An open letter to those who have expressed outrage over the recent video from UC Davis:
Dear people who think that the application of pepper spray is a “chilling” act of “violence” against “peaceful protesters:”
If the police give you a lawful order to leave an area in which you do not have the right to remain, you must leave. If you do not leave, you will be placed under arrest. If you resist this arrest, either actively or passively, you will still be removed. The police will not go away. It is their job to enforce the law, and you are breaking the law.
If you have linked your arms together with a dozen other people so that the police cannot remove you, they have two choices: apply pressure points and control holds in order to induce enough pain that you will give up, or deploy some sort of tool to accomplish the same result. The police cannot read your mind, and they do not know if you will fight with them if they attempt to remove you with pressure points and control holds. The risk of injury to them, and to you, instantly goes up, and they have to worry about all of the other people present. The police are concerned about your safety and the safety of all the other people present, as well as their own. They have no more desire to get injured than you, and there is a risk of injury any time the police are required to physically compel someone to comply with arrest.
Pepper spray, though painful, WILL NOT cause serious injury if applied correctly… and deploying it from a large-volume can from eighteen inches away is a correct application. This is not an act of “brutality,” nor is it indicative of any sort of “police state.” The police, by and large, are professionals, and the cause for which you are breaking the law does not matter to them. The fact that you are breaking the law DOES. Again, it is their job to enforce the law. Enforcing the law includes making arrests, and the use of force to effect arrest, if necessary.
The bottom line is this: no matter how “peaceful” the protester, if they are violating the law, they are subject to arrest. If they resist this arrest, the police will effect their arrest in whatever way is safest for all involved. Peacefully violating the law is still violating the law. Do not blame the police for doing their job.
Thank you.
Well done. Too bad we are all on the same side in this issue. It’s just sad and unfortunate. All of it, but ya know, not this post, that’s really good.
Mom
Well-written and understandable from the police point of view. That people can protest is one of the joys of being American. That we have police to do their best to peacefully enforce the laws of the land is another one of the joys of being American. This is a link to the way the St. Louis police dealt with the Occupy movement: http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/452788.html which offers some perspective on peacefully dealing with protesters. I understand that this method may not necessarily work on more “het-up” protestors, but it is certainly a better way to start than pepper spray, batons, etc.
Nicely said, JD. I will be forwarding this to a friend with whom Karyn (and me, via lots of input) have been having a discussion. Perception is a very large part of the bargain, which again illustrates that general public has really no concept of police use of force, and our need to better educate said general.
I understand the Police have a job to do. I also know the VAST majority of cops are really, honestly trying to serve and protect. But repeated videos of a few cops using brutality (there was NO WAY any use of force was necessary in some of these videos) has made a lot of Americans leery of police actions when confronted with clearly non-violent protesters. Moreover, pepper spray was shown to be significant in the deaths of over 60 people between 1990-1995, and has been used incorrectly and with brutality in multiple cases. http://www.nlg-npap.org/html/research/LWpepperspray.pdf I am sure that you, as a good cop, doubtlessly know that pepper spray is not a toy. If the seated students had been actively struggling to resist arrest, I would understand the spray. Finally, using the spray on non-violent protesters is bad for the cops. The supreme court ruled the spray on people exercising 1st amendment rights was “excessive force”. http://www.shouselaw.com/pepperspray.html That means using pepper spray on non-violent protesters can get departments sued. Cops are underpaid, understaffed, and shot at … they DO NOT need bad press on top of that because it undermines the arguments on why we need more, better trained, and better paid cops. In the UC Davis case I argue that mediation would have a been a safer, more effective tool of law enforcement: http://www.mediate.com/articles/police.cfm I disagree with the police use of pepper spray on non-violent protesters.
We’ll take your cited articles one at a time:
1) The pepper spray article is written by an attorney who “writes frequently about police misconduct litigation issues,” to quote the article’s own header. The citations used within the article in defense of its points are almost universally from institutions which were, at the time of their publication, steadfastly opposed to the use of the then-relatively-new technology of aerosol-delivery oleoresin capsicum. Specifically, the ACLU came out as a vociferous opponent to pepper spray, similar to their current opposition to the TASER electronic control device. At the time, the ACLU even made the absurd claim that baton strikes were more humane than pepper spray.
To cite merely the first example in the article, which is clearly written to shock the audience with what is inferred to be a clear case of police brutality, the article states the following:
“Williams’ death was, according to the local coroner, caused by the combined effects of cocaine toxicity, hogtying and ‘excited delirium,’ a frenzied mental state induced by drugs or acute psychiatric disorders.”
