It's rare to hear an author say, “Researching and writing this book has made me want to scream.” But perhaps it's not surprising, given the topic of Gary Younge’s Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives -- the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly death-by-gun of startling numbers of kids in this country -- and the time he spent tracking down the stories of the young Americans who died on a single day in November 2013 in separate incidents nationwide.
After all, these days, the U.S. is a haven and a heaven for guns. It’s hard to find another nation on the planet -- except in places like Syria or Afghanistan where whole populations have been thrown into desperate internecine conflicts -- in which guns are so readily available. Between 1968 and 2015, the number of guns in the U.S. essentially doubled to 300 million. Between 2010 and 2013 alone, American arms manufacturers doubled their production of weapons to almost 11 million a year. And those guns have gotten more deadly as well. Military-style assault rifles and semi-automatic handguns are now the weapons of choice for mass killers and “lone wolf” terrorists in this country. In almost all cases those killers got their guns and ammo (often high-capacity magazines capable of holding 15 to 100 rounds) in perfectly legal fashion. And it’s getting easier to carry concealed weapons all the time. Missouri, for instance, recently passed a law that allows the carrying of such a weapon without either a permit or training of any sort.
Under the circumstances, no one should be surprised that kids die in remarkable numbers from guns for all kinds of reasons. Believe me, though, that makes it no less shocking when you read Younge’s unsettling and moving book. Long a journalist, columnist, and editor for the British Guardian stationed here in the U.S., today he offers us a look at the death toll from guns among our young and the way we Americans generally like to explain that toll to ourselves (or rather how we like to explain it away).-Tom Engelhardt
An All-American Slaughter The Youthful Carnage of America’s Gun Culture By Gary Younge
Every day, on average, seven kids and teens are shot dead in America. Election 2016 will undoubtedly prove consequential in many ways, but lowering that death count won’t be one of them. To grapple with fatalities on that scale -- 2,500 dead children annually -- a candidate would need a thoroughgoing plan for dealing with America's gun culture that goes well beyond background checks. In addition, he or she would need to engage with the inequality, segregation, poverty, and lack of mental health resources that add up to the environment in which this level of violence becomes possible. Think of it as the huge pile of dry tinder for which the easy availability of firearms is the combustible spark. In America in 2016, to advocate for anything like the kind of policies that might engage with such issues would instantly render a candidacy implausible, if not inconceivable -- not least with the wealthy folks who now fund elections.
So the kids keep dying and, in the absence of any serious political or legislative attempt to tackle the causes of their deaths, the media and the political class move on to excuses. From claims of bad parenting to lack of personal responsibility, they regularly shift the blame from the societal to the individual level. Only one organized group at present takes the blame for such deaths. The problem, it is suggested, isn’t American culture, but gang culture.
Researching my new book, Another Day in the Death of America, about all the children and teens shot dead on a single random Saturday in 2013, it became clear how often the presence of gangs in neighborhoods where so many of these kids die is used as a way to dismiss serious thinking about why this is happening. If a shooting can be described as “gang related,” then it can also be discounted as part of the “pathology” of urban life, particularly for people of color. In reality, the main cause, pathologically speaking, is a legislative system that refuses to control the distribution of firearms, making America the only country in the world in which such a book would have been possible.
“Gang Related”
The obsession with whether a shooting is “gang related” and the ignorance the term exposes brings to mind an interview I did 10 years ago with septuagenarian Buford Posey in rural Mississippi. He had lived in Philadelphia, Mississippi, around the time that three civil rights activists -- James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner -- were murdered. As I spoke to him about that era and the people living in that town (some of whom, like him, were still alive), I would bring up a name and he would instantly interject, “Well, he was in the Klan,” or “Well, his Daddy was in the Klan,” or sometimes he would just say “Klan” and leave it at that.
After a while I had to stop him and ask for confirmation. “Hang on,” I said, “I can't just let you say that about these people without some proof or corroboration. How do you know they were in the Klan?”
“Hell,” he responded matter-of-factly, “I was in the Klan. Near everybody around here was in the Klan around that time. Being in the Klan was no big deal.”
Our allegiances and affiliations are, of course, our choice. Neither Posey nor any of the other white men in Philadelphia had to join the Klan, and clearly some were more enthusiastic participants than others. (Posey himself would go on to support the civil rights movement.)
It's no less true that context shapes such choices. If Posey had grown up in Vermont, it's unlikely that he'd ever have joined the Klan. If a white Vermonter had been born and raised in Mississippi in those years, the likelihood is that he'd have had a pressed white sheet in the closet for special occasions.
At the time, for white men in Philadelphia the Klan was the social mixing place du jour. It was what you did if you had any hope of advancing locally, did not want to be left out of things, or simply preferred to swim with the tide. Since pretty much everyone you knew was involved in one way or another, to be white and live in Philadelphia then was to be, in some way, “Klan related.” That doesn't mean being in the Klan should give anyone a pass, but it does mean that if you wanted to understand how it operated, why it had the reach it did, and ultimately how to defeat it rather than just condemn it, you first had to understand its appeal in that moment.
The same is true of gangs today in urban America. On the random day I picked for my book, 10 children and teens died by gun. Not all of their assailants have been caught and probably they never will be. Depending on how you define the term, however, it would be possible to argue that eight of those killings were gang related. Either the assailant or the victim was (or was likely to have been) part of a group that could be called a gang. Only two were clearly not gang related -- either the victim and the shooter were not in a gang or membership in a gang had nothing to do with the shooting. But all 10 deaths did have one clear thing in common: they were all gun-related.
The emphasis on gang membership has always seemed to me like a way of filtering child deaths into two categories: deserving and undeserving. If a shooting was gang related then it’s assumed that the kid had it coming and was, in some way, responsible for his or her own death. Only those not gang related were innocents and so they alone were worthy of our sympathy.
Making a “Blacklist”
The more I spoke to families and people on the ground, the more it became clear how unhelpful the term “gang related” is in understanding who is getting shot and why. As a term, it’s most often used not to describe but to dismiss.
Take Edwin Rajo, 16, who was shot dead in Houston, Texas, at about 8 p.m. on that November 23rd. He lived in Bellaire Gardens, a low-rise apartment complex on a busy road of commercial and residential properties in an area called Gulfton in southwest Houston. It sat between a store selling bridal wear and highly flammable-looking dresses for quinceañera -- the celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday -- and the back of a Fiesta supermarket, part of a Texas-based, Hispanic-oriented chain with garish neon lighting that makes you feel as though you’re shopping for groceries in Las Vegas. Opposite it was a pawnshop, a beauty salon, a Mexican taqueria, and a Salvadorean restaurant.
The Southwest Cholos ran this neighborhood, complex by complex. There was no avoiding them. “They start them really, really young,” one of Edwin's teachers told me. “In elementary. Third grade, fourth grade. And that’s just how it is for kids... You join for protection. Even if you’re not cliqued in, so long as you’re associated with them, you’re good. You have to claim a clique to be safe. If you’re not, if you’re by yourself, you’re gonna get jumped.”
In other words, if you grow up in Bellaire Gardens you are a gang member in the same way that Soviet citizens were members of the Communist Party and Iraqis under Saddam Hussein, the Baath Party. There is precious little choice, which means that, in and of itself, gang affiliation doesn’t tell you much.
Edwin, a playful and slightly immature teenager, was not, in fact, an active member of the Cholos, though he identified with them. Indeed, you get the impression that they considered him something of a liability. “They accepted him,” said his teacher. “He hung with them. But he wasn’t in yet.” His best friend in the complex, Camilla (not her real name), was in the gang, as allegedly was her mother. She sported the Cholo-style dress and had a gang name. After several altercations with someone from a rival gang, who threatened them and took a shot at Camilla's brother, she decided to get a gun.
