Time for Serious Gun Control

“People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

I watched the announcement of the Grand Jury’s decision in Ferguson with interest. I had the DA on television, the street scene unfolding on my iPad, and the Ferguson Police and Emergency scanner traffic on an iPhone. I don't think I ever believed any of it was ever going to go another way.

This next phrase is difficult and I've had to struggle with the phrasing: I don't believe the officer involved did anything wrong criminal illegal unnatural surprising. He felt threatened; his gun was available; he used it. He had no reason to believe he'd be seriously sanctioned for it (Note: media circuses, while unpleasant, don't count). A layman’s balancing of the details of testimony isn't particularly satisfying.

Brown appears to have been a thief. The stop wasn't handled well. Volumes could be written about the secrecy-laden proceedings which followed, and the incompetence of police handling of unrest. Other volumes could document the damage done to minority communities by protesters. This should have gone to a full jury. But none of that actually changes the underlying problem.

I don't own a gun, but I'm a strong advocate of second amendment rights. It’s ironic then, that I am beginning to see the gun in this case as the problem. If Officer Wilson was at risk of death, it’s because Brown was close enough to grab his gun, the one Wilson shot him with instead. I have to wonder: what if Wilson hadn’t been carrying one?

Take everything else as Wilson describes it (I’m not sure I do, but just for the sake of argument). Brown and a friend were walking in the street and Wilson pulls over to tell them to get on the sidewalk. Brown immediately swears at Wilson. Wilson notes he is carrying cigars like those stolen in a strong-arm robbery reported earlier and calls him over. Before he can open his door, Brown slams it and begins punching Wilson through the open window. Should Brown be allowed to do that? Of course not. Is Wilson allowed to defend himself? Absolutely. So it’s good he had a gun to put a stop to it, right?

Well, this is the weird part. Brown stopped in the middle. According to Wilson, he stopped and turned to his friend to hand him the cigars. “Hold these,” or some such, he says, before returning to the beating. The officer has mace. No Taser—they're uncomfortable. But he also has the gun. Time to misfire it twice, but no time to use the mace, he says, without spraying himself in the face. Even when Brown turns to hand his stuff to somebody else.

So let’s take the gun off Wilson’s belt. Michael Brown isn't dead anymore. That’s no small thing, because suddenly we have his testimony of what went down. Is Officer Wilson dead? I don’t think so. I think Wilson suddenly becomes more resourceful. I think he rolls up the window more quickly; I think he pulls away instead of pulling toward Michael Brown; I think he calls for backup.

I’m not sure he even stops.

If we can remove the assumption of deadly force as an available option in comparatively benign circumstances, cops get smarter and so do criminals. The image of a crook waiting to murder a policeman during a traffic stop--does that even make sense if the policeman doesn't have a gun? What percentage of incidents are made safer, are inherently de-escalated when the policeman is unarmed?

To be clear, my position on private citizens possessing weapons hasn't changed. I’m just increasingly less certain the police should have them. But that can’t surprise you; I've long believed the people should have more power than the government. This is taking it to its logical conclusion.

I'm not suggesting that police should never have lethal weapons under any circumstances. I'm saying something needs to fundamentally change the way we are policing in this country. So let them keep their weapons in a lockbox in the trunk. I’m suggesting patrolmen shouldn't be relying on them to “keep the peace,” though nowhere has that phrase been more laughable lately than in Ferguson. One badly managed city, though, does not make the rule. Like you need more examples.

In Cleveland this week, a young boy with a bb gun was killed by police. A caller who alerted the cops said, “There’s a boy with a gun, I think it’s a fake.” The dispatcher passed it along. Oh, except the part about the gun being fake. The boy moved wrong. They killed him.

For all the adoration we give to our first responders, heroes each of them, so everyone seems to say, I don't see a lot of sacrificing. I see a lot of shoot first and ask questions later.In Northern Kentucky recently, another deputy was not indicted, after firing four shots at the 19-year old driver of a car leaving the scene of a party. He says she tried to run him down. Others say he jumped on the car to stop her from leaving. Malice or panic, she accelerated. So he killed her. Whether or not her death will put a stop to the horrible crime of fully grown adults drinking, is unclear.

President Obama is protected by people who will kill for him. They will also die for him. The United States is protected by soldiers who will kill to preserve the nation. They will also die for it. No one is protecting society the same way.That 12 year old in Cleveland should not have died. He didn't have a real gun. But if he had—well, he still shouldn't have died.So, beat cops everywhere, turn in your guns.

You can keep the nightstick—for now.

