What do you suppose would happen to an agitated, belligerent
African-American man wandering around on the street in his pajamas
yelling at people, waving a gun around and telling police to shoot him?
Judging from
what we saw happen in St Louis to Kajieme Powell, he would likely be shot dead by police almost immediately.
But that’s not what happened to this gentleman in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
In fact, what happened in Kalamazoo was a picture-perfect example of
smart, strategic policing to deescalate a possibly lethal situation.
Of
course, the perpetrator was a white, 63-year-old “open-carry” advocate
who was drunkenly asserting his right to bear arms in the middle of the
day — the very definition of a “good guy with a gun.”
Here’s what
happened. It was a Sunday afternoon about 4 p.m. when Kalamazoo 9-1-1
got several calls from citizens concerned about an intoxicated man with a
gun walking around a coin laundry and “stumbling around a little bit
and kind of bumping into some stuff” on the street. The police arrived
shortly and confronted the man by saying, “Hey, partner, how you doing?
Can you set that down real quick and talk to me?” (The officer didn’t
have his gun drawn.) The armed man refused to set it down. The officer
told him that he was jaywalking and was being detained. At that point
the officer radioed that the armed man would not drop the weapon. He
tells the man again that he just wants to talk to him and says, “You’re
walking around here scaring people, man.”
A second police car
arrives at the scene. The man refuses to identify himself and demands to
know if he’s free to go and the officer says no, that he is resisting
and obstructing, a misdemeanor, for jaywalking and failing to identify
himself. The man says, “Why don’t you fucking shoot me?” The officer
gently replies, “I don’t want to shoot you; I’m not here to do that.”
This
back and forth continues, with the man refusing to give up his gun and
the cops patiently trying to talk him down from his position. The whole
time he’s rambling about revolution and accusing the cops of being “gang
members.” It becomes clear that he has conceived this drunken episode
as an “open carry” demonstration. He’s proving to the community how
important it is that “good guys” be allowed to carry guns on the street
to protect themselves.
Soon
12 police are on the scene, including a supervisor and SWAT negotiator.
The street is shut down in both directions. Police recordings describe
the man as agitated and hostile and although he is holding his gun at
“parade rest” he’s switching it back and forth and fumbling in his
pockets for chewing tobacco. After much discussion, he finally agrees to
give up the weapon.
Do the police then instantly swarm him and
wrestle him to the ground? Do they handcuff him, throw him in the back
of the police car and arrest him for the trouble he’s caused? Did he get
roughed up or put in a chokehold for resisting arrest and being
uncooperative?
None of that happened to this man. The police took
his gun and then said he could have it back immediately if he agreed to
take a breathalyzer test on the spot. (You can be arrested for carrying a
firearm while intoxicated in Michigan if you blow a .08 or above, the
same legal limit for DUI.) The man refused. They carried on for a while
longer with the man objecting to having his gun taken away even as the
police explain that he is free to walk home and retrieve it at the
police station the next day. They spar over whether he’s mentally
unstable and if it’s a good idea for him to “demonstrate” this way,
particularly being hostile to the police. He finally apologizes and
leaves the scene without his gun. No charges were filed. Nobody was
hurt. He got his gun back.
That’s very different from what happened to Kaijame Powell,
the young black man from St. Louis with mental problems. A shop owner
called the police to report a shoplifter and said he had a knife. The
man walks around on the sidewalk in an agitated fashion. A few minutes
later a police car races up the street and stops at the curb in front of
him, two officers jump out with guns drawn shouting, “Put down the
knife!” He says, “Shoot me, shoot me,” and he walks toward the car and
they fire their guns, killing him on the spot. The whole altercation
took 30 seconds. The St. Louis police chief said that the video of the
incident was “exculpatory” and explained that the officers could not
have done anything different (like use the tasers they carried on their
belt) because nothing else was “guaranteed” to stop the victim.
Just a few days before that another
African-American man named John Crawford was shopping in an Ohio
Wal-Mart while talking to his wife on the phone. He’d picked up a BB gun
the store sells and apparently some patrons were afraid and called
police. The wife heard the cops order him to put down the weapon and he
immediately shouted, “It’s not real.” Then they opened fire and killed
him. (Another shopper collapsed and died as she tried to get away from
the gunfire.) Crawford had two young children and a third on the way.
Many
people have wondered how one is supposed to know which people carrying
guns in public are “good guys” who just want to defend the Constitution
and which ones are the “bad guys” who are dangerous. Evidently, one way
that some people tell the difference is by the color of their skin. A
drunk white man wandering around with a gun, spouting gibberish, leads
the police to be patient and considerate since he’s obviously just
exercising his Second Amendment right to bear arms and just needs to be
talked down and counseled a bit. If it’s an agitated young black man
with a knife he’s clearly trying to kill someone and the police need to
kill him first.
The first method is the proper one. Those Michigan
police followed the law and they used common sense. The man wasn’t
trying to kill anyone, but he was drunk, angry and potentially
dangerous. They could easily have escalated that situation into
something tragic. But they took their time and whether you agree that
the man should have been arrested or not, one thing is sure: In the end
everyone went home alive and in one piece.
Unfortunately, the
police in Missouri and Ohio shot first and asked questions later and two
young men are dead when they didn’t have to be. It’s very hard not to
conclude that if they looked more like that man in Michigan, they would
have had a much better chance of surviving.
Heather Digby Parton, also known as "
Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.
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