“We were thinking like little kids,” Camilla told me. “I didn’t really know anything about guns. I just know you shoot with it and that’s it.”
Sure enough, Edwin was at Camilla's apartment that night and suggested they play with the gun. In the process, she shot him, not realizing that, even though the clip was out, one bullet was still in the chamber. So was that shooting gang related? After all, the shooter was in a gang. She had been threatened by someone from a rival gang and Edwin may indeed have had aspirations to be in her gang.
Or was it an accidental shooting in which two kids who knew nothing about guns acquired one and one of them got killed while they were messing around?
In an environment in which gangs run everything, most things most people do are in some way going to be “gang related.” But defining all affiliation as a kind of complicity in violence not only means writing off children in entire communities for being born in the wrong place at the wrong time, but criminalizing them in the process.
For one thing, the criteria for gang membership couldn’t be more subjective and loose. Gang leaders don’t exactly hand out membership cards. Sometimes it's just a matter of young people hanging out. Take Stanley Taylor, who was shot dead in the early hours of that November morning in Charlotte, North Carolina. He spent a lot of his time on Beatties Ford Road with his friends. “I ain’t gonna say it was a gang,” says his buddy Trey. “But it was a neighborhood thing. Beatties Ford. We got our own little clique. We on the West Side. North Side is a whole different neighborhood you don’t even fool with. Everybody was together. This my brother, this my brother. We all in the same clique. We got each other’s back. I’m not going to let nobody else touch you. If you hit him, I’m gonna hit you. Cos I’m his brother.”
Stanley was shot at a gas station in the wake of an altercation with Demontre Rice, who was from the North Side, after Rice allegedly almost ran him over as he pulled in. It's not obvious that either man knew where the other was from and yet if Rice were in a gang (something I can’t even confirm), that would, of course, make his killing gang related.
Sometimes gangs do have actual rites of initiation. Since, however, gang affiliation can be a guide to criminal activity, authorities are constantly trying to come up with more definite ways of identifying gang members. Almost inevitably, such attempts quickly fall back on stereotypes. A 1999 article in Colorlines, for instance, typically pointed out that in “at least five states, wearing baggy FUBU jeans and being related to a gang suspect is enough to meet the ‘gang member’ definition. In Arizona, a tattoo and blue Adidas sneakers are sufficient.” In suburban Aurora, Colorado, local police decided that any two of the following constituted gang membership: “slang,” “clothing of a particular color,” “pagers,” “hairstyles,” “jewelry.”
Black people made up 11% of Aurora’s population and 80% of its gang database. The local head of the ACLU was heard to say, “They might as well call it a blacklist.”
Under the Gun
Gangs are neither new nor racially specific. From the Irish, Polish, Jewish, and Puerto Rican gangs of New York to the Mafia, various types of informal gatherings of mostly, but not exclusively, young men have long been part of Western life. They often connect the social, violent, entrepreneurial, and criminal.
None of this should in any way diminish the damaging, often lethal effects organized gangs have on the young. One of the boys who died that day, 18-year-old Tyshon Anderson from Chicago, was by all accounts a gang member. His godmother, Regina, had long expected his life to come to an early end. “He did burglary, sold drugs, he killed people. He had power in the street. He really did. Especially for such a young kid. He had power. A lot of people were intimidated by him and they were scared of him. I know he had bodies under his belt. I seen him grow up and I loved him and I know he could be a good kid. But there ain’t no point in sugarcoating it. He was a bad kid, too.” If I’d chosen another day that year, I could well have been reporting on one of Tyshon’s victims.
And although gangs involve a relatively small minority of young people, they still add up to significant numbers. According to the National Youth Gang Survey, in 2012 in the United States there were around 30,000 gangs and more than 800,000 gang members -- roughly the population of Amsterdam.
What’s new in all this isn’t the gangs themselves, but how much deadlier they’ve become in recent years. According to the National Youth Gang Survey, between 2007 and 2012, gang membership rose by 8%, but gang-related homicides leapt by 20%. It seems that the principal reason why gang activity has become so much more deadly is the increasingly easy availability of guns -- and of ever deadlier versions of such weaponry as well. Studies of Los Angeles County between 1979 and 1994 revealed that the proportion of gang incidents involving guns that ended in homicide leapt from 71% to 95%. "The contrast with the present is striking," argues sociologist Malcolm Klein, after reaching a similar conclusion in Philadelphia and East Los Angeles. "Firearms are now standard. They are easily purchased or borrowed and are more readily available than in the past."
This raises the stakes immeasurably when it comes to parents and caregivers trying to protect their adolescent children from bad company or poor choices (as parents of all classes and races tend to do). Identifying with a gang and doing something as seemingly harmless as wearing clothing of a certain color or befriending the wrong person can result in an early death. As a result, Gustin Hinnant's father in Goldsboro, North Carolina, used to burn his red clothes if he saw him wearing them too often. Gustin died anyway, hit in the head by a stray bullet meant for another boy who was in a gang. Pedro Cortez's grandmother in San Jose, California, used to similarly hide his red shirts -- the color identified with the local Nortenos gang -- just in case. Yet on that same November 23rd, Pedro, who was legally blind, was shot dead while walking in a park. He was dressed in black, but a friend who was with him was indeed wearing red.
Gangs are hardly unique to America, nor do Americans make worse parents than those elsewhere in the world, nor are their kids worse. There is, however, an unavoidable difference between the United States and all other western nations, or the book I wrote would have been inconceivable. This is the only place where, in addition to the tinder of poverty, inequality, and segregation, among other challenges, you have to include the combustible presence of guns -- guns everywhere, guns so available that they are essentially unavoidable.
As long as Americans refuse to engage with that straightforward fact of their social landscape, the kinds of deaths I recorded in my book will keep happening with gruesome predictability. In fact, I could have chosen almost any Saturday from at least the past two decades and produced the same work.
Dismissing such fatalities as “gang related” -- as, that is, victims to be dumped in some morally inferior category -- is a way of not facing an American reality. It sets the white noise of daily death sufficiently low to allow the country to go about its business undisturbed. It ensures a confluence of culture, politics, and economics guaranteeing that an average of seven children will wake up but not go to bed every day of the year, while much of the rest of the country sleeps soundly.
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If you’ve paid any attention at all to the news during the past year, or simply are on social media, then chances are you’ve seen real life videos of white cops shooting and killing black males when the situation did not warrant it. The most recent video to have surfaced captured the shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, for which he has been charged with first-degree murder. Earlier this year, a similar video was released of a white South Carolina cop shooting a 50-year-old unarmed black man in the back as he was running away. Although in these cases it was clear that the officers were not presented with any lethal threat while they fired their weapons multiple times, there are also countless cases where police officers have discharged their firearms when the level of threat was more ambiguous.
A classic example of this occurred in 2014 when another South Carolina policeman shot an unarmed African American who he had stopped in a parking lot for a seatbelt violation. The cop asked for an ID from the young man, who subsequently reached under the seat for his wallet, but was shot in the leg before he could even take it out. Upon inspection of the body-cam video, it becomes evident that the jumpy, trigger-happy cop probably did fear for his life. At the same time, it is also clear that he shouldn’t have, as the behavior of the driver involved nothing out of the ordinary. One could reasonably argue, and many did, that if the driver had been white, the cop wouldn’t have reacted the way he did.
