Conflicting Command Conundrum

Is there a “bright side” to the misbegotten stop of Lt. Caron Nazario? Absolutely. He “only” ended up being pepper sprayed and not dead, like Daniel Shaver. Both presented two fairly common themes in police encounters. First, the person is not an “experienced criminal” who knows what to do with he’s confronted by the police, but rather ordinary, law-abiding citizens who have no reason to expect the police to feel antagonistic or threatened by them. Second, the police issued conflicting commands. Or to be more realistic,police simultaneously scream  directly contradictory orders interspersed with threats and vulgarities.

These two factors aren’t inherently connected, and yet play out together. What’s an ordinary person to do when two police officers, with guns drawn and pointed, engaged you with professionalism, courtesy and respect?

Cop 1: FREEZE, MOTHERFUCKER, OR I’LL BLOW YOUR FUCKING HEAD OFF!

Cop 2: PUT YOUR HANDS OUT OF THE WINDOW AND GET OUT OF THE CAR, ASSHOLE, OR YOU’RE DEAD, MOTHERFUCKER!

The driver of the car is at a great many disadvantages here. First, he doesn’t know why he’s been stopped, no less why there are guns pointed at him. He doesn’t know if these cops are scared, angry or crazy. He is defenseless.

Second, the screaming orders, combined with the offensive language, creates a processing problem. It’s hard to understand what’s happening to begin with, and increasingly difficult when the stimulus is overwhelming, unfamiliar and contradictory. Not only is it hard to make sense of what’s happening, what commands are being given, when viewed after the fact from the comfort of a wing chair, but the fear and confusion at the moment reduces the likelihood of calm compliance to an impossibility.

Third, police officers are not only in control of the scenario, but they are theoretically trained to handle the engagement, armed for their own protection, in an occupation that involves some risk but there of their own accord, and fully capable of choosing their particular words, volume, and demeanor. There is a huge chasm between whether their actions were criminal and whether their actions were optimally calculated to be effective and safe for all involved.

Fourth, the driver is neither trained nor experienced in what to do when the cops come. A more experienced person, or one who knows he’s engaged in conduct likely to draw the attention of the police such that he’s prepared for that moment when things go sough and cops arrive, will be better prepared to show his hands, lie on the ground, maybe even take a few kicks to the head while cops scream “stop resisting” after he’s been cuffed. The “experienced” guy is ready for it. The good guy is not. The good guy actually listens to the cops commands, which puts him at a distinct disadvantage when the cops order him to freeze/move or die.

The “official,” and that word is in scare quotes because it’s what police may assert even though there is no official answer because there is no official problem of cops issuing conflicting commands because good and well-trained cops would never do such a thing, answer is that the person should calmly, rationally say, with hands frozen, up or out, as the case may be, say that he is about to move his hands to take off his seat belt, open the door, get out and lie on the ground as ordered. Problem solved?

For the same reasons that there are problems to begin with, there are problems with this “solution.” The police would shift the duty to be calm and rational onto the scared, untrained, confused guy to be responsible for not doing anything that might set off a screaming, irrational cop whose orders are contradicted by another screaming cop, either one of whom appears disinclined to listen to what the fellow has to say, give up command presence by allowing the “perp” to have any control over his actions, and, should the slightest twitch set him off, pull his trigger.

No, this doesn’t happen in every stop. Indeed, most are uneventful, but that depends on the mindset of the officer more than the driver. If the cop is calm, doesn’t escalate the situation, things tend to play out relatively smoothly without anyone missing dinner. But when police approach a vehicle with any expectation of a threat, they will invoke the First Rule of Policing and calm is dead people.

Bear in mind, this conundrum isn’t about the particular facts of either the Nazario or Shaver cases, but the regularly occurring situation where scared cops scream conflicting commands at an ordinary person. Much as the cop answer is naive, aspirational and facile, making it the citizen’s burden to not make the cops kill him rather than cops’ burden to not create an untenable situation likely to end badly, what’s a person to do?

Surely better police training to deal with this scenario would help, such as one cop taking the lead, the other following, so that conflicting commands aren’t issue. It would further help enormously for police to calm situations rather than create confusion, but whether they would be able to do so given that they’re hopped up on adrenaline and fear, and not a small amount of power, is unclear. It’s also contrary to training to present overwhelming force so as to compel compliance out of fear. In some situations, the model is “ask-tell-make,” but when any risk is perceived, that goes out the window as the First Rule takes precedence.

Ordinary people shouldn’t have to be learned in Pennsylvania v. Mimms in order to survive a police encounter. Ordinary people ask ordinary questions, and have an ordinary expectation that police aren’t vicious animals but public servants who will respond to reasonable questions with reasonable answers. Ordinary people don’t understand why cops keep calling them “motherfucker.”

There are, of course, an infinite number of variations on how these scenarios play out. Surprisingly, it’s very rare that they end with a dead body despite popular belief that cops are slaughtering people in the street all the time. Yet, an ordinary person would expect the police to be capable of handling this situation without being put in the position of risking death or a beating because they want to comply with police orders but can’t.