Brett Hernandez, a San Francisco cop, was suspended for having unlawfully searched a guy who parked illegally.
On January 24, 2019, around 11 a.m., Ibrahim Nimer Shiheiber pulled up to the curb in front of a sandwich shop in the Inner Sunset to grab a Philly cheesesteak for lunch. He parked in a red zone with his tail end blocking a fire hydrant. Shiheiber put his hazards on and headed toward the shop.
At that moment, an SFPD cruiser pulled up and two officers jumped out. Officer Hernandez and a female officer named Jacqueline Hernandez, no relation, approached the then-30-year-old and turned on their body cameras.
The only justification for this search would have been a founded suspicion that Shiheiber was armed and presented a threat to officer safety, which would have justified a pat down. There was no basis to suspect he was armed, however, while Shiheiber was wrong about most of his assertions to the officers, that he wasn’t “parked” but “stopped,” he was right that they had no authority to touch him. And Hernandez did and was punished for it.
But what’s mostly curious about this encounter is that it escalated because Shiheiber was non-compliant and Hernandez paid him back for his “bad attitude.” What gave rise to to this resistance is unknown, but there are many on social media offering “advice” about what cops are allowed to do, what people’s rights are and how people should engage with police.
Perhaps Shiheiber preferred to assert his rights, or what he believed his rights to be, rather than get through the encounter as quickly and painlessly as possible. But in doing so, an otherwise banal encounter escalated into a search and seizure, with Shiheiber on the ground, shirt ripped and hip hurt. Was it worth it?
This raises an issue that was discussed by commenter Carlyle Moulton here at great length with regard to Greg Prickett’s post about the killing of Patrick Lyoya.
For a black man in the US running from the police is rational because if he/she fails to escape he/she may end up dead. Lyoya’s fate simply emphasises this.
While this may be substantively false, Carlyle raised another issue about the perception of a police stop in the minds of black men. There is a pervasive belief that a black man stopped by a cop is likely to be maimed or killed. Whether it’s believed to be a probability or merely a fair possibility, the point remains that when given a choice between what is perceived to be a very possible death sentence and the risk of flight, flight makes a lot more sense than sticking around to be shot and killed.
The responses to Carlyle’s point, made a few times at greater length, were unavailing. It may well be true had Lyoya not resisted and fled, he would be alive today, but that doesn’t address the perception raised by Carlyle. And it’s most certainly true that police killing a black man is an extremely unusual event, contrary to the widespread belief that cops are slaughtering black guys, or anybody, in the streets. This is not to minimize police abuse and needless violence, but to note that out of millions of police encounters, the probability of someone being killed is negligible.
What gives rise to this false belief that black men are better off resisting and fleeing from police than not for fear of being killed? The threat has been grossly exaggerated by activists for the obvious purpose of creating outrage and support for reform. This is understandable, as a nuanced approach to police violence is unlikely to be sufficiently outrageous to get many people worked up about it. It’s far more effective to turn every encounter into an outrage, create the appearance of constant brutality, to gain support.
But does this distortion of reality help or hurt? On the other hand, this hype may be causing people to react to police in a way they believe to be rational, but creates the very scenario they are trying to avoid by resisting and fleeing. This is the self-fulfilling prophesy problem, as the second sentence of Carlyle’s comment shows. Lyoya’s death shows that his fear of police was justified and his reaction was rational. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
The traditional legal advice is “comply now, grieve later.” The point is to survive the encounter as arguing or fighting with cops rarely does much good. Yes, there are limits to it, and there are horrible outlier stories, but for the vast majority of encounters, this approach has enabled everybody to make it home for dinner. Unless you’re hoping to be a cause célèbre, most people prefer not to be harmed.
There is, however, a fair argument to be made that this enables and encourages cops to exceed their authority, to believe that they are unconstrained by law and god-like in their power on the street. “Grieve later” hasn’t done much to fix the problem, and while police killings may be negligible, exceeding their authority is commonplace and rarely addressed.
The belief raised by Carlyle is certainly understandable, as this is what people hear constantly about police encounters. And if they’re on the good guy curve, what else would a person know but what he’s being constantly told? Then again, are the police to assume that a resisting, fleeing person is doing so because of a good faith belief that the police are likely to kill him or assume that he will cause the cop harm?
And if being obsequious to police is the most likely way to make it through an encounter without being harmed, are we being enablers of police misconduct? Is it necessary that we sacrifice our constitutional rights to make it through a police encounter unscathed? And of critical importance, are those hyping fear of police violence causing people to react in ways that make it far more likely that black men will be harmed and killed because they believed their lies? Do black lives matter enough not to create a false belief that’s likely to get them killed?
