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De-Escalating after Dallas and Baton Rouge

SCOTT PIEPHO
Cases and Controversies

Published: July 22, 2016

The original plan for this week’s column was to run part 2 of the last column’s discussion of preferential voting. That second part will run, but the events of the last week demand a timely response.

As I write this column, we are still learning the details of a second ambush of police officers, this one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. That outrage follows the sniper attack in Dallas during a Black Lives Matter demonstration. The demonstration was one of many responding to the shooting deaths of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge Louisiana.

I am heartbroken for the men who died—all of them—and for their families, friends and colleagues. I am sickened to learn that some people see no better response to unnecessary violence than more violence. And I fear that the very real and necessary concern for officer safety will delay, or perhaps even supplant, the very real and necessary work toward police reform.

What I hope for—although it seems at this writing like wishing for a miracle—is de-escalation on a national scale.

In police reform, de-escalation training teaches officers how to defuse tensions during an investigative stop or other encounter between police and civilians. After the first ambush of police officers in Dallas, people observed as a sad irony that the police department there was doing things right—that a set of reforms had dramatically decreased the number of shootings and excessive force complaints during a time that also saw the crime rate drop. Among the reforms adopted in Dallas was training officers in de-escalation techniques.

Although it has a proven track record, selling de-escalation to police often proves difficult. Officers, and not a few of their allies, wonder why they should work to de-escalate a situation with a deliberately antagonistic suspect. But that facet of de-escalation which gives pause in fact provides its greatest strength. Who de-escalates is not about who is right, it is about who has power. Police enter an encounter bearing the full force of the state’s political power, up to and including the power to end life. While they may object to the scrutiny posed by protests and activists, the fact remains that police are rarely prosecuted or even successfully sued as a result of shooting deaths. I read de-escalation as an acknowledgment of that power and the tremendous responsibility that goes with it.

If de-escalation on the micro level of a police stop is a hard sell, practicing it on a macro level after two ambush murders, each of multiple officers, seems folly to even propose. For those of us who know and care about police officers, rage is a natural response to such atrocities (although it is worth noting in contrast that the typical responses among African-Americans to the deaths of Sterling and Castile was more often despair.) Unsurprisingly, that rage is spilling over, being directed not simply at the two men who committed these crimes, but also against protestors, activists, and (for reasons I cannot divine) President Obama. A certain politician who never misses an opportunity for a race-baiting dog whistle, has already taken advantage of both shootings. Meanwhile, the very real grievances of the Black Lives Matter movement have not gone away, even as we necessarily take time to grieve the deaths of the officers gunned down.

Under the circumstances, de-escalation seems like an impossible dream. But I see it as the only way through the crisis we find ourselves in. We saw examples of it before the shooting in Dallas, from Newt Gingrich urging white Americans to understand what they don’t understand about the relationships between black citizens and police, to the police posing with protestors for pictures during the Dallas demonstration.

De-escalation on a national level would require a ratcheting down of the rhetoric around the ambush shootings. It would require white Americans to acknowledge that we carry the greater power and therefore we should take the responsibility. It would start with a simple step—acknowledging that participants in Black Lives Matter protests grieve the senseless deaths of officers as much as anyone. That in turn could lead to an easing of the resistance to acknowledging the disparity in how minorities are treated by the police and ultimately to adoption of the sort of reforms that have proven successful in cities like Dallas.

The shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge were the work of individuals. They need not result in ongoing violence between protestors and police. The work we need to do to stop the cycle of violence will be difficult, but the way forward exists if we will take it.


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