‘It doesn’t happen in every community’
Only education, training will end police shootings, experts say
Two police officers shot at a young black couple, wounding a woman. Days of protests have followed.
In the wake of the officer-involved shooting April 16, during which Hamden police officer Devin Eaton and Yale University officer Terrance Pollock opened fire on a vehicle stopped near Dixwell Avenue and Argyle Street in New Haven around 4:20 a.m., organizers have demanded justice for the couple in the car: Stephanie Washington, 22, and Paul Witherspoon III, 21.
Protests against police shootings have become routine after such incidents and promises from officials to focus on community policing get repeated. But even after communities cry “never again” and officers undergo more training, people turn to face another incident.
“Training is wonderful and all of that’s important but in a real life situation it is difficult to predict what will happen,” said Khalilah Brown-Dean, Quinnipiac University associate professor of political science. “What we’re seeing is how people see a threat.”
Since the shooting, people have protested almost daily against the practices of the Hamden and Yale police departments, but there’s no simple answer as to why the shooting happened.
“When people ask why did it happen, the response is it doesn’t happen in every community,” said Don Sawyer, Quinnipiac University’s associate vice president and chief diversity officer. “People talk about how it wouldn’t happen in a more affluent neighborhood and one could argue that the economics of that neighborhood colors the way policing happens in that neighborhood. There seems to be a lack of political power and resources in those areas and that’s some of the conflict we see.”
Further, John DeCarlo, associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven and former Branford police chief, said, “We are talking about why police shoot people and it’s because they have guns.”
“It’s a complicated situation because we’re America and we live in a gun culture,” DeCarlo said.
He said chances are the United States is never going to repeal the Second Amendment, so policy makers, police and communities have to learn how to live with it.
The Error in Training
While the April 16 shooting took place in New Haven after a reported armed robbery at a Hamden gas station/convenience store, it turned out no gun was found in the car Witherspoon and Washington were in, and that the store clerk who reported seeing a gun in a 911 call later retracted that statement when speaking to state police detectives. Witherspoon has not been charged and told police he made no threats at the store.
State Police have said the officers fired after Witherspoon exited the vehicle “abruptly” and turned toward them.
The body-camera footage appears to show Witherspoon start to exit the car with at least one hand up, then duck back inside as shots are fired.
“What happened was a study in error,” DeCarlo said. “There are a lot of things that happen really quickly. We often think that police are expert marksmen, and that’s not true and they’re not trained nearly enough to decipher these situations.”
Connecticut’s only mandated police training requirement is for officers to get 60 hours of training every three years, DeCarlo said, and most of the training police receive is to reduce litigation, not policing errors.
“We’re training them in things they need to get out on the street, but not everything they could use,” he said. “If you want better cops, you have to train them better. We as a society have to own up and train them better by professionalizing them more.”
While more training in anything is helpful, DeCarlo said more social training, more cultural training is critical so officers understand the different populations and communities they’re working in. And while there might be a call for racial sensitivity training after a shooting, it’s not systemic enough, he said.
Countless professions require college degrees and even advanced degrees for someone to be hired and be expected to do their job well, but not cops, DeCarlo said. The difference between an officer and any other profession, though, is cops are the only members of society that can take one’s freedom away or have the authority to shoot somebody, he said.
“If we’re going to give police that responsibility, we have to give them commensurate training,” he said.
The U.S. has 18,000 police departments across the country. By comparison, Great Britain, which requires police officers to have a college degree, has only 47. Each department in the U.S. is funded on a local level with no national dissemination of training or funding, DeCarlo said.
“It’s hard to make change and own up and change the system when it’s decentralized,” he said. “Until we come to a collective agreement and how we want them to police, we’re going to face a lot of ‘sentinel’ events.”
The obstacle is funding.
While the University of New Haven offers a degree in police science, a graduate isn’t then a certified police officer until they go through the police academy. But the state and local jurisdictions don’t get much extra money for police training. The biggest cost in police service is salaries, benefits and basic equipment, DeCarlo said.
With more officer education, though, the country might see fewer incidents of police profiling, acting defensively or out of fear.