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I think that the fear of being killed by police is certainly a factor, but more so, it’s the build up of humiliating and harassing encounters experienced by most poor (largely black and Latino) folks that lead to he widespread distrust of police in those communities. The illegal pat downs, the traffic stops for broken tail lights that are magically working after the stop, being told that they match the description of someone they don’t actually look like, the tickets, etc. If you recall, Michael Brown was originally confronted because he was walking down the middle of the street and after his death, many residents of Ferguson spoke at length about how the largely white (and non-Ferguson residing) police department treated the citizens of Ferguson like cash registers by giving out loads of tickets for minor and/or non-existent violations. Comply now and grieve later only works if there are consequences for police, and for the most part there are no consequences for abuse of power After a while, compliance becomes too much to bear.
Would Michael Brown be alive today if he complied then, grieved later? No doubt the black, Hispanic and poor people are disproportionate targets of police encounters, although oddly enough there seems to be significant support for police on the streets suggesting that they know something about their life that we don’t. But as bad as it is to be baselessly tossed by the cops, is it better to be baselessly tossed then tossed and killed?
Brown was, for lack of a better term, heading down a bad path. Perhaps he would have remained alive longer had he not be subject to unnecessary police contact over a the “crime” of walking down the middle of an empty street. I agree with you that comply and grieve is the best and most logical way of surviving a police encounter but I still think that citizens of this country are subject to far too many police encounters.
The interesting paradox of the situation that says black men are irrational for thinking this way and yet cops are not only rational but celebrated for the same line of thinking. Only one side can justifiably use force based on the whole “one second” rule.
Even in the conversation after Pickett’s article the responses to Carlyle’s hypothesis of black male fear it showed that there was equally large policeman fear and yet only one side of that was rational or understandable.
It’s illustrating that everyone needs to use the outrageous circumstances to justify their own brand of violence and no one seams to want to discuss the steps needed to fix their own team. As much as I hate seeing instances of abuse, your advice always seems to ring true. Resisting may seem like the right thing, but it’s never the safest thing for the individual. Just as escalating may seem like right approach to handling criminals, I severely doubt it’s the correct route.
But then again, I’m just one voice in the millions. Here’s to hoping something gets figured out someday.
Cops have the First Rule of Policing for a reason, and it’s not to give their targets a fair fight.
I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss this as the fevered machinations of recent media coverage. The narrative that blacks are being executed in the streets en masse has only been pushed for a little over a decade now. Yet black families, almost without exception, have been giving their children “the talk” of how to interact with police (and white people in general) for at least a century now. There’s clearly something going on, to that extent that even the Mass SC admitted a few years ago that it was reasonable for blacks in America to fear the police.
The extent to which that fear is rational is hard to pin down die to a lack of good statistics, given that police arent particularly open about how many beatings they deliver on a daily basis. What little information that exists, however, supports the notion that blacks should be more fearful than whites, though. It puts us in a similar situation to question #69 from yesterday’s post, where the statistics tell you something, but what this is isn’t easy to pin down.
Glad I could clear that up for you. Imma go get some coffee now and see if th as that helps my thinkinating work more better.
The whole point of “The Talk” is to keep kids safe. This is the opposite.
Safe from what? Why does a young kid need to be kept safe from a cop? And why only little black kids? “The Talk” is almost unknown among white families, yet universal among black ones.
The two approaches might be the opposite, but they stem from the same cause: black Americans’ fear of the police. A fear that is palpably visible for maybe a century now.
There is a general mechanism in the minds of all humans that distinguishes between real humans that are like us and sub-humans who are not like us, the sinister THEM. I call this the US THEM DIVIDE. Racism is only one of many prejudicial ~isms that afflict human minds that all depend on these same mechanisms of individual and group psychology. A few of them are class prejudice, misogyny, prejudice against sexual deviants and socio-economic prejudice. The entire list is quite long. The stereotype of the White race and LEOs in the minds of a Black man has a strong connection to the attribute DANGEROUS and in the minds of White people and LEOs (including those with brown skin) their is as strong association between that of big black male and ARM DANGEROUS CRIMINAL. Encounters across racial and LEO lines are fraught with strong emotions and above normal anxiety and stress hormone levels. In such environments people are more likely to make bad decisions very quickly.
