The Limits of Armed Intervention
Billy was a career soldier committing his whole adult life to the profession of arms. A master of state sponsored violence, he ultimately had only one confirmed kill: himself. He died surrounded by police. They were sent to his home to stop his intended suicide. Whoever called 911 on his behalf did so asking for help, help with a problem beyond her control. As in the case of all such requests, the help being sent was a person with a gun.
Beginning with the use of soldiers to police the “frontier,” with the resulting genocide and into the beginning of the current millennium where the darker your skin the more likely you are to die while in police custody, finding one human being who can be all things to all crises in contemporary US society borders on the miraculous. As miraculous as it sounds, still, in this country, when people with a phone have a problem in their lives that they think requires intervention on the part of someone they have never met, they call for a cop.
We need to stop depending on miracles. After the unequivocal, egregiously heinous murder of George Floyd, every police department in the country now lives under a microscope. The lesson for the police is the same for the armed forces: government agencies no longer can use the excuse of a few bad apples. We have a problem with our security architecture. (Think Wounded Knee, My Lai, Kandahar 2012.)
Recruiting for police must begin with a screening process that includes a battery of psychological profile inventory devices. The most important test should be the one that predicts how the person responds to stress. I don’t think it will come as a surprise to anyone to find out that some people are not wired to remain level-headed in a crisis.
Once applicants make the cut to be police officers, they should go into a training pipeline that lasts at least three years, and includes several weeks of training in police procedures, the techniques, tactics, and procedures (with particular emphasis on the role of de-escalation). Add training conducted by the US Department of Justice (to insure a baseline understanding of federal regulations, followed by a test, the results of which affect funding at the state and local level), a year as a rookie (never allowed to work alone), a year in a probation office (to see how the system treats those who are trying to rebuild their lives), another year as an apprentice riding with a seasoned officer (but allowed to work alone if required), and concluding with graduation to the ranks of police officers entrusted to walk into a crisis with a gun alone. Also, every member of the force should complete the pipeline with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, psychology, or similar discipline. The degree program would serve many functions, but most importantly it would provide a measure of insurance to the police force that every member had a shared baseline of theory to employ (or avoid) on the job.
The nation needs federal guidelines such that no funding should be available to police departments who fail to match the 90th percentile of the population demographic they police. In other words, white cops do not patrol black neighborhoods or vice versa except that the department demonstrates why recruiting efforts have failed to produce a police department that matches the people they serve. This rule, though simple enough to understand, is the key to reestablishing the police as trusted servants in communities throughout the US.
On first blush, this program could seem cost prohibitive. I would love to see the cost of such training in comparison to the cost of city and state settlements for police brutality, and the cost to rebuild neighborhoods torched in the flames of righteous indignation.
As I write this, in the USA in the summer of 2020, I see a crisis among elected leaders, artists, business people, clergy, academics, and working folk. I see a society that responds with cognitive dissonance created by the reality in the streets and the phrase “liberty and justice for all.” No one seems able to imagine what that phrase looks like. To reiterate, there is data — as in more than a little — that shows there is a direct correlation between the darkness of one’s skin and the likelihood of dying in police custody, going to jail and prison, and being executed by the state.
In the case of Billy, he was white, and he was not in custody, though he had to know that he was headed to such a condition. And I am sure the cops did their best to stop him from taking his own life, though he did die by his own hand. They used the tools our society gave them — cultural inculcation, education, training, and equipping — in an effort to bring a successful conclusion to the crisis they were called into.
As Billy was killing himself, they shot him.
Originally from Macon, Georgia, Tony Schwalm spent much of his adult life as an Army officer, serving as a tank company commander in the First Gulf War in 1991 and leading Green Berets during the Haiti invasion in 1994. Retiring from the Army in 2004, he works as a consultant to the Department of Defense and lectures to business students at the University of South Florida on the merits of improvisation as learned in the world of guerrilla warfare. In 2009, his essay, Trek, won first prize at the Mayborn Literary Non-fiction Conference at the University of North Texas and was the basis for the book The Guerrilla Factory: the Making of Special Force Officers, the Green Berets published by Simon and Schuster in 2012. He makes his home in Tampa, Florida.
