Our Contribution to Police Corruption and Gun Culture
Whenever we loose the Great Way we get benevolence or righteousness.
Lao Tzu
1. Policing
Whenever we loose the Great Way we get benevolence or righteousness.
Lao Tzu
1. Policing
I know the feeling of power conferred by a gun, both in owning
one and using it. And I also know it's corrupting influence.
Two years out of the Naval Academy, while on a Navy
Destroyer already in the combat zone off Vietnam, I got orders to become the
executive officer of River Division 594 in Operation Giant Slingshot. The Division consisted of 10 River Patrol
Boats with 60 men on a base straddling the main Viet Cong supply route to
Saigon. I was scared from the moment I
got those orders until the end of my tour when the plane crossed the Vietnamese
coast headed home. But it wasn’t until months
after receiving those orders that I first truly experienced my vulnerability.
It happened on my last training patrol. A Chief Petty Officer was the Patrol Officer,
in charge of two boats and also training me. Since I was still in training, I had no actual assignment. Suddenly we came under enemy rocket and
automatic weapons fire. Nothing I can
say can possibly communicate the immense totality of the vulnerability I
experienced in that moment. I was
standing exposed on the engine cover, with no weapon, bullets flying by, noise from
every direction. I experienced myself as
a naked piece of meat that could be shredded in an instant; me, and all my dreams,
could disappear forever. It was the
worst, most intolerable feeling I've ever felt.
But I didn’t have to tolerate it long (though it seemed so). I found an unused M-16 and, though “shaking
like a leaf,” I somehow managed to cock it, flip the safety and fire. Although still experiencing my vulnerability,
still aware I could be killed in an instant, I also experienced the immense
relief that came from not feeling totally
helpless. I was doing something! I had some
power and that decreased the lived experience of my vulnerability.
When I left Vietnam I wanted nothing more to do with war, guns,
or hierarchical organizations. I wanted to
live on a hill by myself in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. But that’s not how it turned out. After awhile I rejoined society and pursued a
graduate degree. Eventually I married
and had a son. At which point
vulnerability overcame me again.
It’s one thing to be willing to tolerate the possibility of
my own death but with the birth of my son, right alongside intense love, came
overwhelming vulnerability. I could not then and still can't bear the thought of the possibility of his dying. I strongly
felt the need to protect him, both by taking care of myself and doing
everything in my power to preserve his life and prevent harm to him.
The way emotions work is that when one is stirred, it also brings to mind other memories of our experiences with that same emotion. So you might well imagine my experience of vulnerability at my son’s birth to have been amplified by my memories of combat. And you might therefor not be surprised to hear that I reached for a similar solution. I bought an M1 carbine from a neighbor. I believed it provided an ace in the hole in case the world descended into chaos, as it sometimes feared it would. I still have it.
The way emotions work is that when one is stirred, it also brings to mind other memories of our experiences with that same emotion. So you might well imagine my experience of vulnerability at my son’s birth to have been amplified by my memories of combat. And you might therefor not be surprised to hear that I reached for a similar solution. I bought an M1 carbine from a neighbor. I believed it provided an ace in the hole in case the world descended into chaos, as it sometimes feared it would. I still have it.
It may be that I’m unusual, but I don’t think so. In my thirteen years as a psychologist working with combat
vets at Walter Reed Army Medical center I saw many veterans who always sat with
their back to the wall in restaurants, wouldn’t go to malls, and slept with
a hand gun under the pillow. Who got intensely
angry with their children and wives but had no idea why. None of this is new, it’s well known by
anyone who works with combat veterans, but I bring it to your attention because
I believe the experience of combat veterans provide us a stark, clearly
understandable example of dynamics that operate in all of us.
“All human beings must come to terms with fear.” Fear is ubiquitous and nearly constant even
if mostly unacknowledged. We are afraid of
being criticized, of spiders, flying, talking (our blood pressure rises every
time we speak to another person), public speaking, being left, intimacy. The list is endless. We are the inheritors of the ancient fear
mechanisms that kept our tiny, tasty, early mammalian ancestors alive in the
land of the dinosaurs.
