Blue Lives Matter Power
These days, cops are feeling under-appreciated — persecuted even — due to a spike in anti-police sentiment in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. And they’re acting up in all sorts of ways. In Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, officers are filing PTSD claims, citing trauma from all the protests. The Atlanta Police Department staged a “blue flu” work slowdown in response to charges being filed against the officers who killed Rayshard Brooks.
They’re also getting some sympathy. The Atlanta Police Foundation gave everyone in the department a $500 bonus to boost morale. State lawmakers in Georgia introduced an (almost certainly unconstitutional) bill to make a new crime called “biased motivated intimidation.” It’s essentially a hate crime law specifically for police that civil rights advocates say could be abused to criminalize many forms of protest.
In Florissant, Missouri, pro-police residents painted over a “Black Lives Matter” message protesters had drawn on the street with blue paint to make it look like the “thin blue line,” a symbol of support for the police. Conservatives around the country have been staging “Back the Blue” rallies that invariably feature signs proclaiming “Blue Lives Matter.”
But that’s not really something that needs to be stated. Our society already values the lives of police officers far above that of ordinary citizens.
Under our laws and norms, the shadow of a hint of a possibility of a threat to a “blue life” is enough of a justification for a police officer to hurt or kill a civilian.
The truth of this can be seen in the way police have behaved during recent protests — often without repercussions.
In Brooklyn, a protester was walking about 3 feet behind a police officer, who then turned around, closed distance, and yelled “Get back!” before pushing him hard into a second officer, who attempted to tackle him. When the man pulls out his phone to film the encounter, the second officer hits him with a Taser then arrests him.
In another incident, also in New York City, an NYPD officer called a woman a “bitch” and shoved her to the ground, causing her to have a seizure. She was standing several feet away from a group of police, yelling at them as they walked past, but she hadn’t done anything that was overtly threatening.
It’s hard to imagine an ordinary person assaulting someone and then claiming self-defense on the grounds that the person they attacked stood too close or yelled at them. Yet, police do this sort of thing all the time and get away with it.
The same laws ostensibly apply equally to both cops and civilians, but there is a double standard.
Officers are allowed to use a “reasonable” amount of force, and juries tend to give them the benefit of the doubt.
And what is “reasonable” is colored by the jury’s attitudes about the value of a police officer’s life relative to that of the person they have harmed or killed. Even though that person usually has yet to be convicted or even charged with a crime, they are a “criminal” — the “bad guy.”
Therefore, any action the “good guy” takes to protect his more valuable life, even if excessive, is “reasonable.” In most cases, all a cop has to do to avoid prosecution or conviction is to say five magic words: “I feared for my life.”
This worked for Jeronimo Yanez, who shot Philando Castile, a black school cafeteria worker, to death in front of his girlfriend and daughter. Castile calmly informed the officer that he had a firearm. The moment Castile said this, Yanez began reaching for his gun.
He says “Okay, don’t pull it out,” then repeats the same instruction much louder before firing a lethal barrage into the car seconds later.
Yanez was acquitted because he testified that he thought he saw something in Castile’s hand at the time. After the shooting, it was clear that there wasn’t.
What mattered in this instance, wasn’t whether Castile posed a threat, but whether Yanez perceived a threat and acted “reasonably.” In other words, a person’s life or death can hinge on how scared an officer is at any given moment.
One of the bullets passed through Castile’s seat and struck inches away from where his 4-year-old daughter was sitting. The life of one officer was weighed against the lives of three black people, and they came up short.
As a response to “Black Lives Matter,” the slogan “Blue Lives Matter” is perverse because black lives are already undervalued while “blue lives” are overvalued.
What’s more, whenever they are killed by police, black people are routinely denigrated and the worth of their lives is further debased by both police and media. In an interview with investigators, Yanez referenced the smell of marijuana smoke as a post hoc justification for what he did:
If he has the, the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five year old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing then what, what care does he give about me.
