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Why many aren’t cheering for officers who don’t shoot civilians
This week, various police officers have been celebrated for not shooting civilians. Over the weekend in Columbus, Ohio, Officer Peter Casuccio, who is white, approached two Black boys, 11 and 13, suspected of having a gun. He drew his gun and ordered them to stop, turn around, and show him their hands. One of the boys pulled a gun from his waist and tossed it. When the gun broke into pieces on the sidewalk, Casuccio realized that it was a BB gun. CNN reported that “the officer showed restraint in the encounter” because he didn’t fire his gun. Casuccio, who is a father, said he went into “dad mode” and used the situation to teach the boys a lesson. “This is getting kids killed all over the country,” Casuccio chided them, in body camera footage released by the police department. “You should be sorry, and you should be scared.” He later added, “Regardless of what people say about the dudes wearing this uniform, OK, we care.” [Darran Simon / CNN]
Also this week, two Pittsburgh police officers approached a man they were told might be trying to commit “suicide by cop.” They started talking to him. “He told us that he wanted to die,” said one of the officers. “My partner saw that he had his hand in his pocket. Asked him to remove his hand from his pocket. At that time, he pointed a gun at us.” The officers could tell the gun was not real. When they told him they knew it was fake, he threw it to the ground and the officers took him in for a mental health evaluation. “They rolled into a situation that [was] tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving,” gushed their commanding officer. “In many cases, we would have seen this play out very differently, but thanks to their training and expertise, they were able to identify the weapon the young man had in his hand was not in fact real and ended the situation peacefully.” Social media is now “blowing up with praise for the two heroes,” according to Pittsburgh’s CBS affiliate. [Julie Grant / KDKA]
But the reaction has not been all cheers. For one thing, the Columbus officer’s body camera footage captured his lecture to the boys, which took a decidedly (and admittedly) paternalistic tone. He asked, “How old are you, boy?” At another moment, he said, “You should be sorry, and you should be scared.” When the 11-year-old began to walk home, the officer chided him for what he considered to be an attempt to evade punishment from his family, or, as the officer put it, his “mama.” The officer recalled telling the child, “You’ve got to go answer for your sins to mama.” And there was no escaping the racialized tone of the entire encounter, beginning with the haunting compliance the boys showed as they immediately dropped to their knees and slowly, carefully put their hands in the air, obeying the officer’s every order. And the officer’s lecture begins with the call he received on the radio describing “two young male blacks.” He chided, “You can’t do that, dude. In today’s world, that thing looks real, bro.” The officer said, “I pride myself on being a pretty bad hombre, because I gotta be. Don’t make me.” He seemed to put the onus on the children, saying they were making him into a killer. [Darran Simon / CNN]
These are not mere quibbles, and this is not a one-off encounter. A systematic analysis of police body camera footage last year by Stanford professors Jennifer Eberhardt and Dan Jurafsky showed that officers consistently use less respectful language with Black community members than with white community members. The study, published last year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that the racial disparities in respectful speech remained even after the researchers controlled for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, and the location and outcome of the stop. For the study, a team from Stanford’s psychology, linguistics, and computer science departments developed an artificial intelligence technique for measuring levels of respect in officers’ language and applied it to the transcripts from 981 traffic stops that the Oakland Police Department made in a single month. They found that white residents were 57 percent more likely than Black residents to hear a police officer say the most respectful utterances, such as apologies and expressions of gratitude like “thank you.” Black community members were 61 percent more likely than white residents to hear an officer say the least respectful utterances, such as informal titles like “dude” and “bro”––as the Columbus officer said to the children. [Alex Shashkevich / Stanford News]
“I’m not an anomaly,” the Columbus officer told CNN. “The overwhelming majority of police officers feel the same way. They do the same thing.” It is pretty hard to believe that officers are being lauded as heroes for not shooting children. That said, it’s a vast improvement from firing or disciplining officers who do not shoot. Last year, when a West Virginia man attempted a “suicide by cop,” the first officer to respond, Stephen Mader, who is white, began to talk Williams down calmly. But when two other officers, also white, showed up and saw a Black man with a gun, one of them shot him in the back of the head within “mere seconds.” Instead of praising Mader’s bravery and arresting the shooter, the police department fired Mader, accused him of freezing up, and one officer called him a “coward.” [Kristine Phillips / Washington Post]
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