Can we have an honest conversation about De-escalation?

By Hans Menos, PhD, LCSW, Vice President, Public Safety Innovations

 

Like the rest of the Football fans around the country, I was looking forward to the start of the NFL season.  Amidst that excitement, the country learned that Tyreek Hill, a star wide receiver for the Miami Dolphins, was handcuffed and detained for some unknown reason.  By Monday, the lines had been drawn.  As usual, social media served as the public square for us all to express our hypotheses and, in some cases, tribal conclusions on what had happened.  By Tuesday, anyone interested had either watched news reports on the body-worn camera video or had watched it themselves.  

As the Vice President of Public Safety Innovations at the Center for Policing Equity, I prepared to watch the video with some existing knowledge.  As our research has highlighted, racial disparities in traffic enforcement are a serious ongoing public safety threat for Black drivers. The most common reason for contact with the police in the United States is being the driver in a traffic stop. Black drivers are more likely to be stopped by police, more likely to be searched once stopped, more likely to have force used against them, and more likely to be killed by police, especially when unarmed.   

Informed by the existing science, I watched this video with certain questions in mind.  Was the car stop necessary?  Knowing that force had occurred, was this proportional and necessary? Were the laws and the policies followed?  Finally, after listening to Tyreek Hill’s question: “What if I was not Tyreek Hill?” the most present question in my mind crystallized: would a similarly situated white person experience the same treatment?

Of course, some of my questions were answered definitively.  Yes, in virtually every municipality I am aware of, a car stop is warranted when someone is exceeding the speed limit.  No, the force was simply not proportional or necessary.  Tyreek Hill, like many young and wealthy superstars, was, as the kids say, acting like a “Karen.”  He was entitled, a bit rude, and very dismissive of the Police Officer.  He likely needs to reconsider if he behaved in the respectful manner which is aligned with how he was raised- as he claimed he did.  However, it is an issue for him and his loved ones to work out over dinner or in some other intimate setting.  Acting in a disrespectful fashion simply does not and cannot offer armed agents of the state, who have the power to take away life and liberty, to pull you from your car and slam you down to the ground not once but twice.  Clearly, laws and policies were not followed because at least one of the officers involved found themselves suspended as a result of their jackbooted behavior.  

Turning to the most evasive question, no, a similarly situated white person would not have received the same treatment.  To be clear, this principle is not one of my own making.  Rather, it is an imperative embedded in the 14th amendment to the constitution, a document the police are supposed to uphold as opposed to flagrantly violate.   Tyreek Hill is given approximately 4 seconds to comply with an unusually aggressive order to get out of his vehicle before he is slammed to the ground and handcuffed.  As noted, the science already informs us that as a Black man, Mr. Hill is more likely to be subjected to force.  However,  culturally, we do not need science to tell us that this would simply not happen to our societies' more traditional “Karens.”  Plainly, the Police would not escalate the situation in the same way.   

We often discuss police de-escalating or failing to de-escalate a situation.  We also talk a lot about bystanders in law enforcement speaking up and de-escalating their partners or counterparts.  In reality, while this is necessary, it misses the larger picture which is laid bare in the body-worn camera video.  The police escalated this interaction and continued to escalate for several minutes.  First, Mr. Hill is pulled from his vehicle after being offered very little time to comply.  Then, he is scolded in an aggressive, demeaning, and domineering manner while being handcuffed.  For several minutes longer, he is openly mocked by the police, who tell him to stop crying and continue to remind him how insignificant they feel he is.  The only thing more present than their open contempt for this man are their badges and guns.   

However, it is their badges and guns that both enable them and prohibit them from acting on their emotions in such a flagrant fashion.  As armed agents of the state, they are empowered to act on their feelings. Note: This is true even if they may later face consequences.  Said differently, they are in a position to escalate the situation and face no real-time consequences for any reaction elicited by that escalation.  If Tyreek Hill rejects their authority, he only faces more consequences, and if his teammates stop to ask why he is being mistreated, they are threatened with arrest and citations.  Thankfully, all of the non-police involved remained calm.  However, if they had acted on their emotions the same way the police acted on theirs, history tells us that the police would have continued to escalate and assert dominance, and the outcome would be far more tragic.  

Over the past decade, the United States has spent millions of dollars on de-escalation training.  This includes spending by local, state, and federal governments.  If this training solved the problem of police officers escalating traffic stops, these encounters would be the safest and calmest interactions in the nation.  However, the reality is that this training is often incongruent with the problem at hand.  When working with police departments via the Center for Policing Equity, we are frequently asked if we can offer de-escalation training.  Our answer is as nuanced as the problem of police escalation.  However, we start with one simple question: what problem are you trying to solve?  In most cases, problems such as the behavior of police officers at traffic stops and other interactions with the public are related to a myriad of issues, including but not limited to training.  Other more present issues include priorities set by police commanders, oversight of law enforcement, formal and informal key performance indicators that reward results without questioning how they were attained, and a rejection of data that can help a police department identify problem officers and problem practices.  Focusing on de-escalation and the related training ignores the fact that escalation is sometimes directly or indirectly called for by the policy, practices and customs of any given police department or municipality.  Until we are able to accept and grapple with this, hundreds of thousands of other Black and Brown people who are not famous professional athletes will continue to be subjected to escalation which is tacitly rewarded by police leaders around the nation.  

Re-designing public safety involves seeking more congruence between the problems and the solutions.  This starts by recognizing that the behavior of front-line officers, like any other front-line employee, can best be viewed as a harbinger of the policies and practices that guide them.  Further, suggesting their behavior can be fixed by training alone has become the epitome of gaslighting. Instead, municipalities need to require that their police departments join a public safety ecosystem where the responsibility and accountability for public safety are shared and the tactics by which public safety is accomplished are congruent with the problems we are facing.  Currently, this work is happening in partnership with communities and municipalities across the country.  However, the treatment of Mr. Hill is a reminder that there is still a lot of work to do.   

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