The article then goes on the state that “…pepper spray was not initially identified as a contributing factor in Williams’ death,” then states that the death was later “identified as one of over sixty nationwide that have occurred in police custody since 1990 after a suspect was sprayed,” citing a newspaper article as a reference. Please note: the CORONER stated that pepper spray was not a “contributing factor” to his death. In fact, based on my training, it sounds like his death was primarily caused by two factors: excited delirium, and positional asphyxia.
In my reading, and based on my knowledge of CURRENT case law and research, the article primarily cites two types of source material: coroner reports, which almost universally fail to cite OC as a primary or contributing cause of death; and studies of death reports, including those by the ACLU, which seem to indicate that OC may contribute to the death of an individual when said individual is both in an excited delirium state AND the individual is “hogtied” (a practice which is no longer used in law enforcement specifically because of the risk of death due to positional asphyxia) after being subdued. The argument from these reports seems to be that, although the death reports largely do not list OC, this must be an error, essentially because coroners were not checking for it properly.
Note that in my original post, I said the following: “Pepper spray, though painful, WILL NOT cause serious injury if applied correctly.” Emphasis here is on the last three words: “if applied correctly.” Correct application involves three things: proper assessment of the threat; proper mechanical application; and proper after care. I maintain my original statement: I have never seen ANY indication that pepper spray, when applied correctly, will cause serious or permanent injury.
2) The website you link to belongs to a law group which describes itself in its own tag line as “California police and jail misconduct lawyers.” The 9th Circuit case it references (paraphrased, “Headwaters Forest Defense, et al, vs. Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department, et al”) involved officers directly swabbing the eyes of the protesters in question with cotton swabs saturated with pepper spray.
This is not proper application. In fact, this is not even close to proper application, and this case is nearly universally taught in police use-of-force classes to recruits and veterans. It is a landmark case in law enforcement, and is a perfect example of what NOT to do. The case DID NOT declare that using “the spray on people exercising 1st amendment rights was “excessive force.”
Moreover, the circumstances involved were wildly different. In the court case cited above, the police applied the OC (incorrectly) to “groups of 2 to 7″ protesters who had used locking devices to secure themselves to trees. There was no evidence of a “large, unruly group” offered to the court. Conversely, the officers at UC Davis were surrounded by a large group, while simultaneously addressing a group of 10-20 protesters who had locked their arms together in an effort to remain immobile.
3) I’m actually a fan of mediation. I use it all the time. I have something of a reputation for being a “talker:” someone who will continue to talk to a suspect, even under some circumstances in which I might be justified in using physical control. I believe very strongly in “talking someone into handcuffs” when possible.
But the depicted situation is NOT the time for “mediation.” Mediation, or negotiation, or whatever you want to call it, is a one-on-one activity. YOU CANNOT “MEDIATE” A GROUP. You cannot simultaneously appeal to all of the protesters as some sort of collective mind, and their joint action speaks to a premeditated decision.
Moreover, I’m not entirely sure what you think mediation might accomplish here. I’m not trying to be snide or sardonic; I’m genuinely curious. I don’t even see how the mechanics of mediation could be applied in this circumstance.
I totally get you are not being snide. I hope you get that I am not anti-cop. Frankly, I think y’all are one of the most underpaid professions in America. Also, I have brothers who are fire fighters, so I am pro-people-who-save-lives-for-little-reward. But I do think that there are SOME (just a fraction) cops who use pepper spray egregiously because they are bullies … and I wish the police department had better funding to weed those jerks out before they got their badges. I think that mediation could have helped because 1) the kids were okay with being arrested to make a point, so explaining they needed to submit to the cuffs or they might get hurt MIGHT have persuaded one (or more) to just go quietly, or at least would have let the cops know the protesters were going to do the “limp” thing. 2) Even after the pepper spray the cops had to drag the limp protesters to the “paddy wagon” (I just like using the phrase paddy wagon, BTW) so the pepper spray garnered bad publicity with no discernible benefit. I think it was a lose-lose with pepper spray. Although that does not mean I was advocating batons as a “safer” alternative. That’s crazy sauce, right there. I just think that, with every media outlet on earth watching, the police should have handled those protesters with kid gloves, if for no other reason than to avoid becoming a meme.
[...] blog read of the day: go here to read Julie’s son’s take on policing protests. While I do truly sympathize with the [...]
