What Cops Can Do, and What They Should Do

June 14, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

“There is a clear distinction between what you can do and what you should do.”

In one simple sentence, Atlanta’s Mayor Bottoms has zeroed in on a central problem in police violence and the public response to that violence. “Can” is about what is legally justifiable. “Should” is about what is right.

Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, and others — all these killings were legally justified. The same is true of less well-publicized cases, lethal and especially non-lethal. The grand jury did not indict, or if the case went to trial, the jury did not convict. And it’s not because prosecutors and juries are racists; it’s not because they are biased towards the police; it’s not even because the police lie. Those reasons apply in some cases. But often, the justice system fails to achieve what to most people would seem like justice because the violence is consistent with the law. It is legally justifiable.

But that doesn’t mean that the shooting, the beating, or other abuse was right. Nor does it mean it was unavoidable.

In the Atlanta killing that occasioned the mayor’s statement, the victim, drunk and uncooperative, had thrown a punch, taken the taser of one officer, and tried to run away. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation,* “During the chase, Mr. Brooks turned and pointed the Taser at the officer . . . The officer fired his weapon, striking Brooks.” (This last sentence is copspeak for “The officer shot him.”) It’s possible that the victim’s actions will provide sufficient legal justification for the killing. But the cop certainly did not have to shoot.

Some police violence seems justified, and not just legally, given the pressures of the immediate situation. But that situation itself may have been the outcome of actions on the part of the police. The most obvious recent example is the killing of Breonna Taylor. In the police version, someone shot at them. They returned fire. Surely that’s legitimate. But that shooting was the end point of a series of actions that could have been avoided — the no-knock warrant, the battering ram breaking down the door, and even farther back in the causal chain, the militarization of the police.

Six years ago, when the St. Louis police shot and killed a man, probably mentally disturbed, who was armed with only a steak knife, I posted (here) this 2011 video of police in London responding to a truly deranged man wildly swinging a machete.

In the US, the police would have shot and killed the man, and they would have been legally justified. But the London police who first arrive on the scene do not carry guns, and they handle the situation in a way that results in no death or injury.

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* The GBI’s original version was much more favorable to the cops and was probably based on what the cops told them. When video of the incident turned up, the GBI changed its story.

Chick Corea, b. June 12, 1941

June 12, 2020

Posted by Jay Livingston

I started taking piano lessons last winter. Before the pandemic shut that down, I managed to meet with my teacher a half-dozen times. I told I was stuck in bebop cliches and wanted to move beyond that. At our last meeting — we didn’t know then it would be the last — he suggested that I listen to Chick Corea’s “Matrix.” It’s a 12-bar blues, but Toto, we’re not in “Now’s the Time” territory anymore.

I saw Chick live only once. I had gone to see Bill Evans at the Village Gate. Not long into the second set, Evans noted that Chick was in the house and asked him to sit in. Evans then left the stand and didn’t return. Chick played out the rest of the night.

“Black People”or “The Black People”

May 31, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

There’s a subtle but important difference between talking about “Black people” and taliking about “the Black people. Here’s Trump yesterday. (I’m usins Sarah Cooper’s version because she’s physically so much more expressive than Trump playing his invisible accordion.)

“By the way, they love African American people. They love Black people. MAGA loves the Black people.”

Does anybody really believe that Trump was being sincere? Or accurate? Does team MAGA love “the Black people”? The definite article, that the, gives him away.

During the 2016 campaign, when some suggested that Trump presidency would not be good for women, Trump said, “I’d be phenomenal to the women.”

At the time, I wondered how “I’d be phenomenal to the women” is different from just “I’d be phenomenal for to women.”  The blog post (here) continued:   

when you add “the” to a demographic group and speak of “the women” or “the Blacks,” you are separating them from the rest of society. Without the definite article, they are included. To say, “In our society we have Blacks, Jews, women. . . . .” implies that they are all part of our group. But, “We have the Blacks, the Jews, the women . . . .” turns them into separate, distinct groups that are not part of a unified whole.

This construction using the definite article fits well with the MAGA notion that America is their country. In their view, they are, as Sarah Palin put it, “the real America.” Republicans, when they are out of office, talk a lot about “taking back our country,” as though the Democratic party were a bunch of foreign usurpers. (See this post from when Obama was in office and running for second term.)  Now that they have taken back the country, they may allow others — the Blacks, the women, and others — to live in it.

Watching for Birds . . . and for Attribution Errors

May 27, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

By now you’ve probably seen the cellphone video that Christian Cooper made during his unpleasant encounter with Amy Cooper when he was bird-watching in the Central Park Ramble and she was letting her dog run loose. He asked to leash the dog, just as the sign nearby indicated. She apparently disagreed.  The confrontation escalated.

The video shows the her calling the cops. “I’m in the Ramble, there is a man, African-American, he has a bicycle helmet and he is recording me and threatening me and my dog.” And “I am being threatened by a man in the Ramble, please send the cops immediately!”

Through it all, Mr. Cooper remains admirably calm, given what might happen if the cops do show up, and not in the last threatening,

Yes, it’s about race. It’s also about norms and norm enforcement, it’s about formal social control (the cops) and informal social control, it’s about birders and dog owners, it’s about the use of urban spaces. But for me, it was about the Fundamental Attribution Error — our tendency to explain people’s behavior as arising from internal factors like personality and to ignore the situational factors. (That’s when we’re explaining the behavior of others. When it comes to explaining our own behavior, the balance of internal and external explanations is pretty much the opposite.)

All over Twitter, people are condemning Amy Cooper. Understandable. But they are also attributing to her all sorts of ideas, knowledge, feelings, life history, and past behaviors that they cannot possibly know about. Here’s one example:

I’ve worked for people like this - it’s rage (that he was disobeying her), not fear, that made her call. And of course, racism, because she knew just what danger she was putting him in by making that call.

 Mr. Cooper, by contrast, refuses to leap to these global characterizations, especially on the central question of whether Amy Cooper is a racist.

NPR: She said that she is not a racist. How do you respond to her? C. COOPER: I can't tell you whether or not she’s a racist. I can tell you what she did in that moment, and it was a moment of, you know, stress and of confrontation and of, you know, probably spectacularly poor judgment. But in that moment, what she did was definitely racist. Now, should she be defined by that couple-of-seconds moment? I can’t answer that.

I had already admired Cooper for his calm and obviously non-threatening behavior displayed in the video, especially given what might happen if the cops actually arrive. But his interview raised that admiration higher. First, he realizes that Amy Cooper’s behavior was, at least in part, a reaction to the situation. And second, he refuses to make those attributions about what is in her head.

Jay Smooth makes the same point in this video, which I cited in a 2011 post “Constructing Character” l: Too often “what started out as a what-you-said [or did] conversation turns into a what-you-are conversation.”

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Jay Smooth says that in these conversations, the “who you are” assumption leads to “mutual frustration.” On the Internet, it leads to self-righteous moral condemnation and to death threats and other calls for punishment. Cooper is quite sensible about that as well. “I am told there has been death threats, and that is wholly inappropriate and abhorrent and should stop immediately.”