For the last two summers I’ve been training a wild lizard in
my back yard to eat out of my hand. It
took awhile. But what really impressed
me was that even though she’s been doing so for many months now, if I make the slightest move too quickly, she flees
immediately. “Stupid lizard,” I would think, but over time, seeing it again and again, it has led me to have a deep
appreciation of how central instinctive fear is to survival. The ironclad rule: one mistake is too many.
I believe the lizard’s experience of fear is very similar to
ours, both in the feeling and the inclination to act. But our big brains allow us to know something the lizard doesn’t: the things
we fear can kill us or cause excruciating loss.
(The lizard needn’t know of its mortality; fleeing when something moves
quickly toward it suffices.) Thus, for us humans, instances of fear also stir recognition
of our vulnerability to death and loss. And,
like combat vets, we, too, find that very difficult to tolerate.
We all devise, inherit, and/or adopt ways of coping with the
daily onslaught of fear and vulnerability, be it denial, ignoring it, praying,
believing our specialness exempts us, superstitions, substance abuse,
obsessions, rituals, and on and on. Anything
that can dispel or diminish the experience of fear is itself experienced as
relieving and very desirable. You can
easily convince yourself of this the next time you see an animal carcass on the
side of the road. Notice how quickly
your eyes and thoughts slide elsewhere, preventing the recognition that you, or
your loved ones, could become a similar pile of dead meat at any moment. It happens instantly, below or just barely in
conscious awareness. Barely aware of the
threat, you are also barely aware of the relief that came from being able to
keep it out of consciousness.
It’s probably not too much of a stretch to say that warding
off the experience of vulnerability is a major focus of human activity. That it’s the goal of many of our actions and
much of our psychological process. My
goal is to explore here this intertwined, shared process in police, gun owners,
and us.
Try an experiment:
Before reading further, allow yourself to imagine for a moment what
would happen if we took all the guns away from the police.
Did you have a vision of chaos? Did you notice feelings of fear? A recognition of vulnerability? If you did, and you think it likely that
others would too, this has, I believe, two important implications I want to
consider here. First, having an armed
police force is one of the ways we ward off experiencing our own vulnerability. Second, people who have reason not to trust
police will be inclined to arm themselves.
Fear is a feeling, an emotion and, usually, feelings come
and go quickly. Vulnerability, on the
other hand, is an unchanging, existential fact of life. Loss and death are ever present possibilities
of every moment, and recognition of this, with its attendant experience of
vulnerability, is forever hovering somewhere on the far outskirts of
consciousness. The ability to keep
recognition of our vulnerability at bay enables us to live and function in
relative comfort, at least until some threatening event places the fact of our
vulnerability front and center in our consciousness. This suggests that the psychological function of an armed police force can be
understood as providing a bulwark against the experience of vulnerability and
its attendant fears.
It’s not common for us to think of things in terms of their
psychological function. When we think of
the function of the police we think of providing law and order, deterring
crime, protecting law-abiding citizens, apprehending criminals, etc. Although we think of these as objective realities, the truth is that what really matters to us is our lived experience
of them. If harm or threats of harm from
our fellow citizens are experienced very infrequently, if that’s our lived
experience, then we see ourselves as inhabiting a crime free space where law
and order prevail and the experience of vulnerability is kept at bay. If, on the other hand, we are frequently assaulted
with experiences that puts our vulnerability in our face then nothing will
convince us that order prevails and the system works. For many, but by no means all Americans, the
armed police force is experienced as functioning well enough to enable us to
generally feel comfortable with our level of vulnerability. The barriers are holding and the level of
fear tolerable.
Being a "barrier" is tough anywhere but in some places here in the U.S. it's probably worse than my combat experience. Policing in big American cities must feel a lot like being on the front lines of a war. Officers must go to work knowing there is a real danger of encountering mortal threat every day. Every encounter with almost anyone may feel like it has the potential to turn violent at any moment. No matter how hardened an officer may become, having their vulnerability shoved in their face frequently requires effort on their part to cope with it. I still experience occasional reverberations from my one year in Vietnam. I can only wonder about the effects of years of this on big city police officers.
