After being involved in a knock-down-drag-out resisting or after surviving a life threatening armed assault, the last thing you need is to be is tried and convicted by the media or used as a means for some community activist or politician to further their agenda. But that's exactly what may happen to you post violent incident.
In my patrol and street narcotics days I worked the high crime areas on a nightly basis. While working patrol my partner and I focused on a large part of our district that was known for high-crime, prostitution and open-air drug trafficking. We made it our mission in life to hound and harass (within the confines of the law) the criminal population that frequented this area. The good citizens that inhabited this area loved us because without aggressive policing by all the officers that worked this area, they were essentially prisoners in their own homes after dark (and throughout the day as well). After my partner and I began working in a tactical street narcotics unit, when we would do sweeps of an area or reverses (our undercover officers posing as dealers and then arresting the customers) we would occasionally hear "Thank You!" shouted in the darkness from a resident. These solid working class Americans supported law enforcement 100%, as most people in this country do. For some reason though, by and large, you'll never see marches or demonstrations of support for the police.
The opposite is certainly not true today.
Use of Force and Politics
Every use of force incident is currently under the microscope. Deadly, non-deadly, or regardless of whether it was 100% justified, the incident, especially deadly force and incidents captured on video, will become political events and will bring out the worst "politicians or activists" around. Your agency, union and you must understand this and prepare for it. Agencies will be accused of being corrupt and engaging in cover-ups of alleged excessive force. Unions, whose job it is to protect its membership and to see that they are guaranteed due process will be raked across the coals and will have to spend considerable sums in attorney fees to protect officer's rights. Officers will be accused of being inept, racist, and brutal fascists, regardless of whether they were the victim of an ambush by an armed suspect. You may even have those activists that you see on the news regularly in your town holding demonstrations and inciting the crowd with chants of "No justice, no peace!" or "Stop killer cops!" It is simply the price of doing business in law enforcement today and your agency can be one incident away from being on the national news on every single network.
The Truth or Reality Doesn't Matter
Your agency and your union need to understand that a certain segment of the population and especially those with an agenda have no desire to know the truth. They don't care about Graham v. Connor, objective reasonableness or totality of the circumstances. They have no interest in knowing about the effects of fight or flight (sympathetic nervous system), perceptual distortions or the realities of ballistics, human movement or response time. They have an agenda, period. City council members with anti-police political agendas will be quick to make public statements siding with the suspect and questioning police actions but will make no attempt to educate themselves about your job, the legal aspects of use of force or any other aspect of police work. Knowledge and the truth is not what they are about; fanning the flames of public dissention against the police scores points with a certain segment of the population and that is exactly what they want. When and if these flames that they have so carefully fueled turn into a full-blown conflagration, rest assured they will disappear only to emerge afterwards to blame the police once again. They will speak ad-nauseam about rights but will forget about the responsibilities they have. These types of individuals will decline all invitations to be educated by your agency about the law, your policies and procedures, police training, etcetera because it will only interfere with their expertise (usually gained from police TV shows and movies). They'll push citizen review boards and police auditors as a way to micro-manage your police agency but these "over-sight" groups are usually filled with citizens or political appointees who have little or no expertise in police work, have no enforcement powers and due to their political agenda, are minefields that require police personnel to exercise their right to remain silent when subpoenaed or called to testify before them.
The Media
Along for the ride of fanning the flames against the police is the media with its "if it bleeds it leads" mentality. Long gone are the days of Edward R. Murrow and objective professional journalism. Although there are exceptions, the current media mantra seems to be, "Don't let the truth get in the way of a good story." Journalists and their references to inside sources report or confidential sources disclose resist no opportunity to engage in speculation and give air time to anti-police spin. Once again we hear about the rights of media but what about their responsibilities, ethics or integrity.
What to Do
We, as police agencies, must be pro-active in educating the public, community leaders and the media as to the legal parameters of use of force, training, and standard operating procedures. In that regard, we must conduct community police academies to help educate the public and win more advocates in the public. We must reach out to religious and community groups within our jurisdictions and offer training opportunities for them. We must continually repeat the message, "Our officers have to be reasonable not perfect." They are required to use a reasonable amount of force not the minimum amount of force. I have taught in numerous citizen academies over the years and have found it very rewarding. Once, after talking to a community group about use of force including deadly force I had a little old lady walk up and tell me, "I had no idea you could shoot that many bullets as quickly as you said." Since number of rounds fired is frequently used by the kerosene throwers to allege excessive force, we must anticipate this and other issues about use of deadly force such as response time and tell those that will listen whenever we can. When possible, post-investigation, our administrators must publicly state that, "Our officers did the right thing. Here's why," and, "We support them 100%!"
We must be pro-active with our public information officers post-incident to make a statement even if it is, "The incident is currently under investigation" and remind the community what our procedures and protocols are. We must feed the animal (the media) because if we don't they will find something to feed on (us).
We must shout our accomplishments, the professionalism of our workforce, the dedication of our patrol officers and detectives and put forth as positive a message to the public as vociferously as our opponents bash us. Will it ever quell the bashers and cop haters? No, but we must remember that like the anonymous shout of thanks from the darkness that most citizens support us, not curse us and being a professional police force will hit the haters where they live and help exhaust the flames some choose to fan.