Does this mean that the officer was a racist, and that he fired his gun purely out of hate? Without actually being inside the cop’s mind, there is no way to know for sure, but we can know for certain that many similar situations have transpired where white officers acted on gut instinct, and not out of animosity towards African Americans.
What needs to be understood by the prosecutors of such cases, and by the public at large, is the distinction between explicit and implicit racism. Where explicit racism is intentional and conscious, implicit racism involves a subconscious bias that causes one to treat members of other races unequally. Implicit racism likely plays a significant role in many of the cases involving white cops shooting black males, and it is also likely that these cops genuinely believe they hold no prejudice at all. In other words, white police officers may perceive black males to be a threat for behaving in ways that wouldn’t seem suspicious for white males. In fact, an overwhelming number of studies from the fields of neuroscience and psychology provide evidence to support this notion.
For example, studies have shown that while some white individuals answer survey questions with responses that reflect positive attitudes toward blacks, their behavioral responses on certain psychological tests reveal a different story. In one particular type of classic experiment, white participants are asked to quickly categorize words that pop up on a computer screen as either positive (like “happy”) or negative (like “fear”). However, just before each word is displayed, either a black or a white face quickly appears on the screen. What scientists have found time and time again, is that on average, white individuals categorize negative words much faster when they follow black faces, and positive words faster when they follow white faces. What these studies show is that many of us, despite what we believe about ourselves, have split-second negative reactions towards members of certain other races. And unfortunately, these subconscious racist tendencies may affect behavior in the real world, especially when police officers need to make blink-of-an-eye decisions about how to respond to a perceived threat.
Another type of experiment has provided further evidence that white individuals tend to subconsciously perceive black males as threatening. All individuals, regardless of race, show something that scientists call an “attention bias” for threat. For example, hundreds of studies have shown that humans tend to move their attention more quickly towards threatening aspects of the environment. In something called a “visual search task,” participants are instructed to locate one specific object in a clutter of objects on a computer screen while their eye movements are tracked. The data has shown that people are able to locate threatening objects, like spiders, or angry faces, much faster than they can find non-threatening ones, like ladybugs or happy faces. This makes sense in terms of evolution. Being able to rapidly locate threats in the environment allowed our ancestors to survive in an unpredictable and dangerous natural world. Interestingly, scientists have also found that white individuals have a similar attention bias for black faces, even when those faces have non-threatening expressions. Specifically, white participants tend to orient their attention towards black faces more quickly than same-race faces. These findings clearly show that on average, whites tend to subconsciously perceive blacks as threats, no matter how opposed to stereotypes or racial discrimination they may be.
Although these studies reveal subconscious racist behaviors that may be beyond one’s immediate control, they also offer solutions to the problem of white officers’ tendency to overreact in situations involving black suspects. First of all, all of us, including police officers and other figures of authority, must realize that these racial biases are real and prevalent. If we are aware of our innate predispositions then we can make a conscious effort to regulate our behavior. For instance, if a police officer is in a situation where his life is not being immediately threatened, he should go through the effort of assessing the situation logically before acting to ensure that he is not overreacting or using excessive force. Additionally, perhaps psychological and behavioral measures, such as surveys and visual computer tasks that test for implicit racial biases should be implemented as screening measures for police. If an officer does in fact exhibit these biases, he could be subjected to more in-depth training that can help mitigate these effects. Psychologists also have attention training tasks that can help dissolve cognitive biases, which can be provided to those at risk through computer apps.
Finally, we all must realize that in some situations the use of excessive force by police officers might not be intentional. Although that is by no means an excuse, it may help us to better understand why the outcome occurred, and how we can possibly prevent it from occurring in the future. And if police departments recognize that these implicit racial biases are in-fact driving some of their behavior, it would show the world that they are willing to admit there is a problem that they plan to address and correct.
Calvon Reid writhed in pain before he died. “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,” the 39-year-old screamed. Reid, an African American father of two, was held face-down by two police officers on a grassy lawn inside a predominantly white, gated retirement village in the south Florida suburb of Coconut Creek in the early hours of 22 February.
Moments before, two officers, standing 10ft away, had deployed their weapons in tandem. Not guns, but Tasers. The barbs struck Reid in the chest, according to eyewitnesses, unleashing 50,000-volt shocks to his body. Reid stopped breathing within moments; two days later, he died in the hospital.
“The whole thing seemed brutal,” 58-year-old locksmith John Arnendale told the Guardian from the ground-floor apartment at Wynmoor Village retirement homes where he watched Reid lose consciousness for the last time.
It is not clear why the officers were trying to arrest Reid in the first place. He was not accused of any crime. Though police say he was acting aggressively, other witnesses have disputed this.
“They didn’t have to use a Taser to stop him,” Arnendale said. “There were four of them and he wasn’t huge or particularly athletic. They certainly didn’t choose the least harsh thing to do with him. They were kind of punishing him.”
Reid’s case is, in many ways, tragically typical of the other deaths following the use of a Taser by police in 2015: he was unarmed, as in all but three cases. Like nearly 40% of the victims, he was black. And as in at least 53% of such cases, the suspect was displaying signs of intoxication before his or her death. As with many of these incidents, Reid died following shocks administered seemingly in violation of national guidelines, by officers belonging to a police department with lax rules on how these less-lethal weapons should be used.
As Tasers became an increasingly prevalent part of police officers’ arsenals around the world, the US Justice Department funded the Police Executive Research Forum (Perf), an independent policing thinktank, to revise guidelines on their use in 2011. These rules are designed to encourage officers to know Tasers “should not be seen as an all-purpose weapon that takes the place of de-escalation techniques” – and to acknowledge the lethal potential of electronic control weapons (ECW) deployed for more than three standard shock cycles of five seconds each.
“When Tasers were first introduced, it was thought they really could be used without causing any harm,” Perf executive director Chuck Wexler said in a phone interview. “Subsequently, in our research and work, we realised that extended use of ECWs could cause injuries and death. That is why we stipulate restrictions on their use.”
The Guardian can now reveal that many police departments are still not regulating the use of Tasers in accordance with these nationally accepted standards. According to 29 guidebooks on ECWs obtained by the Guardian from police departments where a death has occurred after the weapon was deployed this year, an overwhelming majority of them flout key tenets of the expert advice:
Twenty police departments do not guide officers against more than three shocks in all but exceptional circumstances.
None of the 29 departments, according to their use of force guidelines, mandate use-of-force investigations into incidents where an ECW is deployed for more than 15 seconds.
Twenty-two departments do not advise against deploying ECWs if the sole justification is that the suspect is fleeing.
Twenty-five departments do not advise against using an ECW’s “drive stun” mode, when the weapon is thrust directly into the skin to cause pain, as a compliance technique.
Thirteen departments do not explicitly restrict officers from deploying their ECWs if a suspect is already in handcuffs and does not pose an exceptional threat.
Eight departments do not even explicitly require officers to give a warning, when possible, before the ECW is deployed.
“One of the key challenges in American policing is that you have 18,000 police agencies,” said Wexler, frustrated. “So when we put forward our guidelines, we can only emphasise that departments consider them.”
Indeed, all of these guidelines were seemingly overlooked in the case of Calvon “Andre” Reid.
“Not only should they not have been using the Tasers,” said attorney Jarrett Blakeley, who is representing Reid’s family in a suit against Coconut Creek and its police department, “clearly they were using the Tasers incorrectly.”
But Reid’s death was also exceptional in that Taser shocks were explicitly found to be the cause.
While the pathologist in Coconut Creek determined that Reid had cocaine and alcohol in his blood and had a predisposed heart condition, his death was ruled a homicide caused directly by an ECW.
