Lack of Discernment when Cops are Afraid?

-- By TaleahTyrell - 16 Apr 2021

Different Looking People Spurs Suspicion and Fear

Pretextual Stops

A year ago, while driving around an affluent San Diego neighborhood with my boyfriend the cops stopped us.

"May I ask what we did wrong officer?" "Your license plate is not from California."

We looked at each other, scared as the cop walked back to his car to run the license. A few minutes later he came back to the car, this time, completely ignoring him, only speaking to me.

"Where is he from?" the cop asked me. And then, "Ma'm, I need to see your license or identification too."

Luckily I'd brought my wallet along. I gave him my identification and he said, "Oh, you are from here." He let us go.

We left angry, confused, hurt, but most of all embarrassed. Why did he ask for MY license if I was not the one driving? Why did he stop us for driving around with a Tennessee license plate? Through the frustration however, I began to wonder if maybe that cop was actually a kind man with good intentions, maybe with kids and a family that lived close to the area. What if, he, from his perspective, genuinely viewed our activities as a threat and it was instinctual for him to stop us?

Police Officers Discernment

De-Funding is Insufficient

Cops unnecessarily killing people of color has re-sparked a movement in America in 2020. After the death of George Floyd, millions of Americans united to protest police brutality. This movement sparked citywide changes across the U.S. Efforts to "defund the police" have spurred throughout the country as a way to eliminate the problem altogether. The main goal consists of allocating police resources to other services such as mental health counselors, community vigilante groups, and social workers, arguing that they should be alternative numbers of citizens to call for help during a situation. However, those efforts will largely fail if the crucial role police discernment plays is not identified. At the end of the day, police officers hold a valuable role in society. They are trained to protect, serve, and keep law and order in our society. They cannot be fully replaced by mental health counselors as evidenced by approaches like this that have failed in the past. Accepting the reality that officers are here to stay leads to the effort of identifying why discernment fails when police officers are tasked with policing Black communities.

Discernment: A Police Officers Greatest Tool

According to Merriam Webster, "discernment" means "the quality of being able to grasp and comprehend what is obscure" or "an act of perceiving." Police officers are tasked with this role daily. They drive around neighborhoods examining individuals and situations making quick decisions based on human dispositions, activities, clothing, demeanor, etc. With this input of information they must make quick judgments about whether to arrest, interfere, assist, help, or interrupt. Quality discernment becomes an officers most valued skill and a method to success in their field. This ability to comprehend is not necessarily always a conscious decision. A good discern-er couples conscious thoughts with quick subconscious judgments that analyze those thoughts. For officers, after many successful arrests, de-escalations, or detainments, these subconscious judgments are inevitably trusted more and more, leading to a confidence that a good officer should have. As such, the valued skill of discernment can become diluted or weakened when its only source is derived from a subconscious experience. In these times, fear or anxiety may be confused as discernment and result in unjustifiable and unnecessary use of force.

False Discernment: A Police Officers Greatest Weakness

This false discernment, which is a mix of fear, anxiety, and rash actions is evidenced by the officer who shot 13-year old Adam Toledo. In the video, Toledo drops a handgun then turns to the police raising his hands. The cop immediately shot him. As graphic as the video is to watch, more telling are the words of desperation as the officer chases Toledo down the alley "Hey! Don't F**move! Stop, STOP!" An eerily similar sheer desperation is also reflected in the voices the the cops that scrambled to stop Daunte Wright. This time, the officer mistakenly shot her gun thinking it was a taser, killing the 20-year-old.

Eliminating False Discernment to Properly Police those that look Suspiciously Different

To have equal justice under the law with respect to and from police officers we need to train officers to re-wire the disproportionate risk perception that they unconsciously attribute to Black people. The current response to situations seems justifiable to them in the situations because they view Black people as a higher risk. Because of deep unconscious bias that has grown from years of portrayals of Black people in the media, the amount of Black people in prison, and the differences in cultures and experience all lend to an appropriately heightened state when they encounter Black people. Those years of discernments where officers look for guns, knives, age, and normally make a sound decision as to how to resolve the situation now mix with the fear of the unknown, “will this Black person respect my authority?” “Do they have a gun?” “If they do, will they shoot me?” Instead of discerning as with a white person, too often the threat is categorically perceived as a deadly risk. Unlearning this bias has to begin by acknowledging the fight or flight the emerges within officers when encountered in these situations.

I’ll never know why that officer stopped me in San Diego. However, knowing that there are so many well-intentioned good officers, I can imagine that this officer saw two very different people and his usual discernment told him that this irregularity warranted further investigation. It is at that crucial moment, however, that officers must take stock of the line between their fear and discernment so that individuals are not needlessly killed.

This draft does everything in 980 words that the previous one did in 1440. Cutting it was both a useful experience for you as a writer and helpful to me as an editor, because now we can see more clearly where the issues are.

In most of the societies I have lived in or visited, desire to avoid police is strong in the general population. In that sense, what is most atypical about the US isn't the fear and antipathy Black folk feel about the police, but the sense White people have that police are genuinely their allies.

No Soviet person wanted to deal with militia, ever. To be from the Caucasus, however, therefore being what Russians call a "blackass," was to be even more fearful of the police than to be one of the "ordinary" Slavic people living under the boot of the State.

Societies adopt paramilitary organization for their order-keepers because that works at keeping order. They way paramilitary forces keep order is always only acceptable to those who in their own opinions personify order, because they personify property. For everyone else, that way of keeping order is unacceptable, because it imposes all the costs of order on themselves, their bodies, their families, and their communities.

So we have in the US both a particular form of racialized dualism with respect to police, in which US White people are exceptionally pro police—because we have a rich society in which police are only very occasionally corrupt, rule of law is strong so most police are law-abiding most of the time, and there are communities in which police are visible engaged in protecting and serving—and Black folks have unusually strong reasons to be afraid, even as police forces around the society are increasingly integrated and even led by Black chiefs and commissioners. US police use unusually high amounts of lethal force in the street for police in wealthy democracies, overall, and the racial distribution of that use of force is self-evidently biased, as are the sorts of petty abuses of power with which your essay begins.

It is entirely possible to imagine a transition away from paramilitary order-keeping. Most of the time, in most social locales, the form of immediate social response to harm or danger can be unarmed social intervention by people who don't require power to arrest. But that won't eliminate entirely the need for the State's coercive force to deal with violence and criminal behavior, so we can't expect to remove the paramilitary form of government from the urban street altogether. Which means that the question how to secure actual civil equality in the treatment of all people by those forces doesn't vanish if we "defund the police." The most valuable route to improvement of this draft, I think, is to make some further cuts, which you can do, in order to give space in which to come to grips with the residual problem: no matter how far we cut back, the state will have uniforms on the street carrying guns, and we need to have equal justice under law with respect to, and from, them.

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