Last week, a black Yale undergraduate was held at gunpoint by a campus police officer outside the school’s main library after being mistaken for a burglary suspect. Once the mistake was realized, the student was released.
The story, though probably not particularly unique, received national attention because the student in question was the son of New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, who recounted his son’s experience in his column.
Obviously the outcome was a bad one — an innocent student was put in fear of his life on his own campus. There are, however, two discrete critical narratives one might reasonably construct to address an incident of this type.
The first narrative is a story about police policies. Most police departments have codified “use-of-force” policies which govern what types of actions officers may take in specific circumstances. These policies theoretically address the question of what level of force is permissible when an officer encounters someone who he believes might be a suspect in a burglary — a nonviolent crime. A comprehensive policy either authorizes or forbids a drawn gun in this situation.
A right-minded policy should forbid the gun. A greater level of certainty than a potential match to an inexact description must be obtained to justify the inevitable dangers of drawing a gun. Police policies can and should be narrowly tailored to avoid placing innocent lives in danger.
Some might argue that drawn guns are necessary to ensure the safety of officers confronting potential suspects. This is nonsense. Taking acceptable risks to protect innocent people is part of an officer’s job. A potential suspect is also a potential innocent whose safety deserves protection, even at some risk to officers.
The second narrative is a story about prejudice, rather than policy. Here, the focus is the student’s race, not the department’s rules. In this narrative, prejudice causes the officer to automatically fear the young black man and to assume his guilt, consciously or not. The officer in question was black, yes, but this does not necessarily immunize him from the prejudices and unconscious associations of young black men with crime which some argue permeate society in general and police departments in particular.
The solution to this problem is not so straightforward as rewriting a policy. Solving police prejudice means somehow eliminating the unconscious biases of those we trust with exercising the state’s monopoly on legitimate use of violence. If this is the problem, it’s hard to think of a solution which alleviates the risk to the safety of minority individuals in the short term. Retraining and diversity awareness have been proposed, but it’s extremely optimistic to think that classroom sessions can change the mentality of those who must face the realities of policing the streets.
But how to reconcile the two narratives? In this case, it seems that the former can be used to address the latter. Whether or not the problem is prejudice, the answer is policy. If police policies don’t forbid holding people at gunpoint simply because they meet an inexact description of a burglary suspect, they should be modified so that they do, and individual officers should be held accountable for breaching them. If such policies exist but go unenforced — enforce them.
I say that this is the path to follow not because it’s necessarily the more important one, but because it’s the one which can be addressed concretely to increase the actual safety of citizens and reduce the number of situations in which people of any race find themselves liable to get shot by police. The human brain is hard-wired to take shortcuts, to make assumptions based on broad categories. Such mental corner cutting is essential to the kind of quick thinking police rely on when making snap decisions in potentially dangerous situations. Policies can eliminate the entire decision-making process, which is naturally biased and therefore flawed.
Such a proposal falls far short of solving every issue that exists between police and minority communities, but it’s the kind of practicable solution we can focus on in the short term to make life fairer and safer for everyone. If we can’t eliminate prejudice overnight, we can at least try to control for it.
ALEC WARD is a College sophomore from Washington, D.C., studying history. His email address is alecward@sas.upenn.edu. “Talking Backward” appears every Wednesday.