One reason deaths that follow Taser use may be attracting less of the spotlight is the difficulty pathologists often have in assessing the weapon’s role, if any, in how a person dies. When someone is shot with bullets, the cause of death is usually unquestionable. But in deaths following a Taser shock, there is often a complicated mixture of circumstances, and in many cases it is drug use, or the deceased person’s resistance to arrest, that is determined to be the cause.
Of the 47 officer-involved deaths that have occurred following the use of a Taser this year, the Guardian has obtained 19 rulings by medical examiners. Seven have been declared homicides, with five ruled “undetermined”, six “accidental” and one attributed to “natural causes”. Although police activity, often directly acknowledging the ECW, was ruled a factor in 13 of the 19 cases, only in Reid’s was the ECW determined to be the primary cause of death.
Taser International, which sells ECWs to 17,800 of the United States’ roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies and commands an overwhelming monopoly on the market, has said their weapons do not kill. The billion-dollar company has also sued medical examiners in the past, in one case leading to the examiners’ representative body to state that Taser International’s actions were “dangerously close to intimidation”.
“A Taser exposure is not risk-free,” a company spokesman said in an email response to a detailed list of questions for this article.
But the company’s position increasingly flies in the face of a growing medical argument to the contrary, as researchers insist that under certain circumstances, however rare, Taser shocks can lead directly to a person’s death.
These medical professionals argue the lethal potential of Tasers is being underestimated – partly thanks to an “aggressive” push by Taser International to fund research of its own – and that the weapons are likely responsible for many more deaths than coroners can easily record.
Science takes on real-life circumstances at heart of Taser debate
The precise circumstances of why Reid was present in the parking lot of that south Florida retirement home in February remain unclear. Eyewitnesses quoted in a recently filed lawsuit against the officers, however, claim he was neither aggressive nor committing any crime before police arrived. He had approached a resident asking for medical help, but when an ambulance arrived, Reid declined their assistance. It was at that point when police were called and the situation escalated.
By the time John and Bonnie Arnendale awoke the next morning, they said all signs of altercation had disappeared, police tape had been removed, and Taser wires were no longer on the ground.
“It was like nothing had ever happened. It was just peaceful and beautiful. It almost felt dream-like,” said Bonnie Arnendale. “Or nightmare-like.”
The Coconut Creek police department took almost two weeks to publicly acknowledge Reid’s death and did not interview the Arnendales until the story broke in local media the following week. Two months later, all four officers were cleared of any wrongdoing in an internal investigation, but a criminal investigation by the county attorney remains open.
“We believe that if they had not used the Tasers, our son would be alive today,” Calvon’s mother, Mamie Reid, said from her South Carolina home. “Why was he treated so inhumanely? Why in America would cops treat people in that manner?”
The Coconut Creek police department declined all interview requests from the Guardian. But some information has slowly seeped out: three of the four officers involved in the incident did not have up-to-date certification for using a Taser – a violation of Florida state law and internal policy. Reid was seemingly shot in the chest and shocked by multiple weapons simultaneously. One month after the incident, Coconut Creek police chief Michael Mann was forced to resign.
***
There is little dispute that ECW use, under appropriate conditions, is both effective and safe. A 2011 Justice Department survey of 12 police departments using Tasers found that deploying an ECW over other comparable use-of-force tactics, such as physical force, reduced the odds of a suspect’s injury by 60%. In the same year, the Justice Department found that the risk of death in an ECW-related incident was “less than 0.25%”, adding that in the “large majority” of even these cases the weapons “do not cause or contribute to death”.
In 2009, Taser International noted that of more than 650,000 Taser exposures among law-enforcement volunteers, none reported significant effects on their heart rhythms. Taser International told the Guardian that this number now stood at more than 2m voluntary exposures.
But critics point to the reality that these exposures – typically a short, single-weapon shock delivered to the back of a healthy police officer – do not reflect the circumstances of many ECW applications.
Numerous studies, such as one published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine in August 2011, point out that the majority of subjects exposed to Tasers in the field were either “under the influence of alcohol or illicit drugs, or had psychiatric co-morbidities”. And, as in many of the cases where a suspect has died in 2015, field situations also frequently involve multiple discharges.
Experts argue that all these factors dramatically increase the chances that an ECW exposure could be followed shortly by death.
The discussion is based in part around a principle cardiologists refer to as “capture”. Since the heart uses electrical impulses to coordinate its beating rhythm, electricity from sources outside the body have the capacity to “capture” the heart and alter its beat. This is the same principle behind defibrillation, when doctors use electrified paddles to shock a patient’s heart back into a normal beat when its rhythm has become too irregular to properly pump blood.
When a heart is beating correctly, however, electricity can instead disrupt the impulses from its internal pacemaker and cause the heart to enter into a dangerous and irregular rhythm known as ventricular fibrillation, or VF. Left unaddressed, VF rapidly leads to cardiac arrest and then death. And unlike defibrillators, which will typically try to pace a heart at 70 beats a minute, a standard Taser X26P pulses at a rate of 19 shocks a second, or 1,140 a minute.
According to Dr Douglas Zipes, a cardiac electrophysiologist and professor of medicine at Indiana University, that presents a problem. “The normal heart cannot withstand such rapid rates,” he said. “When a normal heart rate stimulated by electricity exceeds 250 times a minute, the entire conduction system breaks down and the heart goes into cardiac arrest.”
Laboratory research remains split on whether the high-voltage, low-current shock delivered by an ECW is capable of triggering the irregular rhythm of VF. For ethical reasons, many available studies on the potential cardiac effects of Taser charges have been conducted on anesthetized animals – often pigs, whose hearts are biologically similar to humans.
“The animal studies have been the underpinning of understanding what can happen, however they can only go so far,” Zipes said, noting physiological differences between pigs and humans, as well as the difficulty in recreating the variables of a Taser deployment in the field.
In 2012, Zipes published a report looking at eight cases when a person who had been Tasered in the chest lost consciousness “during or immediately after” being shocked by police. In all eight incidents, EKG readings show either VF, ventricular tachycardia (VT) or asystole, which is the medical term for a flatline reading with no detectable heart rhythm. Zipes concluded that “cardiac arrest due to VF can result from an ECD shock”, referring to an alternative name for electronic control weapons. He also concluded that law enforcement officers “should be judicious how and when to use the ECD weapon, [and] avoid chest shocks if possible”.
Steve Tuttle, the Taser International spokesman, said Zipes’s report is “based on uncontrolled and anecdotal observations”, and noted in an email to the Guardian that it “does not prove a cause-effect association”. He pointed to a 2012 Wake Forest study funded by the National Institute of Justice which found that out of 178 field chest strikes with Taser weapons, no subjects suffered any heart-related complications.
But in the case of 18-year-old Israel Hernandez-Llach, a graffiti artist from Miami who died after being shocked in the chest in August 2013, the pathologist ruled the teenager died from “sudden cardiac death” as a result of the shock. Hernandez-Llach had fled from Miami Dade police officers after painting on an abandoned building. Nonetheless, his death was ruled accidental. Prosecutors, who did not charge officer Jorge Mercado over the death, argued the officer did not intend to kill the teen as he did not know the weapon could be lethal.
Although a records request for the full autopsy in the death of Calvon Reid – who was, according to eyewitnesses, shocked in the chest with two Tasers – was rejected pending an ongoing criminal investigation, a medical source with intimate knowledge of the case told the Guardian that the pathologists involved “stood by what is on the death certificate”.
“This case was done very, very well. It’s a well thought-out opinion in cause and manner of death,” the source said, before declining to elaborate.