This sort of character assassination recurs again and again in police homicides where the victim is black. When Botham Jean was murdered in his apartment by an off-duty cop in Dallas, narcotics police were sent to ransack his home in search of drugs in an attempt to smear him.
Cops are lionized as heroes who “put their lives on the line” to protect citizens from criminals, but some folks aren’t fully afforded that protection, including black, brown, and indigenous people as well as marginalized groups like the homeless and the mentally ill.
They’re treated as something less than full citizens.
It’s no coincidence that those whose lives are devalued in our society bear the disproportionate impact of police violence. For instance, people with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed in a police encounter.
In 2011, police in Fullerton, California, beat to death Kelly Thomas, a schizophrenic homeless man. When paramedics arrived, they found Thomas on the ground in a pool of his own blood, but they were instructed to first give care to a minor injury on one of the officers’ thumbs that he sustained while caving Thomas’ face in with his stun gun.
In 2017, Seattle police shot Charleena Lyles, a pregnant black woman, seven times — twice in the back — after she reported a burglary. Lyles was known to police from a previous call, and they had flagged her as a person with mental illness. Both officers had a Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) certification and at least one was supposed to be equipped with a Taser, but neither was.
Officer Anderson backs out of Charleena Lyles’ apartment while firing. (Seattle Police Department)
The only witnesses aside from the officers were Lyles’ two infant children and there is nobody camera footage, but they claim she brandished kitchen knives and they “feared for their lives.”
The officer who fired first on Lyles claimed he had no choice because the apartment door was closed behind him and there was no way to create distance, per department de-escalation policy. But the apartment surveillance video, when synced with the police audio, contradicts this narrative. It clearly shows the officer backing out the open apartment door while firing.
SPD policy dictates that the totality of circumstances should be taken into account, including the potential to harm others — i.e. Lyles two small children who were in the living room with her at the time — and the relative size of the suspect.
Both officers are at least double the weight and almost a full foot taller than Lyles, who was 5'3" and weighed 100 lbs. Remarking on this, the Force Review Board noted that “size is not relevant when a person is armed with a knife.”
Had this incident happened in the United Kingdom, Lyles would almost certainly be alive. Because of strict gun-control laws in the United Kingdom, knives are the most common weapon police encounter.
British officers are able to disarm and arrest the vast majority without killing the suspect. In 2019, UK police killed only three people. In the same year, American officers killed more than a thousand.
Most British patrol officers are armed only with less-lethal weapons like batons, pepper spray, and tasers. They’re also trained to treat the life of a subject — even an armed and dangerous one — as if it has the same value as the officers.
By contrast, American police procedures give priority to the life of the officer. Many police have a “kill or are killed” mindset that’s been drilled into them from day one.
One of the most popular police training consultants in the country is Dave Grossman, who travels the country giving lectures on “killology.” According to Mother Jones, Grossman has given upwards of 300 seminars a year for two decades and trained law enforcement at every level in all 50 states. He insists that cops must learn to kill without hesitation or remorse: “We fight violence. What do we fight it with? Superior violence. Righteous violence.”
One of his pupils was Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who killed Philando Castile.
Part of Grossman’s schtick is hyping up the threat to officers’ lives, which he presents as always growing. In fact, the number of line-of-duty deaths has been trending downward over the course of his entire career. A police officer is about as likely to die on the job as a construction worker. A logger is roughly seven times more likely to be killed at work than a cop and a garbage collector is three times as likely.
While it’s not a panacea by any means, many of the problems in policing could be mitigated by applying a simple principle at every stage, from training to discipline: the lives of members of the public are more valuable than those of police officers.
Police are supposed to protect and serve the public, and they’d be held in higher regard if they showed greater willingness to brave injury or death in order to ensure that citizens are taken alive.
Allowances are made for police to use “reasonable” force, but a corollary to that is that cops should also accept reasonable risk — the definition of which should be expanded beyond its current boundaries.
So, yes, “blue lives matter,” but this country would be a lot better off if they mattered less.
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