Historically, mainstream American society has held a very
positive view of the police force. The
invaluable service police provide us by standing between us and violent
lawlessness put us in their debt, we "owe" them. We
“pay” that debt by our “support” of the police in the courtroom. Police
testimony is almost always taken at face value and incontrovertible evidence is required
before jurors will abandon their belief in police veracity. We see them as doing a
difficult job we need done, we trust them, and so we give them the benefit of
every possible doubt. As much sense as this makes, the truth is,
however, that by our refusal to hold them accountable
for their excesses, we have in abandoned them to corruption.
We have given them great power but fail to provide the checks and balances necessary to ensure the safe exercise of that power.
“Power corrupts,” we say, and it’s true almost always. For the police officer repeatedly confronting potentially dangerous situations, the power of a firearm is an ever-present
temptation. They don’t have to tolerate those awful feelings of
vulnerability. It takes
strength of will to resist that temptation and most officers do. But for some, depending on their exposure and
their history, the threshold for use of deadly force lowers to below dire
necessity and firearms are drawn when they shouldn’t have been. And when a gun is pulled, fear skyrockets,
rational thought impaired, and mistakes made with deadly consequence.
We understand the corrupting possibility of power and that’s
why our political system is based on checks and balances. In policing, however, the system of checks and balances is severely compromized. Having ceded to the police the power to use deadly force, we
cannot, or should not, relinquish our responsibility for how they use it. But the evidence suggests we have. As more videos come to light, we have become
aware of how unrestrained the police use of power actually is. In these videos we clearly see the failures of selection,
training, supervision, on-site oversight, and accountability that are directly
attributable to our “washing our hands” of the whole business of policing. In the interest of protecting ourselves from
the harsh realities of policing (and the vulnerability it stirs in us), we have abandoned them to the streets,
relentlessly exposing them to what we now call “moral injury” i.e., having done something they shouldn't have, something "immoral". What this really means is the intense shame felt when our behavior radically
differs from how we believe we “should” act, based on our idealized version
of our best self.
The police live in a world where the myth of the “rational
man” is shattered by the daily reality of how easily we are all overcome by fear, rage,
shame, and distress. In many of the videos we have seen, we frequently see a moment when the officer is suddenly overcome by some emotion. We watch as in that second he or she abandons proper, professional conduct and, instead, acts out of their personal feelings stirred by the interaction. They know this too and later will likely feel some shame about their own "failure." But the defenses against feeling and acknowledging shame are every bit as well developed as those holding back vulnerability. Plus, acknowledging mistakes on the job can get you fired or worse. Then, add to that the estrangement from society that police feel when they are so often attacked and vilified and it's no surprise,that we rarely see police risking further vulnerability by admitting to mistakes.
In shielding ourselves from experiencing our vulnerability
by ceding power to the police, we have also protected ourselves from knowing about the corrupting effect of facing life or death situations while having access to deadly
force. Watching the videos of police in
action show us what happens then, and what could happen to us. What’s new now is we are beginning to realize
the price we pay for abandoning the
police. We see now, and are beginning to
be forced to acknowledge, that their exercise of power harms some of our most
vulnerable citizens, destroying the sense of equality and shared purpose
necessary for democracy and civil society. Unfortunately, we are at risk of disowning this new knowledge. We see that when we either demonize the offending
police officer, self-righteously calling for severe punishment, or when we make
excuses for them, refusing to hold them accountable. Either option is a continuation of our attempt to disown our own responsibilities in how power is exercised in our name.
This new attending to how policing is done is forcing us to recognize that policing stands at
the nexus of fundamental issues threatening our democracy: income inequality,
racism, mental health treatment, poverty, gun culture, drug use, immigration
policy, terrorism, and the entire criminal justice system of courts and prisons. Although police play a vital role in all
these arenas, police forces - local, state, and national - are woefully under
resourced, over tasked, and insufficiently supervised to be able to meet these
multiple demands. The citizens of the
U.S. must transfer substantially more of their time, effort, money, and
attention to the problems we have so recently become aware of if we are going to have a police force
that protects and promotes democracy rather than one in danger of subverting
it. If we are going to have a police force willing to endure the vulnerability they must in order to truly serve and protect, we must become a society worthy of such a sacrifice on their part by owning our own duty to provide them
the necessary and appropriate working conditions they need in order for them to be
protected from the multiple risks and dangers of doing their job, including the risk of abuse of power.
