At the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf starts with a fair point, that cops see the same scenario we do, but through their peculiar lens. This isn’t meant to suggest anything bad, but rather that we all see things through our own perspectives and biases.
For example, one anecdote concerns a man in the back of a police car who told his arresting officers that he was having trouble breathing. They ignored him. He died. Many who watched the video saw callous cops who placed no value on a human being’s life. But police officers who watched the same tape saw two cops who thought that their seemingly healthy arrestee was faking, as so many people fabricate medical conditions to avoid being taken to jail.
Horribly, this isn’t an uncommon phenomenon. But if you view it from the perspective of a thousand complaints, only one of which is real, the reaction of police makes some sense, even if it remains inexcusably callous.
But from there, Conor takes the point to a place not so easily explained.
In that spirit, I’d like to focus on “Inconvenience Store,” the This American Life segment where the behavior of the police officers struck me as most difficult to comprehend. I’ll relay what happened to a man named Earl Sampson in Miami Gardens, Florida, and invite any willing police officers to write in with their thoughts.
Most of the action takes place at a Quickstop convenience store. Back in 2008, police approached its owner, Alex Saleh. Did he want to make the Quickstop part of “The Zero-Tolerance Zone Trespassing Program”? Saleh said that he was “pro-police, pro-cop,” and agreed. A sign to that effect was posted in the parking lot.
But soon, he says, cops started harassing his customers, especially the black ones, when they were doing nothing more than standing in line waiting to make a purchase. Set that aside. Our interest is in Earl Sampson, a black employee at the store.
The TL;dr version is that Earl Sampson was arrested repeatedly at his job at Saleh’s Quickstop, and would plead guilty so he could be released immediately and go back to work the next day. When Saleh learned of it, he installed cameras to prove what was happening.
In time, Saleh had 16 surveillance cameras running. So in addition to arrest reports proving that a man was repeatedly jailed for “trespassing” at his place of employment, there is ample video of police officers harassing both customers at the Quickstop and Earl Sampson, even after he was literally living in the store at the owner’s request. There is no excuse for this behavior and no doubt that it happened. A man’s most basic rights were repeatedly and willfully violated by multiple police officers, with a paper trail and videotaped evidence to identify them.
And so? So nothing.
Anthony Chapman, the police commander whose officers repeatedly harassed Alex’s customers and Earl, he’s still at the police department. He denies all allegations against him and declined to be interviewed. Martin Santiago, the sergeant who Alex says threatened him at a traffic stop, he also still works there, as does William Dunaske, the officer who pulled Earl out of the store in that very first surveillance video. The city declined to make Santiago and Dunaske available for comment. Michael Malone, the officer who threw and kicked customers’ personal things, he did leave the force, but it was voluntary. An internal affairs report concedes misconduct, but Malone was never disciplined for his actions. He could not be reached for comment.
The rousting of Sampson stopped only after this was reported in the press:
This has long since become public knowledge—the Miami Herald wrote about it in 2013. “Miami Gardens police have arrested Sampson 62 times for one offense: trespassing,” the newspaper reported. “Almost every citation was issued at the same place: the 207 Quickstop, a convenience store on 207th Street in Miami Gardens.”
And the police response was one, big shrug. Was there some view of this, some perspective, that might explain what was done to Earl Sampson in a way that would not reflect an outrageous and cavalier disregard for his constitutional rights, for propriety, for the basic decency to be shown another human being who did nothing wrong? Conor invites an answer:
If you’re a police officer, maybe no one asked for your opinion on a case like this before. I invite any of your thoughts.
The comments following the post reflect the usual angry “cops suck” diatribes. What they fail to provide is anything insightful as to how this can be explained other than as outrageous and abusive misconduct. But do cops see it differently?
It’s an important question. Yes, it’s easy to see what is terribly wrong with the police dumping on poor Earl Sampson, but is there a view of what happened that could possibly help us non-cops to see some rational purpose in this? Is there a justification if we squint and look through cops’ eyes? What are we missing?
It’s a great question, and like Conor Friedersdorf, I would really like to understand.
Update: In addition to the comments below, Conor posted three comments he received at the Atlantic in reply to his question. (H/T/ Jill McMahon) While the response rate has been less than overwhelming, they do reflect a theme.
The thing speaks for itself.
A diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder?
Does this help to get a response?
It’s easy to understand.
If you want to help the PoPo get the John Lee Pettimore’s of the world, you gotta agree to let the PoPo kick people off of your property. Besides, who understands these people better than us? They’re all lowlifes, why do you care?
Don’t you support the PoPo? Revenooers and the DEA have to work too.