Taser International strongly denies the suggestion that its weapons are capable of triggering VT, a rapid heart rate that can sometimes precede the irregular and potentially fatal rhythms of VF. Still, in 2009 the company updated its recommended targeting guide to chest shots, in order to avoid “the controversy about whether ECDs do or do not affect the human heart”.
Mamie Reid remains unconvinced. “I would like for them to have three cops – Tasing them at the same time, in the chest, see if they could take that test,” she said. “Then maybe we could all be believers.”
Only 12 of the 29 police department rulebooks obtained by the Guardian from around the country explicitly advise against shocks to the chest.
Death by Taser: a difficult determination
Chance Thompson was striding and shadowboxing when two Yuba County deputies encountered him on top of a wall outside a deserted manufacturing plant in rural California. It was the early hours of 15 February, and both deputies, Jaime Knacke and Daniel Trumm, observed that Thompson appeared to be high on drugs.
They instructed him to get down, but when Thompson seemed oblivious to their requests, Trumm grabbed him by the trousers and pulled him off the ledge. A passerby captured part of the altercation on video, showing the two grappling briefly before Knacke deployed her Taser. Thompson fell to the ground instantly.
The video shows that Trumm is seemingly able to gain control of the 35-year-old, who was flat on his face after the Taser is fired. But the eyewitnesses stopped recording shortly after. According to the deputies’ account, Thompson subsequently “bucked” them both off and continued resisting.
The data from Knacke’s Taser, revealed in documents released to the Guardian by the county prosecutor, shows Thompson was subsequently shocked another five times – each for a full five-second cycle – before he was placed in handcuffs. He was then shocked once more, meaning a total of seven cycles – or 35 seconds.
It was at this point, according to their report, when the deputies noticed Thompson was having difficulty breathing. He had “white foam around his mouth and nose, his face was red, and his pupils were fully dilated with no iris color visible,” they observed. Shortly after that, he lapsed out of consciousness and his heart stopped beating. Despite later being revived, Thompson was pronounced brain-dead in hospital. The life-support machine was switched off two days later.
“What Chance was doing was non-violent. Nobody was in danger from him – he was out in the middle of the country,” Thompson’s stepfather, Ray Guthrie, said in a telephone interview. “You Taser him once, and he’s on his back, with the officer’s knees in him. He’s not resisting arrest anymore. But they just continued.”
The Yuba County sheriff’s department has one of the more restrictive policies obtained by the Guardian, advising that deputies should acknowledge signs of intoxication before use, refrain from deploying Tasers on people in restraints, and avoid shocks in the chest. But both internal and criminal investigations found no wrongdoing.
Thompson’s autopsy, conducted two days after the altercation and obtained under a records request, classed the cause of his death as a lack of oxygen to the brain following cardiac arrest after a “violent struggle”. While the pathologist noted the “attempted restraint with electronic control device” as a significant condition, the manner of death was left “undetermined”. The Taser darts were noted in Thompson’s lower back and left shoulder.
For Yuba County district attorney Patrick McGrath, this medical ruling appeared to be enough to absolve the officers of criminal responsibility. “I’m not even sure [the Taser] contributed,” McGrath told the local newspaper. Noting the high levels of methamphetamine found in Thompson’s blood (the 35-year-old had a long history of substance abuse), McGrath continued: “His methamphetamine level ... was off the charts.”
Thompson’s family considers that line of argument part of a cover-up. “It was quite obviously excessive use of force,” said Guthrie. “He wouldn’t have died if they hadn’t have tased him several times. Obviously.”
•••
Other studies on the lethal potential of ECWs have centred on the question of whether multiple shocks – irrespective of placement – can contribute to a cardiac arrest.
Dr Zian Tseng, a cardiologist and electrophysiologist at the University of California San Francisco, argues that ECW shocks can cause death by what he calls the “indirect method”, where the “intense pain and adrenaline surge can indirectly induce cardiac arrest”.
Much of the argument relies on a process called metabolic acidosis. Since ECWs cause muscle tissue to rapidly contract, they also force muscles to produce the byproduct of contraction: lactic acid. This is the same substance that causes muscle soreness hours or days after a strenuous workout. When lactic acid rapidly enters the bloodstream at a speed faster than the kidneys can process, it lowers the pH of the blood, which can increase the risk of a fatal arrhythmia or cardiac arrest. Single Taser shocks produce little lactic acid, but prolonged use increases the amount. It is believed that illicit drugs in a person’s system can further add to this risk.
In 2008, a California jury found that Taser International “knew or should have known that prolonged administration of electricity from the devices pose a danger, i.e., a risk of acidosis to a degree which posed a risk of cardiac arrest”.
The finding came in a civil lawsuit against Taser International by the family of 40-year-old Robert Heston, who died after receiving at least 25 shocks over a 74-second span. The medical examiner in Heston’s case ruled his death was due to cardiac arrest caused by his “agitated state associated with methamphetamine intoxication and applications of Taser”. The jury declared Taser International 15% responsible for Heston’s death, and Heston himself 85% to blame.
Tuttle, the Taser International spokesman, argued that “human studies” on the effects of acidosis “consistently show no interference with breathing”.
Part of the difficulty in parsing studies on the potential medical effects of Taser use is the outsize influence of Taser International in funding research. Several of the more prolific researchers on the subject were either partially funded by Taser International or forged official relationships shortly thereafter.
For example, Jeffrey Ho, who has authored dozens of papers on the safety of Tasers, was named the company’s medical director in 2009 and owns shares in the company. Another prominent researcher, Mark Kroll, who co-authored a 2009 book on Taser weapons with Ho, also serves as a board member and scientific adviser for Taser International. According to the company’s 2014 annual report, Kroll owned 34,130 shares of Taser International as of 17 March, at a value of just over $800,000 according to the share price of $23.44 for that day. (Ho and Kroll did not respond to interview requests from the Guardian.)
Tseng told the Guardian that in 2005, after he was quoted in a San Francisco Chronicle article suggesting that Tasers could induce cardiac arrhythmia, the company asked him to reconsider his position and offered him grant money for new research.
“They were very, very aggressive with me in my early career,” Tseng said.
Tuttle argued that the weapons are “the most studied less lethal tool on an officer’s belt”. He stated in an email that of more than 700 “safety studies, human studies, abstracts, reports, letters, etc”, 78% were “independent of Taser International”.
•••
Cases like Chance Thompson’s underline the difficult position pathologists often find themselves in when assessing the role an ECW may have played in a death.
“It’s essentially impossible to make that assessment through an objective examination of the body itself,” said professor Marcus Nashelsky, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners and a professor of pathology at the University of Iowa. “As important is to have a very clear, sequential understanding of what was occurring during this event immediately before, during and after use of the ECW.
“It’s the information about circumstances, and changes in the decedent around the time of the use of the ECW, that provides extremely valuable information to the medical examiner.”
Simply put: if an ECW is likely to contribute to or cause a death, it is expected that a suspect will go into distress shortly after the shocks are administered. But determining whether this occurred can often mean medical professionals are relying on a police officer’s account of the incident.
In Thompson’s case, the Yuba County coroner’s office – which is part of the sheriff’s department – confirmed that the eyewitness video was not reviewed by the pathologist who made the determination. Instead, the deputies’ own report of the event was used to determine the course of events.
In the case of Terrance Moxley, a 29-year-old African American from Mansfield, Ohio, who was staying at a halfway house following his release from prison after a drug-dealing conviction, even video evidence was not enough to assess the effects of multiple Taser shots to the chest.
Moxley, who had been violently tripping on synthetic marijuana on 10 March before police were called, was carried to a cruiser in handcuffs by a group of five officers. He managed to break free of the restraints, and officers deployed two Tasers. CCTV captured the entire exchange on video but, as Moxley was surrounded by officers, it is not clear from the footage at what point the Tasers were deployed and at what point Moxley went into medical distress.