Bugs and Thugs: Ebola, Ferguson, and Mediocrity

“Mediocrities everywhere, I absolve you!”

--Salieri, in the film Amadeus

I was on a jury recently. I've been in several pools, but this was my first time actually making it into the jury box, and I was intrigued. I believe in courts as a vital element of administering justice and redressing wrongs. Well, I did before I served.

I suppose I still do, but wow, the glamour is certainly gone. The police investigated this particular crime for 11 minutes. Now, this was hardly the Lindbergh baby, but man, don’t they have to put some time in? When the prosecution rested, I couldn't imagine returning a guilty verdict, not because their conclusion was inconceivable or even unlikely, but because the possibility for doubt seemed reasonable.

My resolve lasted only until the defendant testified. Even before being cross examined, his version of events more than convinced me of his guilt. He eroded his credibility quickly and completely. I said in the jury room that I really hated to send a message that 11 minutes was all the investigation that was needed to convict. But that was the truth, like it or not.

No one was awful here. No police run amok or judicial incompetence. It was really just the banality, the uneventfulness of the vast majority of bureaucratic life. The question is whether “the system worked” or not. Despite my disappointment, I think it’s hard to argue that it didn't. In this case, working means allowing a man accused of a misdemeanor to argue with his accusers, as is his right. I believe the process resulted in a guilty man being appropriately convicted and sentenced. “Working” doesn't mean making me happy or giving me a chance to practice Al Pacino’s “You’re all out of order!” speech from And Justice for All. Of course this was a small trial on a comparatively noncontroversial topic. It doesn’t take long for the results to be less satisfying when the stakes are higher.

Bad summer to be a policeman in Ferguson, for example. I honestly don't know how police behaved during the infamous arrest and shooting. They were incompetent afterward though, and showed an amazing contempt for the people they serve. Of course, they aren't all scoundrels or saints. They're guys who write tickets and fill out reports that only insurance companies will ever see. But now they're all symbols--of oppression, or privilege, sure, but also of just how thin the wires are that hold civil society together. The problem isn't that the police are horrible people; the problem is that they are human beings operating in a system that assumes they will be superhuman.

Autumn has seen similar bad press for the CDC. The gist is that they are paid to be prepared and weren't. Incompetence? I guess that could be argued. But I'm not sure we were paying for the system we thought we were. See, everyone wants a flawless plan waiting in the wings. TV and movies promised as much.  Instead, we got what I saw in that courtroom: underwhelming performance that mostly got the job done. If you disagree, I must point out that the only death in the U.S. was a man who had advanced symptoms before he entered the system. I grant the following among other problems: Airline rules? Failed, true. Prescreening? Vulnerable to lies, it seems. Emergency rooms? Hard to convince of diseases they've never seen before. And yet, it was reigned in. Was the CDC maximally effective? No.  In a nation where our general medical infrastructure was less substantial, they would've been overseeing an epidemic. But that isn't where we are. They didn't have to be great. They were good enough.

My point is that, in our disease management process, we utilize many overlapping agencies that attack the problem differently. That makes them comparatively resilient to less than stellar performance, while still allowing for the possibility of exceptionalism. We could have been wildly impressed, but we were probably foolish to expect to be.

In the Ferguson police, we see an opposing example--a system that invests great power in average people and expects, even demands that they be exceptional, and that fails as a result. With apologies to the mythology that says all police and firefighters are heroes, these are people who took a job for all sorts of reasons, not unflagging bastions of liberty and justice. We've been foolishly arming the police with military grade weapons. There were a number of great articles pointing out how badly they performed with them. They behaved, at best, like an occupying force, at worst like jackbooted thugs.

It seems to me that they did what was natural in difficult circumstances for nonmilitary personnel using such weapons--by which I include their shields and vests and riot gear, since those too gave them greater security and power than the crowds they were managing--using them as the bludgeons the average person might take them to be. In fact, they can be wielded with more finesse by those trained to do so. I don’t mean exceptional people; I mean people who operate under a different set of premises, a different procedural set.

I don’t want to oversimplify a solution for this specific incident. But it’s clear that the system needs to be re-engineered to assume the participation of average people, not because police are worse than any other group. They aren't. But if you plan on them as a group being somehow better, or even heroes, your plan is likely to fail.  Stop treating a civil service job like it’s a calling. Stop using military models and making them a class set apart. Start examining the procedures and limitations that can interact with other societal elements to produce acceptable results, without relying on a nonexistent workforce of men and women with superhuman stamina, and patience, and judgement.

As we've seen in the case of Ebola, mediocre can get the job done. Good thing too, since most of us are.