Fear alone shouldn’t justify lethal police force. Post-Stephon Clark, what must change
Forty-five years ago, I was the student activist, my father was the attorney for the grieving family, and the unarmed young black man killed by police was Raymond Brewer. Today the protesters chant, “Say his name,” but the sad fact is that the names are interchangeable. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
We have all seen the video, or read the transcript: “Show me your hands! Gun!” The problem with these words is what’s missing between them: “Drop it!”
Because without those two words, Stephon Clark was already a dead man. There was nothing he could do from that point to save his own life. When he showed his hands, the police saw something in them, concluded it was a gun, and shot him.
Every single day, many times a day, police officers take into custody an armed suspect, and no one gets hurt. This must be true, or there would be no such thing as felony possession of a weapon, because all the suspects would be dead. If anyone really wants these killings of unarmed black men to stop, this is where they need to begin.
When police arrested Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz, less than an hour after he had slaughtered 17 people, they had every reason to expect him to be armed and dangerous. And yet, he was arrested unharmed. I am simply asking how and why that happened, and why it didn’t happen for Stephon Clark.
Officers are told to take control of a situation, but if they are not in control of their own emotions then they are not in control of anything, and they’re not doing their most basic job, to protect and to serve. They are not hired to shoot first and ask questions later.
We don’t hire police for their fear. We hire them for their control. We expect them to have a greater level of emotional control and objectivity then the rest of us, but they are not being trained for that responsibility.
We need a statewide mandatory protocol that subjective fear is no longer the standard for deadly force. Jury instructions will have to be rewritten. All police officers should know how to peacefully arrest an armed suspect, and that should be their duty. This new standard should extend to mandatory POST training, and from there a model for the rest of the country.
Second, bodycams will have to be redesigned and relocated to a place on or above the officer’s shoulder, like an epaulet, or perhaps a helmet cam. At eye level we will be able to see what the officer saw, rather than the ground, their legs and a jumble of arms and hands that make it difficult to know what was going on.
When I first got the keys to my house just north of Meadowview, I went over to walk in the backyard, planning my fruit orchard. When I came back inside, someone was at the door, and to our mutual surprise there were two police officers.
I showed them my driver’s license, they recognized my name, and they left. Later the neighbor who had seen me out back, and called them, came by to apologize.
But what if I had stayed out back a little longer, and wasn’t there to answer the door?
The police would have come into the back to investigate, and they would have found me there, possibly with something in my hand – a rake, a twig, a pair of clippers. And depending on their reaction, I could have been dead in my own backyard, just like Stephon Clark.
The more things stay the same, the more they need to change.
Nat Colley is a former civil rights attorney, a past president of the Sacramento NAACP, and a past member of the NAACP National Board of Directors. He is currently at work on a legal technology startup. Reach him at @semanticlaw.
This story was originally published April 4, 2018 at 11:35 PM with the headline "Fear alone shouldn’t justify lethal police force. Post-Stephon Clark, what must change."