To Pull Or Not To Pull, There Is No Good Answer

Aaron Sibarium took a huge risk by raising an important point in the context of a scenario so deeply emotional that the expectation of calm, reasoned consideration of his point was nearly impossible. And indeed, many were outraged and mustered their best snark challenges to the particulars for lack of grasping the concept. As the example raised was the police failure at Uvalde, this outcome was not only understandable, but wholly unsurprising. Nonetheless, the point raised was still important.

But when cops in Texas have pulled the trigger under similar circumstances, they’ve ended up in court. In at least three cases since 2014, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sided against police officers who made split-second decisions to shoot armed suspects—one of whom appeared to be headed for a Texas high school. The court, which has jurisdiction over the Lone Star State, denied several officers’ requests for qualified immunity, a legal defense that protects police from civil lawsuits.

It also sent an entire county to trial for the actions of its officers, who were responding to an active shooter in a residential neighborhood. In that case, Winzer v. Kaufman County, police shot a suspect who was bicycling toward them with a gun.

It seems overwhelmingly unlikely that in the throes of chaos and fear in Uvalde, no cop stopped to assess his potential liability for a bad shoot, but because of the facts and the First Rule of Policing trumps all deliberation. That said, there are a great many other instances where police are acutely aware of the problem they face when they need to decide whether to pull the trigger or not. As one cop friend said to me somewhat jokingly, the most important piece of equipment a cop has isn’t his gun, but the brakes on his car. Press on them and arrive after the shooting is over. Then you wont get blamed.

We are all know the correct answer of whether or not the cop should shoot. Of course, we don’t all agree, and more importantly, we know the answer afterward, from the comfort of our easy chair where we can condemn at our leisure. We are never wrong, of course. But then, we don’t have to make any hard choices, and even if we were wrong, it wouldn’t mean that some innocent person dies. We cry for the death of the putative shooter. We don’t give much thought to the putative deceased. This is because the shooter is dead and the decease alive, as we look backwards at what transpired. If it had happened differently, we might think differently, but we have the luxury of not having to think all that hard.

But it’s easy? But it’s obvious? But all cops are bastards who slaughter thousands of unarmed innocent black  people daily in the streets for nothing? Remember when Ma’Khia Bryant was killed by Columbus Police Officer Nicholas Reardon? Did they throw Reardon a parade for saving a life as Bryant was about to plunge a knife into another human being?

Michigan police officer Christopher Schurr is charged with second degree murder for the killing of Patrick Loyola. Whether it was a good shoot or not, was it murder if the cop in the throes of a struggle that Loyola chose made a choice to shoot that in retrospect wasn’t the best choice?

Too much cop love for you, since there are also a great many instances where the police simply murdered someone, choosing to shoot when it was not only unnecessary and unjustified, but flagrantly criminal. Consider Arabella Yarbrough’s position as marchers protested the killing of Tekle Sundberg.

Things boiled over during Saturday’s rally and march for Tekle Sundberg, when the 24 year old woman who says he was shooting into her apt. showed up voicing her frustration with those gathering in front of her building on Sundberg’s behalf. @kare11 * video contains profanity * pic.twitter.com/qdi1vbgO7k

— Deevon Rahming (@DeevonRahming) July 16, 2022

The cops killed Sunberg, but only because he had a rifle and was shooting into Yarbrough’s apartment where she and her children thought they were about to die. Sunberg had many hours to ponder the option of putting the gun down and walking out with his hands up. He didn’t. And yet the protesters blame the cops for killing him because, well, there had to be a way that Sunberg the shooter at Yarbough who, fortunately, failed to hit his target as of yet, could be taken alive.

Yarbrough was less concerned with Sunberg’s survival than she was of her own and her children. This engendered the unduly passionate responses when she raised in a pretty passionate voice of her own that there were bullet holes in her apartment, “Not in you, though” and “You’re alive.”

This is true and completely irrelevant, at least on any rational level. And that’s the point, that those police officers who are paying attention, who are capable of thought and deliberation, who are not malicious, cowardly or racist, have come to the realization that public demands and expectations of them are no the subject of reason and understanding, but outrage and ignorance.

The point Aaron raised isn’t that anything that happened in Uvalde necessarily related to this big question hovering over the heads of those police officers who, with only the best of intentions, are constrained to make the decision of whether to pull their trigger to take a live to save a life knowing that no matter how good a shoot it appears to be in the heat of the moment, it will be picked apart afterward with a high probability that the cop’s life will be ruined for it.

It used to be too easy of an answer, where we gave police far too much latitude to err and kill without justification. They could do no wrong, or at least couldn’t be responsible for any wrong they did. This was how the disaster arose.

We are now at the stage where they can do no right. This isn’t going to work either.