The video of cops pulling her one-year-old son from Jazmine Headley’s arms, while another held onlookers at bay with her Taser, generated well-deserved outrage. The “offense” for which security guards in the SNAP office called in muscle was Headley’s sitting on the floor. To the extent there was any defense to the police conduct, it was that she was doing something she shouldn’t have been doing, and what else were they to do?

This rhetorical question, “what else were they to do,” has plagued criminal law and its reformers. There are rules by which society runs, some dealing with serious matters of life and death, others utterly banal, just random rules for their own sake.

As people fail to be as orderly as others want them to be, the question of how to deal with it short of a scene like this, risking maiming a baby over the grievous offense of floor-sitting, or more likely, refusing to be compliant with security guards who demand in impolite terms that you cease your grievous floor-sitting.

Conor Friedersdorf takes on the question.

“After sitting for some time on the floor, she got into an argument with a security guard who asked her to move,” The New York Times reported. “After that, somebody called the police.” The details are sketchy. But two NYPD officers responded to the scene. There were also multiple security officers working for the city’s Human Resources Administration. The officers tried to remove Headley by force, even as someone started recording video footage of the altercation. As it escalated, an officer forcefully removed her child from her arms.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Why call the cops? The simple answer is who else would you call? Who else is there?

But what exactly went wrong? One question is whether Headley could’ve been left alone, sitting on the floor, without doing any harm, or whether she was disrupting the municipal office in a way that warranted attempts to forcibly remove her.

Let’s stipulate that people who can be left alone often should be left alone, remember that might apply here, and interrogate the other possibility. If it wasn’t tenable to let her sit on the floor of the municipal office as long as she liked, a plausible scenario, then what went wrong?

There is a very good possibility that this situation arose from less an untenable problem than from the rote application of rules. Official people love their rules, bringing order to their tiny sphere and exerting control over others. The issue isn’t whether rules serve us, but that rules must be enforced or they aren’t really rules. And the more rules people create, the more rules that need enforcing.

Had Headley’s floor-sitting presented a problem for others, such as blocking a fire door, her refusal to move on request might be more acceptable. After all, it wasn’t merely her being left to sit on the floor with her baby because there were too few chairs for all the people in need of help, and this wasn’t just a security officer pushing his weight around with poor people who had no choice but to be there if their children weren’t to starve.

So assuming there was a real problem, that Headley was informed in a reasonably not-too-offensive way as to why her floor-sitting was a real problem and she nonetheless argued, refused and left the guards with the responsibility of doing something, the guards did what they were likely told to do, call the cops.

The assumption is that the police, being brutes who know only how to use force to obtain compliance, had no choice but to apply force to the situation.

What I see are NYPD officers who were put in a position that partly resembles what George Orwell once described in his essay about his time as a colonial police officer in Burma. “I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible,” he wrote. “With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.”

Is there a seething hatred of the people police theoretically “serve” lurking just below the surface such that one push too far unleashes the bayonet into the priest’s guts?

Many NYPD cops would feel sympathetic to a woman with a baby in her arms who was struggling to make her way in a society where she is not thriving. But if harried municipal workers cannot persuade a woman with a baby in her arms to get up off the floor where she was blocking people, and call the officers away from other pressing matters to deal with the situation, those same cops might feel that it was now on them to solve the problem.

This is where calls for de-escalation training tend to fill the void, as if the problem isn’t that the cops don’t already know that they can talk someone off the edge, calm the situation down, wait it out. But patience and empathy aren’t easily quantifiable. How long do you wait? How much non-compliance must you tolerate before you flip the switch to force? How real is that seething hatred of the job that turns from sympathy to gutting the woman and getting it over with?

But cities would not need armed police officers if not for violent criminals. Maybe one of our great mistakes is calling cops to handle so many other matters. If the bureaucrats dealing with a young mother who refused to get up had been acculturated to call for a social worker rather than for police officers, would the result have been better?

If the public were acculturated to call mental-health workers rather than police officers when they encounter disturbed behavior, would fewer unarmed people die in shootings?

There is little doubt that in many instances, 911 is a bad number to dial. After all, rules get enforced, and refusing to obey a rule, no matter how petty, can end in death. And if there is an antagonism by armed warriors toward the public, can it be trained out of cops?

But there is no number for the public, in this instance the security guards, to call for a social worker rather than the cops. There is no 911 for a mental health emergency, to keep the cops out of the mix where they may be one refusal away from gutting the priest. Whether such an alternative system can be created is a huge question, but it doesn’t exist now and leaves us without an alternative to the cops.

It’s fine to say that we ask too much of the police, but since they’re all we have, there is no other choice. Except to not call the cops in the first place, and to not create myriad rules that must be enforced even when their only real purpose is to placate demands for a more orderly society and the desire by enforcers to control other people at all costs.