Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is a former police officer and supervisor who went to law school, hung out a shingle, and now practices criminal defense and family law in Fort Worth, Texas. While he was a police officer, he was a police firearms instructor, and routinely taught armed tactics to other officers.
I don’t doubt Christopher Young’s sincerity when he wrote his op-ed in the New York Post. He says he is a progressive, and I don’t doubt it. He’s certainly not the only police officer who thinks that the War on Drugs is a failure, wants reform in other areas, etc. He then lists four police myths that he wants to debunk. The problem is that he’s wrong. My old mean-ass editor wrote about it and it’s good. It’s just not from the cop standpoint.
I was a police officer in Texas for over 20 years, starting in the housing projects of a major city. I’ve been in patrol, and have supervised patrol, detectives, training, administration, and parking enforcement, among other duties. I have taught in the classroom at the academy and at in-service training, and was also a firearms instructor. I am also retired military, serving on both active duty and in the reserve, both as enlisted and as an officer.
So let’s go through his comments, and address each, one by one.
1) Police are killing large numbers of civilians. That’s simply not true. In New York City, the police department has meticulously tracked every shot fired by its officers since 1971. These officers represent roughly 5 percent of the entire American force, so it’s a large sample. The NYPD’s annual report shows a dramatic, sustained drop in killings by police — from 93 in 1971 to just five in 2018.
As of today, according to Mapping Police Violence, 1,066 people have been killed by police in 2020. Last year, it was 1,037. The Washington Post database has similar numbers. This year, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, there have been 296 police deaths in the line of duty, up by 103%. That’s misleading though, because it includes 180 deaths from COVID-19. Without that, it is 116 deaths, and only 45 by gunfire. That’s a 22% decrease from 2019, which had a 20% decrease from 2018. The things that are constant is that about 15-20% of those killed by police are unarmed, and that the number killed by police isn’t going down the way police fatalities are. Basically a citizen is about 10 times more likely to be killed by the police than the police are to be killed by the citizen.
2) The anti-cop movement is largely peaceful. Again, false. The movement, rather, is akin to the Batman villain Two-Face. Anyone who watched the protests on television would know that the daytime ones were lawful free speech. But the dynamic changed dramatically at night. Protests became intentional riots, designed to draw a police response that allowed rioters to claim victim status.
I don’t disagree with him here, although I will point out that some of the nighttime problems are caused by white supremacist groups, like the Proud Boys and the Boogaloos. These are people trying to increase tensions, not decrease them. That’s according to information from the FBI and DHS. And anyone rioting, destroying property, or hurting people (including police) needs to be arrested and tried for their crimes.
3) Abolishing police wouldn’t lead to lawlessness. Many of the defunders are genuine anarchists, who want no government at all and believe in a society of angels who serve each other voluntarily.
This is nonsense. One of the greatest achievements in human history was creating government monopolies on the use of force. Ancient tribal societies had a violent death rate of 500 per 100,000 people per year. That number dropped to 50 in medieval societies and just one to five in the modern West.
Sure, some of the calls for defunding the police are from anarchists. Many more of the calls are not to eliminate the police, but to reform and restructure them. Police should not be sent on mental health calls; they are not trained in counseling, nor, for the most part, do they have the temperament. No, what we should be looking at is adding social workers and mental health specialists to handle those types of calls.
The second part of the equation here is the problem created with the first rule of law enforcement. Young, like most cops, believes that police officers have a right to go home at the end of their shift. But if you ask him about the right of the citizens to go home at the end of the day, you will likely get a blank look. It just simply never crosses their mind that citizens should have the same right to go home that they do.
4) Today’s police are “militarized.” Wrong, wrong, wrong. As a soldier, I rode in an armored vehicle and sat in a turret with a belt-fed machine gun. My job was to shoot enemy soldiers. In my 26 years as a cop, I have done no such thing.
Contrary to activist complaints, SWAT teams’ armored vehicles, armored clothing and special training help them avoid deadly force, not commit it. A regular cop is often justified shooting someone who threateningly brandishes a gun. A SWAT officer wearing protection, however, will wait longer before resorting to deadly force. In Seattle, our SWAT team recently saved a suicidal young black man with a gun.
