2023|Civil Rights, Legal, Race|Comments Off

Another Black Man Gunned Down

Look, this is a problem in our society. For some reason (and we can argue the reason), black men are getting killed by police. I’m a trauma surgeon. I work for the police all the time. The folks with whom I work are very professional and seem to want to do the right thing all the time. There are, somehow, these folks in the police force that are, for a lack of a better word, cowboys.

Officer Michael Slager had several days to tell his story. Here’s what he was saying through his lawyer on Monday –

Slager thinks he properly followed all procedures and policies before resorting to deadly force, lawyer David Aylor said in a statement.

…

“When confronted, Officer Slager reached for his Taser — as trained by the department — and then a struggle ensued,” Aylor said. “The driver tried to overpower Officer Slager in an effort to take his Taser.”

Seconds later, the report added, he radioed that the suspect wrested control of the device. Even with the Taser’s prongs deployed, the device can still be used as a stun gun to temporarily incapacitate someone.

Slager “felt threatened and reached for his department-issued firearm and fired his weapon,” his attorney added.

So, then the video comes out. He gets fired from the police force and indicted for murder. We need to fix this but we will only fix this problem when we stop the craziness and decide that shooting Americans is NOT acceptable.

Walter Scott was shot and killed by someone who was supposed to guard and protect us.

From Charles Blow:

This case has also refocused attention on the power of video evidence and is likely to redouble calls for the universal implementation of police body cameras (the video in this case came from a witness). What would have happened if video of this incident had not surfaced? Would the officer’s version of events have stood? How many such cases must there be where there is no video?

But I would argue that the issue we are facing in these cases is not one of equipment, or even policy, but culture.

I would submit that cameras would have an impact on policy and culture, but that a change in culture must be bigger than both. It must start with “good cops” no longer countenancing the behavior of “bad cops.” It will start with those good cops publicly and vociferously chastising and condemning their brethren when they are wrong. Their silence has never been — and is certainly no longer — suitable. We must hear from them, not necessarily from the rank-and-file but from those higher up the ladder.

By ecthompsonmd|2015-04-08T23:49:29-04:00April 8th, 2015|Legal, Race|Comments Off

Judge Carlton W. Reeves

I must admit that when I hear the word – Mississippi – I don’t think of anything modern. I think of racism and Jim Crow. Judge Carlton W. Reeves (US District Court Judge in Mississippi) deeply believes in the New Mississippi, a place where the rule of law prevails. Before sentencing three white men for the racially motivated killing of James Craig Anderson, Judge Reeves spoke passionately about moving from the “old” to the “new”.

From NPR:

One of my former history professors, Dennis Mitchell, recently released a history book entitled, A New History of Mississippi. “Mississippi,” he says, “is a place and a state of mind. The name evokes strong reactions from those who live here and from those who do not, but who think they know something about its people and their past.” Because of its past, as described by Anthony Walton in his book, Mississippi: An American Journey, Mississippi “can be considered one of the most prominent scars on the map” of these United States. Walton goes on to explain that “there is something different about Mississippi; something almost unspeakably primal and vicious; something savage unleashed there that has yet to come to rest.” To prove his point, he notes that, “[o]f the 40 martyrs whose names are inscribed in the national Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, AL, 19 were killed in Mississippi.” “How was it,” Walton asks, “that half who died did so in one state?” — my Mississippi, your Mississippi and our Mississippi.

Mississippi has expressed its savagery in a number of ways throughout its history — slavery being the cruelest example, but a close second being Mississippi’s infatuation with lynchings. Lynchings were prevalent, prominent and participatory. A lynching was a public ritual — even carnival-like — within many states in our great nation. While other states engaged in these atrocities, those in the Deep South took a leadership role, especially that scar on the map of America — those 82 counties between the Tennessee line and the Gulf of Mexico and bordered by Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama.

Vivid accounts of brutal and terrifying lynchings in Mississippi are chronicled in various sources: Ralph Ginzburg’s 100 Years of Lynching and Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, just to name two. But I note that today, the Equal Justice Initiative released Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror; apparently, it too is a must-read.

In Without Sanctuary, historian Leon Litwack writes that between 1882 and 1968 an estimated 4,742 blacks met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs. The impact this campaign of terror had on black families is impossible to explain so many years later. That number contrasts with the 1,401 prisoners who have been executed legally in the United States since 1976. In modern terms, that number represents more than those killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom and more than twice the number of American casualties in Operation Enduring Freedom — the Afghanistan conflict. Turning to home, this number also represents 1,700 more than who were killed on Sept. 11. Those who died at the hands of mobs, Litwack notes, some were the victims of “legal” lynchings — having been accused of a crime, subjected to a “speedy” trial and even speedier execution. Some were victims of private white violence and some were merely the victims of “nigger hunts” — murdered by a variety of means in isolated rural sections and dumped into rivers and creeks. “Back in those days,” according to black Mississippians describing the violence of the 1930s, “to kill a Negro wasn’t nothing. It was like killing a chicken or killing a snake. The whites would say, ‘niggers jest supposed to die, ain’t no damn good anyway — so jest go an’ kill ’em.’ … They had to have a license to kill anything but a nigger. We was always in season.” Said one white Mississippian, “A white man ain’t a-going to be able to live in this country if we let niggers start getting biggity.” And, even when lynchings had decreased in and around Oxford, one white resident told a visitor of the reaffirming quality of lynchings: “It’s about time to have another [one],” he explained, “[w]hen the niggers get so that they are afraid of being lynched, it is time to put the fear in them.” (more…)