In policing as in other endeavors, it’s the little things that get you. “Officers who get in trouble often do so in incidents that seem surprisingly small,” says Seattle City Councilman Tim Burgess, a former SPD officer. Several times in his own patrol career, “what should have been a rather routine encounter turned into something much worse. I perceived [the encounter] as significant. The individual perceived it as an irritation.” On one occasion, Burgess’s more experienced partner chewed him out for mishandling such an encounter: “I was being too aggressive.”
Jaywalkers and poop-scoop violators are often otherwise upstanding citizens unused to dealing with cops, who react self-righteously to being treated, in the common refrain, “like a criminal.” It’s easy for police to likewise react and then feel obliged to escalate: As another police veteran says, “once you go hands-on, you can’t back down.” At the same time, police face a new culture of defiance: When he was young, “it was unthinkable that someone would refuse to stop when you told them to.” Now it’s common. So cops get tougher, fueling a vicious cycle of mistrust.
“The kids think of them as another gang,” says McClure, who has two teenage sons. “If one [cop] gets dissed, they all come—it’s the gang response.” And action breeds reaction. As Wilson’s lawyer Swift says, “use of force puts everyone, including police, at risk.”
Both Pflaumer and Burgess say that teachable, tried-and-true de-escalation techniques can do much to defuse such tensions. But these lessons were cut from SPD’s ongoing training curriculum a few years ago in favor of other priorities. De-escalation training “shifted to a more informal approach,” says Burgess—which means it often falls through the cracks. He says the council will look at providing dedicated funding for it.
Burgess and another council member, Bruce Harrell, are also interested in a more novel measure for reducing confrontations between police and citizens: miniature video bodycams that record exactly what officers see and hear. The cameras have been tried in San Jose, with promising results. “People act differently when they know they’re being recorded,” says Harrell: Suspects and officers alike tread more carefully on camera.
But technology can’t supplant training entirely. SPD has already installed video cameras on all patrol cars. “The use of them actually went down last year,” says Harrell, “either because of malfunctioning or because officers turned them off.”
And even when they’re working, cameras don’t always tamp down confrontations. Officer Daniel Amador’s car cam was on when he stopped Joe Wilson on Queen Anne.
Read more about the people and issues shaping the Seattle landscape.
Published: September 2010
We must have been, er, in a rush when we wrote that. Thanks for pointing out!
“Brakes,” not “breaks.”