One delusion we humans have about ourselves is that we are rational, others not so much. In fact most human behaviour comes from the unconscious mind not from the conscious. The unconscious mind is not a big and inscrutable mystery it is just 99% of our thinking processes. Have you ever racked your conscious mind on a problem getting nowhere for hours, slept on it and had a solution pop into your consciousness apparently from nowhere? The fact is the unconscious is always working away in the background like a powerful AI on things that most concern us but it does not make us feel tired. (the best way of thinking is to attract the interest of your unconscious in whatever problems concern you and then direct your conscious mind to something else completely different. In my view the conscious mind is the mind’s post office, a tiny annex in which communications to or from others in language are prepared for export or decoded after receipt. If we didn’t have language we wouldn’t have a conscious mind at all. When we make decisions quickly we are usually responding to ideas in the unconscious and our unconsciousness are full of weird and silly ideas. Being controlled by bad ideas is not good but since we are mostly unaware of them we cannot realize how negative they are. In the minds of Black men I believe that there is a meme that interaction with a LEO in courtesy is humiliating and in the minds of LEOs that failing to act with dominance over Blacks results in a loss of face. Machismo dominates both.
I let you have this comment since I used your comment to Greg in the post, but you would have been wiser not to comment.
SHG.
Yes I am not a wise person I do say things that might make others think badly of me. However I believe in commenting on blog posts where I believe wrongly or rightly that I have something of value to the poster and other commenters.
I find many posts and comments on your blog to be extremely interesting and to be relevant to other things about which I think. I don’t think I could have generated the ideas I have posted if I had not read Greg Prickett’s post from yesterday and yours today. I do my thinking by reading blogs and posting things that I believe are relevant to the blog and comment thread topics. Your blog is very thought stimulating regardless whether my comment get through moderation or not. I consider that you and your commenters are doing me a service by helping me think. That is because your posts and the comments are often about topics that concern me very much as are the topic and comments on this one.
“Being controlled by bad ideas is not good but since we are mostly unaware of them we cannot realize how negative they are.”
So, no one ever tried to tell them that running with gangs, selling drugs, and living the “Thug Life” in general would have bad outcomes? Sorry, I don’t believe that. While there are exceptions, I’ve known plenty of inner city Moms who tried to raise their sons right but the lure of the streets was stronger.
“In the minds of Black men I believe that there is a meme that interaction with a LEO in courtesy is humiliating and in the minds of LEOs that failing to act with dominance over Blacks results in a loss of face. Machismo dominates both.”
There is much truth in the first part of your thought. But cops are taught to treat people as they act. Come on strong and the cops go strong; be calm and the cops are calm. Machismo is a problem in many young men of every color. The lucky ones grow out of it.
I would say it is a shame the cop got suspended, and I will be calling SFPD and the authorities over there and telling them I saw the video online and thought the cops were totally in the right, and reasonable, given this weird combative dude made a reasonable person feel some concern he might be violent.
I appreciate your pointing out this injustice to me. THis cop should not have been suspended, he should have been given a pat on the back and a bonus. The abuse of cops by people who claim they are being abused is disgusting. The sky high rates of black on black murder, greatly increased recently, in my opinion partly due to the war on the police. I support the police. I think it is too bad people like this dude are out free in society to make things worse for decent people.
Everybody believes they’re reasonable. Some are wrong.
Exactly but some some of the time, many most of the time and a few all of the time.
Irrational lumping is taking place with the alleged “perception.” It might logically tie to the “fleeing,” but not the “resisting,” which is not likely to lead to escape, and if anything. Increases the risk of a bad outcome.
Some resisting doesn’t. Some does.
The San Francisco incident could have been avoided if… the citizen had just acknowledged he parked illegally politely asked that he not be ticketed or accept a ticket and move on…. Or the cops could have checked his ID ( no search) and admonished him and moved on.
Something some may not have thought about is other thoughts going through the mind of someone being stopped; whatever the ethnicity or color.
Is it fear of being shot? Or is it projecting in one’s mind going to jail, getting a ticket which might be a significant financial hit, going to court… missing work etc etc. Believe it or not those scenarios quickly go through one’s mind so the gut reaction is to try to escape.
I believe it’s best to comply and grieve later; no matter how disillusioned one feels about what that grievance will result in. But I think often the reason some try to escape is for the reasons I stated above.
What caught my interest about the Frisco case was that it was such a petty matter, a parking ticket, that needlessly escalated on both sides. Was being argumentative with the cop likely to serve any useful interest? Yet, he was immediately belligerent.
Just makes me think what a better world it would be if everyone went out into it with the resolve to be polite and respectful to every human they interacted with that day.
I’m far to old to have those thoughts.
So the driver got his ego and hip bruised and a torn shirt, the cop two weeks suspended and unfortunately I’d wager neither will leave the encounter any wiser.
Your use of the phrase “immediately beligerent” is striking. I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable for an officer to conduct a safety (pat down) search of an “immediately beligerent” person. It seems reasonable to think that immediately beligerent people are a much greater risk
Five years ago, that would be true. Today, too many people are belligerent with cops for it to have any significance.
From the cited post:
“There’s no risk of death from buying a losing lottery ticket.”
But there is a risk of death from claiming a winning lottery ticket, witness the arrest of a man in NY when said ticket was erroneously reported atolen.