https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tRsrmMUTcw
This morning CNN actually came close to having an interesting discussion.
The occasion was a video from a South Carolina classroom in which a policeman was shown ejecting a student from her chair in a nifty maneuver which catapulted her skyward as if she were being ejected from an airplane, landing her on the floor with his knee in her back.
Harry Hauck, the CNN cop in residence sighed and, once again, said with a weary impatience: "She refused to obey the policeman's order."
Professor Hill, CNN's resident reasonable man said, "Let's take this reducto ab absurdum: If the policeman had ordered her to get out of the chair and she refused and he had pulled his gun out and shot her, then we both, I hope, would agree, the policeman has used unreasonable force. Do you agree? And if you agree that refusal to obey a policeman's command does not justify that level of violent response from the policeman, then you will agree we have to then assess what level of violence we can consider reasonable."
Faced with this basic college seminar proposition, Retired policeman Hauck was struck dumb, really speechless, momentarily. Eventually, he said, "Well, if you call a policeman into the room, you are asking for him to act."
This is all complicated by the fact this happened in school and in some way may be connected to the feelings parents have about teachers or any other adult striking their children. We stopped corporal punishment in schools ages ago.
What retired policeman Hauck was saying is police are volatile, explosive, pull-the-trigger sort of people, and when you are the teacher and you request a confrontation, stand back. Once a policeman gives you an order, you are like a soldier in the Army, you disobey at your own peril.
Or, if you get pulled over by a policeman, don't provoke him or your life may not matter.
Apparently, the standard issue TASER shocking devices have been an effort to allow policeman to not just shoot everybody, but allow for something less than lethal force for every jaywalker.
On the other hand, as any viewer of The Wire will know, students like the one on CNN have long been a presence in the classroom in inner city schools: "Oppositional Defiant Personality Disorder" (ODPD) can destroy any hope for learning for forty other students in the classroom.
In The Wire, a whole cohort of students with ODPD were pulled from the classroom and grouped together, over the objections of school administrators who were afraid they'd be accused of "tracking" students, which in public schools is a no-no.
One can only imagine how long these kids would last in a confrontation with police on the street--but you can also imagine these same kids would not "act out" on the street with police, where they might in school, where they feel safer to defy, unless of course a policeman comes into the classroom, because, you know, if his services are requested, then he can do anything he wants, because he also has Oppositional Defiant Personality Disorder, which is what attracted him to the police force in the first place.
Mr. Hauck pointed out this school had a policeman on the beat, and that suggests the school had discipline problems and may have had gangs, so the environment may well have been one of intimidation, if not from the police, from at least some students.
The larger issue about the police, which Chris Cuomo tried to scrupulously avoid is why do we tolerate escalation to lethal force or even sub lethal fracture force from police? When did "protect and serve" become "pummel and sever?"
On the psych wards, I saw patients who were oppositional and defiant and they were not shot or TASER'd or thrown out of chairs or windows. The staff dealt with these "acting out" patients often and they had a plan: Overwhelm with bodies. No one person can oppose for long three or four people who have straight jackets or ropes or restraints.
This might be a technique the police might emulate. Strength in numbers. Works really well. And you don't have to fracture anybody's spine or skull.
This all goes back to what authority we grant the local police to search and seize, which brings us back to the Supreme Court decision about strip searching. The Court held police can strip a citizen naked within the confines of a police station because this may be thought of as an action taken to protect the police in that police station or jail. What other person, institution or entity in this nation has that kind of power?
In what way are we different from a "police state" if police have the power to order any citizen, at any time, to get out of a car or chair, to lie down on the ground, or to strip naked and the only justification the policeman needs is that he is a policeman. The citizen has no option but to obey, just as if he or she were in the Army.
Ultimately, police can behave as unbridled monarchs, or thugs, because they are protected right up the chain of command to the Supreme Court.
Once was a time when a Supreme Court insisted police had to inform any person they arrested they had the right to remain silent. The police had to stop what they were doing to show they were aware they were bound by some sort of legal/Constitutional restraint. But not since the Scalia/Alito/Thomas/Roberts/Kennedy court.
When the Miranda rights case was handed down, there was much bleating about how cops on the beat would be hamstrung by this unworkable intrusion into their practices.
Oh, how far we've come.
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