Friday, July 8, 2016

Can We Break the Circle of Fear?

I hate to jump on bandwagons and for sure, everyone who writes on blogs will be writing about all this, either trying to make sense out of madness, or adding to it.

I don't want to add to it or to look for blame or offer an interpretation that no one wants to read -- but I do have questions.  Why do arresting officers work themselves into an incoherent lather, screaming hysterically so that anyone they're addressing is more likely to panic than to comply?  Anyone who has handled firearms for long enough will realize that when you have your finger on the trigger, guns go off when you least expect it. In fact that fact is used to improve accuracy in target shooting.   If you're howling like a wild animal backed into a corner, the gun will go off in your finger is on the trigger. It most certainly will and you'll be as surprised as anyone else when it does.

Are police trained to do this?  Why?   Why when someone is pinned to the ground and someone yells "gun" and you don't know why, do you start pumping one round after another into the man on the ground, shrieking like scalded cats? Is the technique of descending into group panic designed to turn good men into dangerous cowards?

I'm very tired of the folk psychology about hidden prejudice lurking behind every white face. It makes as little sense as shooting Dallas cops for something that happened in Minnesota, because if we're training police to be trigger happy and paranoid, anyone could be a target, including other policemen.  The key word, I think is training, teaching cops to handle people as well as they handle weapons would be a start. As it is, some cops are training the public to fear them  and mistrust them to the point of panic and especially minorities.  I'd call it a vicious circle if it weren't a cliche'.

Prejudice is a natural part of learning in humans and animals. We make judgments based on past experience -- we prejudge from our training as well. Our reflexes, our conditioned responses are the result of learning from many sources and to say it's hopeless and a property of our race is no less than racism, and although the idiot Trump can say we have to fight fire with fire, we don't. We don't fight racism with racism and we don't have to murder people because they make us nervous and we don't have to make the public terrified by yelling at them as though we were insane.  If we're that untrained and unstable we shouldn't be cops in the first place.

5 comments:

  1. I thought that when police stop someone in a car they ask him or her to get out of the car and put their hands on the car while they pat the person down. The cops in Minnesota didn't do that. From what I saw on the video, they stuck a gun in the car, and mayhem ensued. The Louisiana tragedy doesn't make any sense either. Why didn't they tell the guy to put his hands behind his head while they look for the gun after the guy said he had one? Questions we'll never get answered.

    And now the horror in Dallas.

    I don't think we'll change. Ever.

    "They listened to his heart.
    Little - less - nothing! - and that ended it.
    No more to build on there. And they, since they
    Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs."
    --Robert Frost

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  2. Prejudice , hell, these people are animals..

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  3. For years, our black friends and neighbors have complained about racial profiling, police brutality, stiffer prison sentences for black offenders compared to white offenders, broken families and broken dreams. Civil rights has not delivered us to the Promised Land. We still live in a nation of “freedom for thee but not for me,” an apartheid of inequality and injustice, and double standards.

    Death for driving with a broken tail light. Death for selling CDs on a sidewalk. Death for selling loose cigarettes. Death for failing to use a turn signal. Death for jay walking.

    Nobody listens. Suddenly, every Mexican is a criminal or a rapist. Every Muslim neighbor is a suspected terrorist. Every citizen in our black community is painted with the brush of urban violence. And every cop becomes a rogue cop.

    A self-serving politician condemns an entire people with gratuitous stereotyping, scapegoating, defamation, and condemnation. All-or-nothing-thinking and reckless rhetoric consumes and divides us.

    Our news media trades on belligerence and bombast. “OMG, did you hear what he/she said today?” Talking heads spin false narratives, and every mendacity becomes the headline de jour. When journalists fail to fact check the veracity of competing claims, lies sprout legs and become legitimized on a public stage. After all, sensationalism sells.

    No wonder why people are angry. In the heat of a moment, guns go off and innocent people end up killed. I see no future in the current environment.

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  4. Well said, and I appreciate the previous comment (O)CT(O)PUS.

    If you watch British officers when they deal with a suspect on video, you'll see a reasoned, calm approach, with an emphasis on "calm". The idea seems to be to make the person of interest less agitated, less prone to panic, less likely to do something stupid out of fear. Over here we have the shock and awe training, which tells our officers to scream commands at suspects, to treat every potentially dangerous traffic stop as a "me or him" situation.

    A couple of decades ago I was at the business end of a frightened police officer's gun as he shouted commands at me. The cop in question looked to be about nineteen or twenty, and he was terrified. A call had come in that someone was taking shots at cars on the interstate from an exit ramp at JUST the time I was on that ramp looking for a lost hubcap. I had no sooner got back into my friend's car when the confrontation started. I ended up on the hood of the car, spread-eagle, while one cop patted me down and another held a gun to the head of my friend behind the wheel. After they concluded it was all a mistake, we were released. I doubt a person of color would have been so fortunate.

    We have to find a way to dial back the testosterone, get people to see one another as humans, and stop taking every situation to the wall from the get-go.

    How that's done in today's climate is the real question, and I'm not sure there's an answer.

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  5. I don't know how this all ends. I'm quite convinced it will get worse before it gets better and it won't end well.

    Perhaps after a rebirth?

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