Although police accounts later suggested Moxley continued to resist officers after he was shocked, a police incident report, written on the day of Moxley’s death and released to the Guardian under a records request, notes he was unresponsive “shortly after the Taser was deployed”.
In an autopsy, also obtained under a records request, pathologist Lisa Kohler acknowledged the video footage did not reveal when the Tasers were deployed and what Moxley’s reactions were. But she noted: “The contribution of the Taser use to this death cannot be confirmed or negated based on the information made available to this pathologist; however the barb injuries are in the area of the heart.”
Nonetheless, the Richland County coroner, who ultimately decided the cause and manner of death, ruled it a drug overdose, describing the manner as accidental. The toxicology reports contained in the autopsy, however, only tested for the presence of synthetic cannabinoid in the blood, not the levels it displayed at.
“We can only put what we can confirm we know,” said Tom Stortz, an investigator in the coroner’s office who worked on the Moxley case. “We can’t put probables or maybes.”
This thinking seems to have been applied in other similar cases. For example, in the death of Brian Pickett II, an autopsy, obtained under a records request, found the 26-year-old African American went into VF shortly after he was shocked in the chest. The Los Angeles County pathologist classed the manner of death as “undetermined” and the cause linked to methamphetamine use. But, in a handwritten note, it is added: “Cannot exclude electromechanical disruption device effects during restraint maneuvers.”
Critics might argue that such a ruling in the Moxley case is a cautious one. From 2005 to 2006, Dr Kohler, Ohio’s first female medical examiner, ruled a homicide in the deaths of three men who, in separate instances, had struggled with police and been Tasered. Use of the ECW was recognised in the cause of each death.
But in an aggressive move, Taser International subsequently sued Kohler and a number of her colleagues under a suit captioned “complaint to correct erroneous cause of death determinations”. A judge ruled for the company and forced Kohler, who has said in interviews that she stands by these determinations, to change the manner of deaths from homicide to either accidental or undetermined and wipe all references to the ECW.
Jeffrey Jentzen, who was president of the National Association of Medical Examiners at the time of Taser’s successful suit, described the legal action as “dangerously close to intimidation”.
In a brief phone interview, Kohler referred all questions on the Moxley case to the county coroner who made the final determination over Moxley’s manner and cause of death.
In other instances, it is alleged that police departments have actively withheld video evidence from pathologists.
Mario Ocasio, a 51-year-old from the Bronx in New York, died on 8 June after a group of NYPD officers hit him with batons and then used a Taser to shock him twice in the back. He was reportedly high on drugs and had been acting violently before officers arrived at his girlfriend’s residence. According to a recently filed federal lawsuit, video of the altercation was captured on the cellphone of Ocasio’s girlfriend, which was subsequently confiscated by police at the local precinct.
Lawyers working for Ocasio’s family contend that this video evidence has not been handed to the pathologist working on the case. Affidavits from eyewitnesses to the altercation state that Ocasio, who had previously served 20 years in prison for the attempted murder of a police officer, was in handcuffs at the time a senior officer deployed the Taser.
“After he was shot [with the Taser],” Ocasio’s girlfriend, Geneice Lloyd, stated in an affidavit, “Mr Ocasio’s last words were, ‘I see God’ he stopped moving or speaking and then he turned blue. He was completely unresponsive and his head movement had completely stopped.”
A spokeswoman for the New York City medical examiner’s office confirmed the cause of Ocasio’s death is still pending, but would not comment on whether video evidence had been reviewed. When contacted by the Guardian, the pathologist involved declined to comment. The NYPD also declined to comment.
A ‘new toy’ for law enforcement, born of sci-fi fantasies
The emergence of electroshock devices in the repertoire of US law enforcement traces back to the civil rights era across the American south and winds between law enforcement, racial tensions and business savvy. In 1963, the New York Times reported that “electric prods” were being used to “herd negro demonstrators” in Alabama. These devices, more commonly known as cattle prods, were designed for and until that point had only been used to herd livestock.
George Bartell, who ran a leading manufacturer of the prods called Hot-Shot Products, “expressed distress” that the devices were being used against people. “We never manufactured them as a law enforcement device,” Bartell said in the article. Within a year, however, his company had patented an electrified police baton.
But those devices never became popular, due in large part to the images of such of devices being aggressively deployed against nonviolent demonstrators.
“Their use,” said Darius Rejali, a political scientist professor at Reed College and an expert in electro-torture, “marked a key moment, when civil rights protesters could say not only that the police were putting them down, but that they were also being treated as animals. That raised a whole series of issues.”
Nearly a decade later, inventor John Cover filed to patent the very first Taser ECW in 1973. Trained as a nuclear physicist, Cover developed the device partly in response to the emerging trend of airplane hijackings. The original Taser was imagined as a gadget that could subdue a prospective hijacker without subjecting the plane to the undue risk of a missed shot from a marshal’s firearm.
Cover drew at least some of his inspiration for the device from a science-fiction series about a young boy named Tom Swift, whose futuristic inventions led him on grand adventures. In one installment, Swift develops an electric rifle and takes it with him to Africa to poach elephants for ivory, and against the native Africans described as “wild, savage and ferocious ... like little red apes”.
“Mercifully, Tom and the others ï¬�red only to disable and not to kill,” the book reads. “Tom’s electric rifle was well adapted for this work, as he could regulate the charge to merely stun.”
Cover’s real-world Taser would derive its name from a loose acronym of the book’s title: Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle. Unlike prods, the Taser’s launchable probes, propelled by gunpowder, gave it a range of approximately 15ft, well beyond the close contact needed to deploy a baton shock. Rather than a constant current of electricity over a small patch of skin, the first-generation Taser applied it to a larger area, and in order to cut down on battery size it used short oscillating bursts of current just millionths of a second long.
The Taser’s inventor struggled for decades to discover a market for his device, finding law enforcement agencies more troubled at the prospect of citizens armed with Tasers that could incapacitate officers than they were interested in adding a less lethal device to their arsenals.
But in 1982, the Los Angeles city council banned police from using chokeholds, and civilians did not fare better with the metal batons that the department adopted instead. Excessive force complaints doubled between 1983 and 1988, and the department was, by the end of the decade, recording nearly 900 baton deployments each year.
And so Cover’s “police special” model was born. The PS-83 Taser was retooled from its consumer-focused design into a more rugged, street-ready device. He built the trigger for the grip of a police officer – more powerful and quicker than that of a flight attendant. City officials in Los Angeles placed their first order for 700 devices in 1983.
But as Taser use proliferated among Los Angeles-area police, so did civil liability lawsuits, personnel complaints and disability compensation claims. Officers were often using them without discretion, most infamously in the case of Rodney King, who was beaten by a group of LAPD officers and Tasered three times. In the aftermath of the King incident, Tasers fell into disuse.
In 1993, brothers Rick and Tom Smith formed a small company, Air Taser, using money borrowed from their parents to reinvent Cover’s technology. The first Air Taser device used compressed gas, rather than gunpowder, to propel the electrode barbs, skirting many of the regulatory issues that left Cover’s early models, at various times, to be classified as a firearm.
The Smith brothers renamed their company Taser International in 1998 and launched Project Stealth to develop a more effective weapon that could stop subjects regardless of their mental focus or pain tolerance, culminating in the 1999 release of the M26 Taser.
The new weapon was much more powerful, reimagined by Taser’s designers from a simple long-distance shock weapon into an electromuscular disruption (EMD) device, which emitted electrical signals to effectively override those that the human body uses to trigger muscle movement.