So you prefer that the criminals get away with it? Got it.
Scott, they don’t see things with a normal view anymore. It becomes an us vs. them scenario. As Anakin said in Ep. III, “I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security to my new empire . . . Don’t make me kill you.” You’re either for them, and whatever tactics they wish to use, or you’re against them. They see no grey, just absolutes, black or white, good or evil.
My understanding was that this store refused to participate in some sort of crimestopper or some other police friendly program, and then the arrests of not just this man, but the store’s customers. It smack of bullying of a business owner who wasn’t willing to play ball.
On the contrary, Saleh did agree to be part of their program, and then it started.
But what did this poor guy do to deserve this? Contemptuous attitude? That would be one thing, but the poor guy just sweeps up. Is there nothing more?
The only thing I can think of – and it’s weak – is that the cops, having made a Zero Tolerance Trespassing Recruit of Saleh, decided to test his loyalty and/or his tolerance for pain by repeatedly dropping the hammer on his customers and the mentally challenged kid he took in.
Much in the same spirit as a hazing, or the way middle school kids treat someone who’s trying to trade in nerd for cool. Take your licks, and if you complain to the teacher, you’re dead to everyone forever.
But I think a better explanation is that it’s fun to torment mentally ill black people.
But what does the cop say?
Now if someone would sync this with Jeffrey Follmer’s MSNBC interview.
Y’all are putting way too much thought into this.
“I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security to my new empire . . . Don’t make me kill you.”
It’s all right there. They are cleaning up the streets, who are you to question how they do it?
A similar situation was explained to me by a cop who insists he knows a criminal when he sees one – a store in a poor minority neighborhood has a bunch of low-life bums hanging out in it all the time and the cops know every single one of those bums (you see customer waiting in line, cops see bums hanging out) has drugs in his possession, most likely in his bloodstream. None of these bums have jobs, they’re all petty criminals of one sort or another, they hang around panhandling and drinking and generally causing trouble so the cops are going to give them trouble. As many times as it takes, the cops sweep in and bust everybody in and around the store and soon the messsge gets across not to be hanging out being a bum in this neighborhood. It’s a more brutal form of “move along, nothing to see here”. You don’t keep moving, you get your head busted. My guess would be the cops can’t tell the difference (and don’t care about the difference) between a mentally handicapped black man and a drunk/drugged black man – just another bum needed a thump on the head until he learns to quit being a bum. (I won’t be so ungenerous as to suggest that the cops see a black man who needs a thump on the head until he learns to quit being black – but i have heard there are one or two cops like that.)
I was kinda hoping for the cops who read SJ to answer rather than non-cops to tell stories about cops.
I could see that was what you were shooting for. But since from the article there really isn’t a legal way possible to support the police’s criminal actions here. All you will hear from them is the sound of crickets.
Two Miami Gardens police officers already answered your question on 9 May 2014:
Two MGPD officers who asked Fusion to protect their identities spoke with us on camera about an unofficial policy of quotas and racial profiling that was rampant in their department. They say they were told by superiors to “get the numbers up” and they were ordered to stop black males between 15 and 30 years old. One officer also told Fusion that field contact reports were falsified to meet the quotas. Such reports were even produced about people who “were still sitting in the county jail,” the officer said.
Allegations that some of the police stops may be falsified is supported by Fusion’s analysis of about 30,000 pages of records provided by the Miami Gardens Police Department.
Fusion identified many instances where multiple reports were filed just minutes apart.
For example, according to the police records, Earl Sampson was stopped on November 3, 2010, at 9:24 p.m. at 21099 Northwest 32nd Avenue in Miami Gardens. The field contact report notes a “suspicious person.” He told police officers he was going to the store.
Then the records show another field contact report, from just one minute later, at 9:25 p.m. In that report, Sampson was stopped for “loitering” at the Quickstop at 3185 NW 207th Street, where he works.
The two locations are nearly one-third of a mile apart, and take approximately 5 minutes to walk.
Fusion’s analysis of the field contact records found several instances in which one individual was written up multiple times, by different officers, all within a few minutes.
“That’s falsifying an official documentation,” said one of the police officers who told Fusion the command staff of the MGPD was after one thing: “Numbers.”
“They created statistics and it was done to the detriment of the Miami Gardens community,” says attorney Stephan Lopez. “These cases were manipulated. They were fabricated.”
Between 2008 and 2013, the City of Miami Gardens received over 15 federal grants, many of which were tied, in part, to funding overtime details to support the zero tolerance policy program, according to documents obtained by Fusion.
