4th Cir denies QI where 5 officers shot a man 22 times as he lay motionless: “Although we recognize that our police officers are often asked to make split-second decisions, we expect them to do so with respect for the dignity and worth of black lives.” bit.ly/3cWyDk4
/2 The man was apparently homeless and walking, but had committed no offense. The cops initiated the encounter, demanding that he provide ID and asking if he had a weapon. He did have a knife on him and so he asked a clarifying question. Things went sideways from there.
/3 Before the 5 cops shot him 22 times, the facts suggest “Jones had been tased four times, hit in the brachial plexus, kicked, and placed in a choke hold, at which point gurgling can be heard in the video. A jury could reasonably infer that Jones was struggling to breathe.”
/4 Key to denying qualified immunity is there are genuine issues to be tried as to whether Jones was already incapacitated before they fired on him: “it is not clear that Jones continued to pose an immediate threat of physical harm to the officers”
/5 Jones did eventually pull the knife and stab an officer, but they had already pinned him down by the time they stepped back and unloaded on him. It’s noteworthy the opinion says “Officer Lehman quickly escalated the encounter”—meaning its uncontroverted.
/6 At one point, Jones is tased and then runs off but find himself cornered in a bookstore stoop. Check out these words: “What we see is a scared man who is confused about what he did wrong, and an officer that does nothing to alleviate that man’s fear.”
/7 It’s clear the killings of Michael Brown and George Floyd are on the judges’ minds: “Before the ink dried on this opinion, the FBI opened an investigation into yet another death of a black man at the hands of police, this time George Floyd in Minneapolis. This has to stop.”
/8 You might have noticed that I haven’t mentioned Jones’s race, but you should be able to guess based on the egregiousness of his treatment and the officers’ outsized assumptions that he posed a social threat.
/9 One thing to notice is that the 4th Circuit here reversed the district court, which had granted qualified immunity to the officers, which meant no trial. This happens most of the time. The reversal, comparatively less so.
/10 One more thing about the knife. Jones never uses it to menace anyone; he pulls it out only while one officer is choking him out. For all we know, he thinks he’s about to be killed. The judges handled this part of the record well.
/11 But once the officers see the knife, they must choose how to react. What the court is saying here is that officers don’t get to just execute you on the street even if a weapon appears. The cops step back, and yell “drop the knife,” but he’s probably out cold when they shoot.
/12 What the court seems to be saying is cops can’t just go to lethal force; they must keep assessing the situation as they go. And here, given the prone man and 5 officers, someone needed to stop and check if he was conscious—even by giving more than a few seconds to respond.
/13 This encounter shows several things: how easily officers demand things like ID, try to get consent for a search, how they always read nervousness in another human being as evidence of a guilty mind, how few are capable of deesclating and respond with overwhelming force.
14/ #DefundThePolice means different things to different people, but what it means to me is to reduce the overall number of encounters between police and ordinary citizens. That alone will help reduce violent encounters and racial indignities.
15/ Many people do agree that the police are being asked to do too many things. The answer is to take certain things off their list. I’m not sure whether anyone realized Jones was homeless and possibly mentally ill, but if so they should have not escalated and sought expertise.
16/ In PRACTICAL EQUALITY, I wrote about criminalization of homelessness as an equality problem. Everyone knows that’s what is happening but equality jurisprudence can’t seem to do anything about the situation because a city doesn’t come out and say, “we hate homeless people.”
/17 As a result, advocates for the homeless have had to chip away at such laws using other legal concepts like free speech, though those ideas too have their limitations.
/18 What #DefundthePolice invites us to do is to think functionally, and with respect to homeless people, more ideally, as to whether armed policing is even a good idea when it comes to the homeless or the mentally ill.
/19 It would mean finding more off-ramps when an encounter involves someone who is homeless, many of whom are already battling other ills. Those off-ramps have to be built into policing even as you keep armed police from being the automatic person to deal with such folks.
/20 Some of us have long worried that the criminalization of homelessness—laws that say no sleeping, no feeding, no begging—has created a dangerous culture on the street where police are incentivized to initiate encounters with innocent people down on their luck.
/21 The sweeps of homeless people—where cops come in and destroy what little property a homeless person owns and throw them into jail for awhile, or else beat them until they agree to go elsewhere—feed the sense that poor people are less than human.