Police today are militarized. When I started, an officer carried a revolver, usually in .38 or .357 with two, maybe three reloads. Almost no officers carried a rifle, much less a mil-spec carbine with a 30-round magazine and a minimum of 3 to 4 reloads. Armored cars were for the big cities of a million or more people. SWAT was rarely used, because it was designed to deal with heavily armed and dangerous subjects. And no-knock warrants were rare.
Now SWAT raids are routine and used when not needed, such as to arrest a young man for an assault warrant less than four hours after the young man had been in court while the warrant was active. In Dallas, SWAT raided a VFW hall for an illegal poker game. Is this something that detectives and patrol couldn’t handle? We were taught to deescalate and wait someone out, for days if needed. Now you roll up in an armored vehicle and breach. One small town sent an armored car and a couple dozen deputies to collect a civil judgement from a 70-something-year-old man.
I understand where Young is coming from. Hell, I used to be there myself. But that doesn’t make his position right.
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Great article. I think we need to go back to the basic principles of modern policing first described by Robert Peele. I’m a little surprised that we do not hear him quoted more often in the debate. But following his guidance would go a long way in solving the problem. Like so many complex issues, the answers can be found in simple first principles. I believe he had nine. They emphasized professionalism; the hiring of the best candidates who were required to model good citizenship at all times; emphasis on community protection and the prevention of crime, not so much punishment; and the involvement of the entire community in policing. He stated them a lot more eloquently, if anyone is interested, just google the “Peelian principles,” and they come right up. The Wikipedia article on Robert Peele is very interesting.
Greg, a drastic reduction in the number of police forces should also be part of a reform-and-restructure effort. In Harris County, we have a county sheriff’s department, eight county constable forces, a metro transit (bus and rail) force, two airport police departments, a port police force, at least seven higher ed police forces, more than 20 municipal police departments, and a medical center police force. (And I’ll bet I’ve missed some individual forces in there.) Still, that mass of law officers doesn’t include the Texas Department of Public Safety or any of the federal forces also extant in Houston. Although each of these forces makes arrests (and thereby provides work for criminal defense lawyers), I have to ask: do we really need this many police and police forces?
If you wanted to write a post about police reforms KK feels should happen, you could always do so. But this was Greg’s, and this was in reply to Young’s, and this isn’t yours. And as always, Houston isn’t the universe and doesn’t fascinate everyone.
I believe that Houston is the reason that the Hon. John Cornyn, senior Senator for Texas, has no clue that: 1) brisket is not roasted in the oven for 3 and 1/2 hours; and is not covered with a red sauce that looks remarkably like tomato paste or ketchup.
That’s how my mother used to make brisket. My mother was a terrible cook.
Don’t get me started on a proper Brisket or other BBQ. Just google Blacks or Smittys in Lockhart and order from there.
Neither the Proud Boys nor the Boogaloo movement are white nationalist. I can provide a more complete refutation of these claims, but I am not going to derail this further unless requested.
It’s telling that you focus on that, rather than offering to refute Prickett’s claim that “[t]hese are people trying to increase tensions, not decrease them.”
Jason K.: I haven’t met any Boogaloos, that I know of. The Proud Boys I’ve interacted with have all been racist assholes, which, I’ll admit, may not be white nationalists, although I believe that they are. Second, don’t waste your time. I’m not likely to give much weight to an anonymous internet guy’s opinion or posts.
>The Proud Boys I’ve interacted with have all been racist assholes, which, I’ll admit, may not be white nationalists, although I believe that they are.
If you had any grasp of the facts you would have known that the leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio is a black Cuban. Interesting background for a, “white supremacist”. Perhaps you ought to give as little weight to the NYT op-ed page as you do random internet guys.
No, this isn’t going to turn into a defense of the Proud Boys. Sorry if this touched a nerve. This ends here.
“Police should not be sent on mental health calls; they are not trained in counseling, nor, for the most part, do they have the temperament. No, what we should be looking at is adding social workers and mental health specialists to handle those types of calls.”
Hi, Honey (Greg, not Scott). You wrote a great article here, but I have to comment on the quoted portion above. Although sending a cop to respond to a mental health disturbance is a good way to get civilians killed, you can’t send social workers in alone to respond to mentally ill persons who are wielding weapons or exhibiting other dangerous behavior. That would be a good way to get a social worker killed or injured.