Internal emails from Miami Gardens Police Department obtained by Fusion show how commanders encouraged their officers to take overtime assignments to reduce violent crime. In this email sent Nov 7, 2013, a captain calls on officers to take a “hands-on approach.” Two of the priorities were to be “field contacts” and “stop and frisk.”
The captain writes in the email that the overtime is “a good opportunity to supplement your salary, right before the holidays.”
This is the best explanation I’ve heard. Terrible, but understandable.
Charles Huth and Jack Colwell here, you may remember us from the blog post on the article we co-authored with Randy Means. http://blog.simplejustice.us/2015/02/05/there-is-no-officer-safety-exception-to-the-constitution/
This is not meant to be an informed or definitive answer, all we know is what we read in your post. This is merely a conjecture, not based on anything unique to police officers, but what we have found to be true of all people, including ourselves. You see, Charles and I work with Arbinger, a company that specializes in Mindset. Arbinger’s work suggest there are two basic mindsets people can have as it relates to others.
We can have an Inward Mindset where we basically only focus on our own personal objectives and concerns. With an inward mindset we tend to see people only in categories of how their objectives and concerns help us, are in our way, or are irrelevant to ours.
We can also have an Outward Mindset where we are alive to, not only our own, but also the objectives and concerns of others. With the Outward Mindset other’s objectives and concerns are valid, independent of whether we find them useful to ourselves or not. Others objectives and concerns are valid because we see them as they actually are, as people just like ourselves.
Here is where the problem starts. When we disregard other’s humanity (their objectives and concerns) we reflexively justify our objectification of the other person. We do this with blaming, hostile or apathetic thoughts and emotions toward those we objectify. These thoughts and emotions feel so right, we are compelled to treat the person in ways in keeping with our hostile or apathetic feelings.
Arbinger calls this state Self Deception; the problem of not knowing, and resisting the possibility, that one has a problem. In other words, the other person is responsible for all my bad feelings, and problems!
There is a huge chorus of calls for changes in law enforcement. We hold that ground breaking change won’t happen by simply ratcheting down on what officers do. (Don’t arrest a person for trespassing at their own place of employment. Where would this kind of rule making end?) Real, lasting change starts with the Mindset officers bring to their work. That mindset involves, among other things: 1) being energetically curious about the needs, fears, objectives and concerns of people in the community i.e. Saleh and Sampson; and 2) being actively responsive to these concerns and objectives; and 3) relentlessly learning and changing; finding new, constitutionally-compatible ways to help things go right in the community and constantly adapting how police service is delivered to be more helpful and responsive given the ever-changing realities of society.
Combined, we have over 50 years of law enforcement experience. We can say without a doubt there are some police officers who are malicious in their intent; however, they represent a statistically insignificant amount of people in our profession. The problem is, while the number of these misguided officers is statistically insignificant, they are very significant to the individuals whose rights are violated. What’s more, because of the high profile nature of law enforcement, the actions of a few officers have a quantum impact on the perception of the law enforcement culture as a whole. I know many are reluctant to hear this, but the majority of police officers are well-intentioned people who really are concerned with the general welfare, just as the vast majority of citizens are supportive of law and order and just want a safe, just place to live, work and socialize. We need to continue to work together to find ways to communicate expectations respectfully and with an eye on helping things go right, rather than perpetually responding to what has gone wrong. The ability to do this is predicated on the outward mindset we discussed. We have found this way of being to be very helpful in our work with law enforcement and communities. Thank you all for the gift of your time and for having the courage to stand up for what you believe in, even when it is unpopular. We have met with many police officers from Chiefs to officers working the beat who share some of your concerns and recognize the need for more transparency and responsiveness. We find this very encouraging.
An interesting perspective. Thanks. A couple questions. Is the outward objectification a pervasive police pathology, and if so, do cops come this way or learn it from cop culture? Or is this just the pathology of the cops who, in this example, arrested Sampson?
Which leads into the second question, the good cop/bad cop dichotomy. If this is the conduct of a “few bad apples,” what are all the good apples doing as they stand idly by and watch this happen?
I have said the same for years that like most professions maybe 7-15% are what you gentlemen call “bad apples” sorry to me they are criminals. The problem is in the current police culture they are not only not punished but hidden and protected. and promoted. Unless the conduct is just so out there and more important caught by so many and on so many cameras it’s impossible to hide. At which time they are tossed to the wolves so the rest of Law Enforcement can say “look at us. We stopped them.”
Let me remind you gentlemen of a nasty law I am sure you have used many times in your long time in law enforcement. since you are there when the crime is committed by a fellow police officer, if you do not actively move to stop it or arrest the perp. You are now an accessory after the fact and legally just as guilty as those who committed the crime.