The device impressed law enforcement officials across the country, and sales took off: between 1999 and 2009 the growth rate of ECW penetration in the market was 84%. (The rate of growth for mobile phones over the same time period was slightly more than 5%.)
While EMD technology was adopted by other manufacturers, nearly all of that growth funnelled directly to one firm: in 2002, its first full year as a public company, Taser International posted net sales of just under $7m. The company sold $91m worth of its professional-grade ECW devices in 2014. On Tuesday, Taser posted record quarterly profits of $50.4m, largely on the back of the company’s focus on the new, lucrative market for body cameras and video storage.
The rapid adoption of Tasers offered researchers a novel way to step back and look at the risks they might pose. In 2009, Dr Tseng and colleagues published an epidemiological study on the in-custody death rates of 50 California police departments in the five years before and five years after they adopted ECWs. The study found a startling 600% increase in sudden-death incidents in the year after Taser introduction, and then a 40% increase over pre-Taser rates for the next four years.
Tseng said the rise seemed to indicate that the weapons carry a distinct sudden-death risk, in part because of how fervently Taser International defends its products’ safety.
“You have this new toy and you’re told by Taser International that it’s non-lethal: ‘The world is great because you don’t need to shoot somebody, you don’t need to be close to them to use pepper spray, so have at it,’” Tseng said. “Then they’re recognizing, hey, it’s not non-lethal, it is associated with certain sudden-death risk, we better implement some corrective strategies so we don’t cause excess harm.”
This is what Tseng believes accounts for the decline in sudden death after a department’s first year of Taser implementation.
“Getting hit with a Taser is not pleasant but an analogy I use sometimes is chemotherapy,” Rick Smith said in 2011 interview describing his views on the product’s benefit to society. “If you’ve got cancer, they do awful things to your body to try and save you. Well, our society has a cancer. We are a violent, dangerous society, and we have a device that, while it’s not pleasant, it can make a huge difference and save tons and tons of lives.”
‘Excited delirium’: real science or a cop-out?
You promised that you wouldn’t kill me,” Natasha McKenna whimpered as five Fairfax County deputies advanced outside her Virginia jail cell door, crouched behind a riot shield. “I didn’t do anything.”
McKenna, a diminutive African American woman with a long history of schizophrenia, stood naked and unarmed. She had flung feces and urine in her cell shortly before. The deputies, wearing gas masks and white Hazmat suits, piled in and attempted to place her in restraints before a cell transfer. McKenna was already handcuffed.
The entire “extraction” on 3 February was recorded on video. It unfolded like a horror movie.
McKenna is shoved against the wall with the riot shield and slides to the ground. The struggle continues for about 15 minutes until the 37-year-old is lifted, her head now covered in a black “spit sock” and her hands handcuffed behind her back, onto a restraint chair.
As she moans, she is warned that continued resistance will result in use of the Taser. She is then “drive-stunned”, meaning the weapon is thrust into the skin without deploying the probes, and then Tasered with a full deploy of the probes into her leg three times – each for the full five-second cycle – as officers accuse her of continued resistance. She groans in pain at various points.
After the last shock is administered, McKenna continues to grunt and shake her legs. But slowly her movements begin to fade. Roughly three minutes after the final Taser shock, it appears she is no longer moving.
“If that’s not torture, I don’t know what is,” Harvey Volzer, an attorney for the McKenna family, said in a telephone interview. “When you have someone who is already restrained – her hands handcuffed behind her back, her feet shackled, a spit hood over her head – there’s nothing she could do. Why do you need to Taser someone four times? The answer is: you don’t.”
The videographer, a Fairfax County lieutenant, follows the officers as McKenna’s limp body is wheeled on a restraint chair through the back channels of the Fairfax adult detention center. She is parked by an exit as deputies, still dressed in gas masks, discuss the best way to load her into a transfer vehicle. Her head, still inside the “spit sock”, is slumped forward as a deputy pulls off the blanket, revealing part of her naked body to show the restraints to another officer. Minutes later, after a nurse checks her for a pulse, it is finally realised that McKenna is unresponsive.
“Hey, we’ve got bad news,” a deputy can be heard saying, his voice still muffled inside a gas mask.
McKenna was admitted to hospital in cardiac arrest with lactic acidosis and hyperthermia, according to the detailed account of events provided by the commonwealth’s attorney’s investigation. Despite being revived, after an hour of CPR, she was declared brain-dead. Days later, the life-support machine was switched off.
The medical examiner classified McKenna’s death as accidental, describing the cause as “excited delirium with physical restraint including use of conducted energy device”.
In September, Virginia commonwealth attorney Raymond Morrogh announced that none of the six officers who restrained McKenna would face any criminal charges. He appeared to use this diagnosis to blame McKenna’s own resistance for her death.
“In the end,” wrote Morrogh, “it was McKenna’s severe mental illness, coupled with tremendous physical exertion she put forth over an extended period of time struggling with deputies that resulted in a cascade of lethal chemical reactions inside of her body.”
Volzer, the McKenna family’s attorney, was disgusted. “Excited delirium is junk science,” he said in phone interview. “Why waste all that time if they were going to base it on excited delirium which is a non-reason? It was a joke.”
The term has featured in five of the 19 pathologists’ rulings in the 47 deaths following Taser use so far in 2015. Research by Amnesty International indicates it has been cited as the cause of death in 75 cases after Taser use between 2001 and 2008.
Yet the terminology of “excited delirium”, which loosely refers to a combination of psychotic behaviour, high body temperature and extreme aggression, is not recognised by the American Medical Association or the American Psychological Association. Tuttle, of Taser International, said in a 2007 interview that the company distributed sympathetic literature on the condition, which is recognised by the National Association of Medical Examiners, to pathologists around the United States. He told the Guardian that Taser no longer distributes this information.
“It seems like it is a catch-all,” said Justin Mazzola, a researcher at Amnesty International US who has monitored deaths following Taser use. “It’s not that it’s necessarily letting the officers off the hook, rather than explaining away the negative effects of the Taser.”
Volzer said the McKenna family are planning to file a civil suit. In April, the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office banned all use of Tasers at the county jail, citing “an unusual event”.
Additional reporting by Jon Swaine and the Guardian US interactive team
Kenneth Wayne James, age 52, was slated for release from a Texas prison, where he was serving time for parole violation. He didn't make it: guards found him dead in his cell, and prison medical staff measured his body temperature at an astonishing 108F.
To get some idea what such a temperature means, body temperatures above 104F are life-threatening.
I spoke about heat deaths in Texas prisons with Ariel Dulitzky, director of the Human Rights Clinic at the University of Texas Law School in Austin. Dulitzky said that there were 14 documented heat deaths in Texas since 2007, and he suspects the number is even higher.
Also in the Lone Star State, Brian McGiverin of the Texas Civil Rights Project is litigating dangerously high temperatures in Texas prisons. Like Dulitzky, he believes heat deaths are under-reported by the authorities and thinks there is a coroners' bias against attributing a death to excessive temperature.
Texas is far from the only state where excessive temperatures cause misery, and often, death. Not surprisingly, the sweltering states of the Old Confederacy figure prominently in class action suits to bring down the prison thermometer, but one of the most heartbreaking deaths occurred in the Rikers Island jail which serves New York City. (Rikers Island has been widely criticized for overcrowding and brutality by guards.) Jerome Murdough, age 56, a mentally ill ex-Marine, was awaiting trial for trespassing. In the meantime he was receiving an antipsychotic and an anticonvulsant, both of which would have made him more sensitive to high temperatures. The temperature in his cell was 100F and it killed him; the city settled with the family for $2,500,000 in a wrongful death suit.
