Cops: "Why Bother?"

If you've been watching LA media you've been treated to no less than three different videos featuring the police using force to subdue an unruly individual. To recap, we have two officers attempting to handcuff an obviously resisting man and the cops popping him in the head to get him to submit, an arrest in Venice from over a year ago in which a guy is pepper-sprayed after being handcuffed and placed in the back of a patrol unit, and the latest is video phone images of a UCLA student who decided to have a bad day and got tasered for his efforts. All three, taken without full context, could lead one to think that the officers overstepped their bounds. Therein lies the problem - context.

None of these videos shows the full incident. We all remember the "thumpin'" Rodney King got back in the early 90's, but even that tape didn't show the entire incident. The media loves to play these up in order to stir up controversy, but one of these days we will all regret that decision when we can no longer find people willing to serve in our law enforcement agencies.

Jack Dunphy (the nom-de-cyber of an LAPD officer to writes frequently at National Review) details a situation he had earlier in his career that could have led to the same type of over-scrutiny we're seeing today:

Had video cameras been as ubiquitous years ago as they are now I might have found myself in a situation similar to the one faced by those two officers today. My partner and I were patrolling a neighborhood well known for the availability of various street drugs, and we spotted a driver we suspected of having bought some. When we pulled him over we expected a routine encounter and a routine arrest. I asked the man to step out of his car, but when he did so he kept one hand behind his back. So obvious was his attempt to hide something that I grabbed his arm and asked him what he had. What fell to the ground at his feet was not the bindle of drugs I expected but a semi-automatic pistol. As you might have guessed, the mood of our encounter took a different tack.

The fight was on. The man immediately dove to the ground and tried to retrieve the gun, and my partner and I dove on top of him to keep him from doing so. The man was on his hands and knees, with one hand only inches from the gun. We would have had every justification in shooting him, but that would have required us to release our grip on him, perhaps allowing him to grab his gun before we could unholster our own. We were at last able to put just a bit more distance between him and his gun, giving me the split second I needed to pull my sap from my back pocket and hit him in the head with it.

It was effective. The guy collapsed in a heap, blood trickling from the wound I had opened on his scalp. For a moment I thought I had killed him, and for more than a moment I wished I had. He had made his decision that he would shoot me and my partner, and if we had not acted decisively and, yes, violently, he most surely would have. Recalling the incident to record it here is indeed chilling.

There was a single witness to the incident, a woman sitting on her porch across the street. She had seen everything, she told our sergeant, and she said we had beaten the man “for no reason at all.” The sergeant asked her if she had seen the gun the man had dropped. She had not, and she agreed that this added information changed her interpretation of what she had witnessed.

Just as the woman failed to see the gun from across the street, if she had recorded the incident with a video camera the gun probably wouldn’t have been visible on the tape, either. I can envision such a tape being played, over and over and over, on the news and on the Internet, and I can imagine being pilloried in the media just as the two Hollywood officers in the current tape are being pilloried today. And I can imagine myself saying, just as the two Hollywood cops must be saying, just as cops all over the LAPD are saying, Why bother?

Have we become so allergic to uses of force that we can't even allow our police officers to do what's needed in order to take the bad guys down? Don't any of these critics ever watch Cops? The world is full of not-nice people, and there are a bunch of heroes who have agreed to deal with the not-nice people in our society, but if we keep hammering away at every incomplete incident video, we won't be able to get good people willing to serve.

Of course, next will be the civil rights lawsuits and other nonsense designed to extort money from the taxpayers to pay the perps for their stupidity. The message to the bad guys is clear: bring a camera.