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Wednesday open thread: Another day, another case of police abuse


Micah Washington, of Tuscaloosa, AL, was on the side of the road, fixing a flat tire. 

A police cruiser pulled up behind him. This is what happened next:

The officer, Dana Elmore, is now on suspension pending an investigation.

Two things can be true at the same time. 1) We need police. A complex society lacking a police force will look much more like Mogadishu than any fantasy that police abolitionists imagine. 2) Our system of policing is not fit for purpose. Too often people like Ms. Elmore get a badge and see it as license to abuse and oppress those whom they are supposed to be serving and protecting. She didn't consider Mr. Washington as someone to whom she should have offered assistance as he was on the side of the road with two other people fixing a flat tire. She immediately saw him as a threat, cuffed him, and then—without provocation—proceeded to torture him with a stun gun when he posed no threat. This is not something which can be solved with "more and better police." If the systems which train police officers produce people of the caliber of Ms. Elmore, that is a fatal flaw in those systems.

Ms. Elmore, instead of ascertaining if Mr. Washington needed assistance, immediately profiled him as dangerous and in need of detention. Was her attitude a result of racism? One can only presume. But put that aside for the moment. Why are police trained to treat every interaction as a life-or-death situation? Why are police trained to fear every incident as a potentially violent one? Does this training encourage the use of excessive force? Is this keeping crime down? Local governments pay out millions of dollars a year to settle excessive force lawsuits. And that money isn't coming from the police budget. You and I are paying that. Much like with our healthcare system, we pay more and receive less in services.

(And, of course, perhaps if the population wasn't armed to the teeth, that might alleviate police fears. At least I'd like to think so. But that's not guaranteed. The mindset might remain the same.)

But there's no doubt that racism is a major element in that interaction. Would Ms. Elmore have made her assumptions had Mr. Washington been a 24-year-old white man? Would she have immediately pulled out her authorization to use force? This is yet another instance of police out of control, exercising maximum force rather than assessing a situation. I don't see how a man changing his tire on a busy road in broad daylight warranted the actions which Ms. Elmore took. But, of course, he "looked the part" of a dangerous individual. The rest of the drama unfolded as it usually does.

Just like "defund the police" is an asinine slogan, so is "back the blue". This country has a crisis of policing. Throwing around rigid ideological statements won't solve a very real issue. The police have to be held accountable, and reformed to be true community police, rather than nothing better than an armed gang operating under the color of law. As long as we stay in our ideological foxholes, the case of Mr. Washington will happen again and again.

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