My father was an Irish-American New Jersey State Trooper. He was also what would be kindly referred to as “a man of his time.” Which means he approached his job in a somewhat bigoted, cynical fashion. He wrote a book, “Jersey Troopers,” which detailed the first fifty years of that police force. I respected him and his career choice, but I am waaayy more liberal than he was. So, these UC Davis situations leave me in a pickle. I feel for the police, and the protesters. I always think there is more than one way to skin a cat, or arrest non-violent protesters, but I also understand that policing is about following the rules. But I agree with Fokker that, purely from a PR standpoint, pepper spray is never a popular solution.
That said, I’ll use this as yet another example of “Do Whatever the Police Say” for my teenage sons. My town police have a reputation for being hard-asses, and my sons are…not always smart, in that way that teenage boys can be, so I anticipate seeing the inside of that station at least once.
Here’s the thing about police work: it never, ever looks good when the police use force. Fortunately, the police use force very rarely. Unfortunately, police use of force is disproportionately represented in the media. Moreover, the worse-looking a particular force incident is, the more attention it garners. This is understandable; after all, a ten-minute video of a cop talking to a motorist in a professional and courteous manner before allowing him to leave with a verbal warning simply isn’t that interesting… but things like that make up the VAST MAJORITY of police actions.
My personal theory about why the use of pepper spray (and TASERs, to an increasing degree) generally “looks bad” to the public is that the use of OC doesn’t look “fair.” Most people, in the back of their mind, still have this sort of Marquess-of-Queensberry-rules mindset when it comes to police use of force: they’re generally okay with the cops using force to control a situation, but only if it looks like the cop is “fighting fair.” That is, if it looks more or less like both sides have an equal chance, people don’t think it “looks bad.” If a guy takes a swing at a cop, people expect the cop to swing back. If a guy pulls a gun, people expect the cop to pull his gun, and if the guy shoots at the cop, people expect the cop to shoot back.
The problem is that the cops are under absolutely no obligation to fight fair, ever, for any reason. Not only do they not have to fight fair, they shouldn’t fight fair. A “fair fight” results in injuries to everyone involved; in fact, it results in significantly higher injuries than reacting with proper force before the situation gets out of hand. That’s not to say that cops can use WHATEVER force they desire on a whim; rather, they are trained to recognize a situation and react appropriately, according to statute, case law, and department policy. The rules governing police use of force are generally pretty clear; the problem is that most people have no idea what those rules actually are, so they just sort of make up their own rules in their heads, and assume that anything that doesn’t conform to those rules must be “police brutality.”
Pepper spray, like the TASER, tends to make it look to the general public like cops are hurting someone without exerting any effort or giving the other party a fair chance. They’re using a tool that the other party generally doesn’t have immediate access to, and they usually use OC or TASER deployment to avoid a fight, by ending it before it can really begin. This is not only justified, but correct; contrary to popular belief, it is not “an expected part of the job” for a cop to take a punch or get shot at. It’s a risk, but it’s not something that cops should be expected to accept and shrug off like an office worker being given a new chair. The police have a right to protect themselves, and an obligation to protect others, and sometimes that means that they have to throw the first punch, or tase someone who is already kicking and resisting even as he implores the cops not to tase him, or shoot a man with a knife while he is still ten or fifteen feet away… or pepper spray a group of protesters who are refusing lawful orders to leave, and who taking steps to actively resist any attempt to induce compliance, even when that “looks bad.” Because, when it comes right down to it, despite all of the bad press, the vast majority of cops are still primarily concerned with doing the job correctly… no matter how it looks after the fact to a largely uninformed public.
JD – you write really eloquently and express yourself very clearly and have enabled me to see the police side of the protest much better, which I much appreciate. It is so easy to see things in an us-against-them way where the “them” are the evil, bad guys. Not that I do think that the police in general are the evil, bad guys at all, it’s just that like everywhere else there are exceptions to the rule. Sadistic teachers, pedophile priests, sleazy lawyers, bullying police, all give a bad name to their profession while most of the people in the profession are doing their best to do a good job.
So I have a question for you. There are clearly wrongs in our society. When they are entrenched wrongs and it becomes clear to the wronged and those concerned with justice that working within the system is not correcting those wrongs, and protesting to publicly illustrate and demonstrate against the wrongs becomes a viable action, how do you, as an officer charged with maintaining the law deal with the inherent moral conflict? I’m thinking about the civil rights movement, which changed laws and altered our society. I’m not going to argue the rights and wrongs of the OWS movement since we are in the midst of it, so I’m going with a more historical movement as illustration. If you believe in the movement that is protesting, what is your obligation as a police officer? And, how would you advise protesters to protest? What is the best method for raising awareness of a wrong, using one’s first amendment rights?
And, I do agree with your statements about the media. Thousands of officers helping to make their communities a safer place get no recognition while a few incidents paint the police as a bunch of bully-boys.