047 The Erickson Report for February 3 to 16, Page 3: Police Training Needs Changing

047 The Erickson Report for February 3 to 16, Page 3: Police Training Needs Changing

Here's a tragedy about which you might have heard, which raises two things I have talked about before with regard to police training and encounters with police.

On January 27 on I-65 south of Nashville Tennessee, a state trooper saw a man named Landon Eastep on the shoulder and pulled over to get him off the highway. Eastep, according to police, pushed away and produced a box cutter which he refused to put down.

Another cop came and tried to de-escalate the situation. More cops arrived until Eastep faced a semicircle of nine cops, most if not all with their guns drawn.

After about a half-hour of this standoff, Eastep pulled from his pocket what police called "a cylindrical object" and held it out toward the cops. They shot him, killed him. The object was not a gun.

First off, I will say that I can't honestly blame the cops for shooting. Look a the picture to the right, a freeze frame from a body cam. You can see Eastep holding out his arms toward the line of cops. I guarantee you every one of those cops thought - and you too would think - "he's pulled out a gun and he's aiming." I would likely be thinking "Omigod he's going to kill me."

We can argue about did all nine of them have to shoot him, or did they have to shoot him more than once, which apparently they did, or a bunch of related questions about the intensity of the response, but I can't blame them for there being a response.

But given that, that's where's where my questions rise. One, why did they have to shoot him - by which I mean, why was that their only present alternative? Why have we devoted so little energy, so little research, so few resources, to the idea of truly non-lethal methods? And no, I don't mean tasers; they are not non-lethal - even the company now calls them "less lethal" or not "intended to be lethal" or some such blather - and really are for relatively close quarters.

Next, one of the cops tried to, again, "de-escalate" things. But in a true sense, he didn't; rather, he avoided further escalation. Which is not the same thing. Remember, this had already gone from one cop to two cops to nine cops with guns drawn. It had already escalated. De-escalating would mean lowering the existing tension, not just avoiding raising it further. What that cop was trying to do was convince Eastep to de-escalate by dropping the box cutter and cooperating.

He was saying all kinds of encouraging things, like "whatever it is, we can work it out; we can get help; I don't want to die, you don't want to die; you're not going to jail," and so on, all of which is good - but, and this is a serious failing, I think, with the training they get and okay maybe it did happen across the half-hour outside of time frame of the video that was released so if it did excellent, but what I noticed is that the cop never asked a question. It was never "what's going on; what would you like us to do for you; what do you hope will happen here." He was just making flat statements. Statements hoping to keep Eastep calm, yes, but still flat statements.

And if asking open questions isn't part of what they're taught in dealing with these kinds of situations, I think it's a terrible mistake. A terrible shortcoming.

Because again: Look at the picture: Where is Eastep going to go? What is he going to do? Unless he is truly clinically insane, so divorced from reality that he can't even comprehend what's going on around him, he can't think he is going to shoot his way out of this. He can't think he's going to fight his way out of this. If he wants to get away, his best, his only, chance is to hop that guardrail and run like hell, hoping either to outrun the cops or they'll decide he's just some vagrant and isn't worth pursuing. But he didn't. He stood there not cooperating for a half-hour and then pulled something from his pocket and held it like it was a gun.

I think we can even determine the critical moment that generated what followed. Remember, this started when a state trooper stopped to get Eastep off the highway. According to Don Aaron, a representative for the Metro Nashville Police Department, I'm quoting NBC News here, "as they approached the trooper’s car, Eastep 'pushed away' from the officer and produced a box cutter." Given that description and what followed, especially when combined with his window's acknowledgement that he was struggling with mental health issues and drug addiction and had relapsed just a few days earlier, I cannot help but think that he was sitting on that highway with a box cutter thinking about suicide and trying to get up the nerve to do it. But as he's approaching the cop's car, he thinks "If I get in that car there's going to be a lot of hassle for my wife and they're going to stop me. I can't let that happen." And then the flash, which may not have even been in words, "I know what I have to do."

In other words, I'm convinced that what we had here is a case of "suicide by cop" and it is a real thing. In fact, a survey of the research literature on the topic a few years ago¹ found that by various estimates, approximately 10 to 29 percent or more of officer-involved shootings involve suicide by cop incidents.

Consider that Eastep stood on that highway for a half-hour, just standing as if waiting, and again it just seems to me that at some point he realized the cops were not going to shoot him so he did something to provoke them - make them think he had a gun. Suicide by cop is a real thing.

And there are in fact training modules, good training modules, for cops on just that, including what it is, how to recognize that it's what you're facing, and ways to deal with it.

But those sorts of materials don't do a damn bit of good if they are not a routine - by which I mean a standard, in fact make that a required - part of police training.

So again again again I say that part of the whole problem with police violence, part of the whole issue of police actions, of what they should be doing, of what we should not expect them to be doing, of what we should not have them dealing with, and of what we should expect them not to be doing, is that the way we train police is deeply screwed up and leads to needless violence and needless death. It remains true that we can't deal with the problem of police violence until we deal with racism in policing and in society - but it is equally true that we can't deal with the problem of police violence until we deal with the way we are training police to think.

¹Patton, Christina L. and Fremouw, William J. “Examining ‘suicide by cop’: A critical review of the literature." Aggression and Violent Behavior, 27 (2016) 107-120. (I couldn't find a direct link.)