I just heard about another homeless man in Los Angeles who was shot and killed. Five cops were involved, and 3 are alleged to have shot the victim. Cop killings are all too common. Police come across a situation, attempt to use force to control it and end up shooting and killing someone. They have no clue about how to de-escalate someone who has escalated into a fear response. It’s common knowledge among scientists that the fear response is automatic and trumps rational thought. You act. But when you act your fear response in front of a cop, they are trained to take you down. And they are also experiencing their own fear response. Rational thought is absent in many cases among any parties to such a confrontation. The victim believes they are protecting their self. The do it by running, and when caught get charged with resisting arrest. Or they fight, and get charged with a heck of a lot more. And as an article recently discussed, we have a huge population of ex prisoners who cannot get jobs because of a conviction that, to me, could be avoided with some dialogue and understanding.
Jim Sporleder discovered this when working with students at Lincoln High School. Other educators who understand developmental trauma came to the same conclusion. You cannot rationalize with a student who has escalated. You can only guide them to a safe place if you are able to, and let them de-escalate on their own. Then you can have a conversation about what they did that put them in the situation they are in.
I understand this. As a minority man, I don’t trust cops. I have some cops who are friends. But when they are in uniform, they are like the enemy. They exist only to catch you in the act of doing something bad, arresting you and putting you in jail. Because I have a brown face, and most of them have white faces, I fear their response to my brown face. I attribute this to my early teen years when I had a morning paper route. I saw someone climbing into a window on my route and called the police about the entry. Teachers and authority figures had advised me that the police were my friends. They also said I should report possible crimes. Mind you, I had to find a payphone, spend a dime and wait for the police to respond. After I told them what I saw and went to the house with them, they frisked me. I was shocked. They were looking at me as a threat or perpetrator. I have not called the police in similar circumstances since. I avoid them like the plague.
My son was stopped twice in Arizona for Driving While Indian (DWI). He has a brown face, and we have been mistaken for Mexican many times. While I am proud that I fit in, I know that in Arizona a brown face will get you stopped. Again, the police are a reason for fear.
While I have not put too much thought into how we address this type of issue, I have to believe that ACE’s, single source trauma, PTSD or mental illness play a significant part in police shootings and beatings. This means we have to look for other ways to de-escalate tense situations. I am not talking about de-escalating shootouts or interfering where protection is clearly needed. I am talking about understanding the process of a trauma victim escalating because of police presence and doing something stupid. We don’t need to compound the problem by escalating the violence potential when no one else is at risk. The person we expect to be trained not to react with fear is the cop. Just like being confronted by a bear in Alaska evokes a fear response, being confronted by the police in an urban jungle elicits a fear response. We need to understand that and talk about how to avoid it.
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