“Education makes us better people, more understanding people and makes us make better decisions based on fact and less on fear,” he said.
Implicit bias
Rhonda Caldwell has been marching and rallying with organizers since the day after the shooting. “Social justice advocate” isn’t on her resume, but it’s a role she takes on every day for her community on social media, she said. Caldwell is one of those organizers who was stunned after watching the body camera footage.
“I’m still in shock from it and I just want to be involved in whatever I can to get this investigation and see policy changes,” she said.
As Caldwell, a woman of color, has been posting to Facebook about the movement and organizers’ demands for an independent investigation, she’s been met with insulting comments accusing her of using the “race card” as a tactic, with commenters arguing that because the officers involved were black, the incident is not a racial issue.
“It’s about a person of authority shooting a person,” she said. “We have people saying that it wasn’t an issue of race, but I’ve never heard of those things happening in neighborhoods like Spring Glen (a majority white neighborhood in Hamden). You’re socializing this thing. You can’t turn it off, no matter what color you are.”
Quinnipiac’s Sawyer said nobody is immune to implicit bias.
“In systems of inequality that are set up with internalized racism, it doesn’t matter who the actor is,” Sawyer said. “Moving the white officer out and inserting a Latino officer doesn’t make a difference because they’re still socialized and conditioned in a certain way.”
The way many are conditioned by media and popular culture is to see black and Latino men as a threat, he said.
“The police officers are not immune,” Sawyer said. “The difference is I don’t have the right to kill somebody and I’m not walking around armed. The impact of the images we see are not played out the same way as an armed police officer — it’s life or death. We see that playing out in the way different populations are policed.”
Brown-Dean said if people are socialized to think people of color are violent or that certain communities are breaking the law, they internalize that, adding that research shows black officers are more punitive because they know they have to work against those stigmas.
Stephen K. Rice and former King County, Washington Sheriff Sue Rahr wrote “From Warriors to Guardians: Recommitting American Police Culture to Democratic Ideals” in 2015 described modern policing as a police-against-thepeople operation.
“In some communities, the friendly neighborhood beat cop — community guardian —has been replaced with the urban warrior, trained for battle and equipped with the accouterments and weaponry of modern warfare. Armed with sophisticated technology to mine data about crime trends, officers can lose sight of the value of building close community ties,” they wrote.
DeCarlo said the militarization of police is the opposite of what officers should aim to be.
“We don’t have enemies, we have communities,” he said.
Despite three decades of falling crime rates, public trust in police has remain generally unchanged, according to Rice and Rahr.
The Right Training = Education
Community members have said what’s needed is education for officers around their implicit biases. But it’s not a cure-all for policing issues.
“One misconception is that someone can take a 60-minute training and they’ll be cured,” Sawyer said. “Implicit bias training is not a vaccine.”
He said one semester or course doesn’t necessarily change what a person has been hearing their entire life.
“One training isn’t going to change it,” he said “It’s going to take a systemic approach. It has to be a series of interactions and classes. The idea of community policing is that you’re present in those communities when trouble isn’t happening. Without that, people tend to see police in their communities as those who aren’t there to protect and serve.”
DeCarlo said requiring every police officer to go to college may not be realistic and could limit the diversity of people joining the force, but giving extended college level training to anyone looking for a leadership positions should be the goal so that the approach to policing changes.
“Us evolving the police training the way we have has wrought what we’re getting,” he said. “Cops are often very dedicated people, but we can’t send them without the training or adequate tools.”
Moving forward
Despite the ever-present call to have conversations about structural change, Brown-Dean said they haven’t truly happened yet.
“We have to be more specific,” she said “What are we demanding? What kinds of procedural steps do we need?”
Hamden Councilman Justin Farmer, D-5, whose district borders where Washington and Witherspoon were fired upon, said it’s the fact that the conversations haven’t happened is why the shootings continue. But now is the perfect time to talk about structural change.
“I hope we use that to talk about mental health in policing, juvenile justice, rehabilitation, job security, economic development and revitalization,” he said. “Any time these situations happen it’s a great way to gather all stakeholders on how we can create a more perfect union.”