I agree that cops shouldn’t be sent in alone in those situations, unless they are specifically trained in de-escalation techniques with mentally ill individuals. Perhaps additional training for police, or a mental health worker/cop partnership would help reduce the deadliness of these encounters.
How about some brisket for dinner?
Dear, no one said anything about sending unarmed social workers in alone to calls where people are armed. Paramedics have to respond to those calls too, and they manage just fine by responding with the police.
Brisket? I’ll need an offset reverse smoker (Oklahoma Joe’s) , a 30-lb back of lump charcoal (Royal Oak preferably), a small bag of applewood, a small bag of hickory (chucks, not chips). Then I’ll need a 12-16 lb. brisket, makings for the rub (and no, I’m not going to tell you what’s in it, other than salt, pepper, chili, and cumin), and 16 hours of cooking time. Oh, and an airline ticket for Scott and Dr SJ, and you or Charlie will have to pick them up at the airport.
You are so high maintenance 😉
As I should be… dear, 😀
I find it interesting that we seem to take seriously the idea that cops’ training can be extended in a way that will let them deal effectively with dangerous people in mental health crises, but nobody would suggest it’s possible to extend the training of mental health professionals in a way that would let them deal with mentally ill people who are dangerous.
I am the author from Seattle PD. Thank you for taking the time to debate by assertions. Like you, I want American cops to kill fewer citizens. The way to achieve this is through Training and Technology. Example: de-escalation scenarios and beanbag shotguns. These things take money! Starving law enforcement of resources will sabotage further reform. It will also increase violent crime. In Seattle, we had 28 murders in 2019. As of this writing, we’re up to 56 and the year is not over.
Welcome.
In your op-ed, you say police aren’t militarized, but you only offer your personal experience of not carrying a belt-fed machine gun as a cop to support that statement. You further state, “Contrary to activist complaints, SWAT teams’ armored vehicles, armored clothing and special training help them avoid deadly force, not commit it.”
Yet in the 2017 study “Militarization and police violence: The case of the 1033 program,” researchers from Harvard, Stanford, and Gardner-Webb found “a positive and statistically significant relationship between 1033 transfers and fatalities from officer-involved shootings across all models.” In short, giving police officers military equipment increases the rate of human (and dog) fatalities.
Even setting that study aside, the mere existence of the 1033 program means that police officers have become militarized: the whole point of the program is to arm them with used military equipment for nothing more than the cost of shipping.
So, do you have any data that supports your assertion that police are not militarized?
You should talk to Scott about doing some guest columns. You write well, you give a different perspective than others give, and it’s clear that you care about these issues. You’re the type of guy we were looking for at Fault/Lines, before it went under, where we had criminal defense attorneys, a law professor or two, two or three federal judges, including Judge Richard Kopf, a couple of prosecutors, and two cops (well, I was an ex-cop).
My personal thought is we need to drastically change our training method (and we’ll have to pay for that), especially as to officer safety; and we need to change the model from that of a highly skilled trade to that of a profession. Require a bachelor’s degree at a minimum, then a year-long professional law-enforcement course, both classroom and field training with FTOs. Spend a lot more time on continuing education.
We also need more accountability through the courts, especially with officer-involved shootings. Outside agencies should handle the criminal investigation, a special prosecutor appointed, and a visiting judge assigned. If there are no charges, the complete investigative report should be released to the public. We’ll have some officers tried that will be acquitted, and some that won’t. It’s the same standard that we hold the general public to, it should also apply to us. The fact that nationwide, 15-20% of the people we kill are unarmed is way, way too high.
We need to limit SWAT use to what it was originally designed to handle, which means that we have good, hard intel about the target. We need to eliminate nighttime raids except in emergencies, and we should have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get a no-knock warrant.
I really hope that you talk to Scott, and you will add your voice to the rest of ours.
Responding to item 4 about the police being militarized, there has also been more militarization among gun owners. 20 years ago – were as many people using semi automatic or fully automatic firearms? It seems like there are more now. Police need to have the weaponry, training and ability to subdue criminals who might use these types of weapons. Only arming police with tasers and a six round revolver wouldn’t do the job.