Hyperthermia is defined as the inability of the body to cool itself in inclement temperatures. The body's organ for regulating its temperature is the hypothalamus, a nodule of nervous tissue situated at the base of the brain. Hyperthermia should not be confused with fever. The hypothalamus is a biological "thermometer" that regulates the body temperature around a fixed "set point." The set point for most healthy human beings is 98.6F; in illnesses such as infections the white blood cells release toxins that drive up the set point, sothat the hypothalamus is "tricked" into regulating the body temperature at a new, higher degree. This is the underlying physiology of fever. In hyperthermia the set point remains fixed while the body strives to cool itself by perspiration, convection, and to a lesser degree, by heavy breathing. Perspiration is the principal mechanism by which the body rids itself of dangerous levels of heat. Each droplet of water that leaves the overheated skin for the open air takes with it a few units of thermal energy. An Alabama jail cell in July defeats the body's cooling mechanisms not only by high temperature but by high humidity; the presence of water vapor in the air defeats cooling by perspiration.
Illness and death from hyperthermia can come about from several ways. Death can occur from organ failure, especially fatal damage to the brain and the heart. I also spoke with Michael Baden, formerly chief medical examiner of New York City. Baden said death from hyperthermia is extremely difficult to detect at autopsy, so that the autopsy findings are often written off as "m.i." (myocardial infarction or heart attack). Inmates with physical illnesses are at higher risk of organ failure.
A second major cause of heat death occurs in patients taking certain medications. David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, said that the American prison population is getting older, and a higher proportion of inmates are mentally ill. Many of them are receiving drugs. At the head of the list are the second-generation antipsychotics (e.g. Risperdal, Seroquel, Zyprexa) and a class of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (e.g. Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft). It is still not clear how these drugs foster heat death.
In a fruitless attempt to obtain some statistical data on heat deaths, I calledh Allen Beck, a statistician with the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. Beck explained that the BJS does not even track heat deaths because the death certificate usually gives some other cause, i.e. myocardial infarction. Baden said that, as far as he knows, New York is the only state that with an agency that seeks to obtain accurate data on every inmate's death.
To find out what it's like to suffer hyperthermia, I reached out to Michael Jewell, who escaped the death penalty on a technicality but served 40 years for murder in a Texas prison. During his confinement, Jewell organized a work stoppage and attempted to escape; for these infractions he was subjected to solitary confinement. The worst experience, he said, was being locked in a cell about 10'x12' with hot water pipes running across the ceiling. It was summer, and there was only a small window in the cubicle. By seven in the morning the cell was "unbearably hot." The window offered no respite: "It was like standing in front of a hair dryer." There was also a sink, but the water came out warm. After a few days in the cubicle Jewell was usually too weak to eat or drink, and when he did manage to get down some food he vomited it back with froth; when he drank some water he because nauseated.
Had Jewel been kept in his oven much longer he would have developed severe symptoms of hyperthermia: fast pulse, rapid breathing, mental symptoms that resemble delirium. A little longer and he would have been a corpse.
Baden said that, when the temperature goes up, it is imperative to make sure inmates have plenty of cold water, or better, electrolyte-enhanced beverages like the kind athletes drink. If a prisoner does succumb to hyperthermia, staff must cool him off as quickly as possible by immersing him in a tub of cold water, preferably with ice in it.
Human rights lawyers have made hyperthermia one of their issues, with variable results. Perhaps the most bizarre commentary on the American system of justice is the Angola prison case in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. At the time of the trial, Angola prison's death row housed 82 men, all of whom were suffering from the sweltering heat. Lawyers won an injunction from a federal judge ordering prison staff to take measures to cool off death row. Thanks to the judge's intervention, Angola's death row inmates can await their fate in a reasonable degree of comfort.
The movement for criminal justice reform has finally brought the topic of police brutality back to the forefront. One unexplored aspect of police killings is the economic profile of the neighborhoods where the killings occur. In a first of its kind research project, I examined police killings this year and found that in the first five months, 95 percent of reported police killings were in neighborhoods with incomes under $100,000.
How To Follow The Economic Trail Of Police Killings
By law, there is no requirement for a comprehensive database of police killings. However, diligent researchers and reporters have labored to create a database that tracks reported deaths. Researcher D. Brian Burghart founded Fatal Encounters, a website and database that aspires to record every death at police hands.
A search of the Fatal Encounters database, focusing on the months of January 2015 through March 2015, the months where there is a comprehensive list of deaths. An examination of this list of killings with the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council's Geocoding tool was used to locate the Census income tract where the killings themselves occurred.
The tool provides several different income readings, depending on the year. For the purpose of our research, the 2015 Estimated Tract Median Family Income category was used, an attempt to use information that's more up to date than the 2010 reading the Census made.
For most addresses, I was able to instantly locate a tract median family income. A few addresses didn't instantly return a reading from the tool, so I picked an address nearby, typically within a block. Roughly 9% of police killings occurred in non-residential areas or highways, or for some other reason I was not able to locate an income tract. These were excluded from our analysis.
Killing The Middle Class And Poor
For the 441 police killings I researched, the average neighborhood family income where a killing occurred was $57,764. The median family income was $52,907.
Just over five percent of the killings were in neighborhoods with over $100,000 median family income. The richest neighborhood that saw a killing was the 700 block on 14th street in northwest Washington, D.C.
This skews against what the actual income variation in America is. A household income of $100,000 or more puts you in the top 21% of American income earners; this means that incomes below this number are overrepresented by four times compared to the income distribution in how often they are killed by police.
A More Comprehensive Look
This analysis is far from comprehensive – for one, it focuses on a five-month period and uses Census geomapping that isn't as precise as it could be. Data on the actual incomes of the individuals killed is not available to us. Additionally, we did not identify the circumstances of the killings themselves – it would be relevant to know what percentage of these individuals killed resided in these locales. Statistical researchers may also find it illuminating to compare neighborhood incomes of deaths with the race of those killed – by doing so, they could use regressions to see how race and income interact as variables.
Consider, for example, the important work being done at The Washington Post, whose reporters are doing a comprehensive tally of police killings in 2015. Those reporters have broken down police shootings by various categories, including ones that are rarely looked at, like mental health status.
This research should be looked at as a “first bite at the apple” – enough evidence to warrant further examination about who is killed by police, and why.
NEW ORLEANS (CN) - Lung and adrenal lesions in dolphins, and an increase in bottlenose dolphin deaths in the Gulf of Mexico, is likely linked to exposure to pollutants from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, according to researchers by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.
According to a report published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed online journal PLOS ONE, bottlenose dolphins in the northern Gulf of Mexico have been dying at unusually high rates since 2010.
This ongoing die-off includes the highest number of bottlenose dolphin deaths on record and coincided—not coincidentally, according to the study —with the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
A team of scientists studied 46 dead bottlenose dolphins found along the Gulf Coast between June 2010 and December 2012 and concluded the lung and adrenal lesions in the dolphins are consistent with exposure to oil and oil-related products in the Gulf of Mexico following an oil spill.
"This is the latest in a series of peer-reviewed scientific studies, conducted over a period of five years since the spill, looking at possible reasons for the historically high number of dolphin deaths that have occurred within the footprint of the Deepwater Horizon spill," Terri Rowles, head of NOAA's Marine Mammal and Stranding Response Program, said in a statement.
"These studies have increasingly pointed to the presence of petroleum hydrocarbons as being the most significant cause of illnesses and deaths plaguing the Gulf's dolphin population," Rowles said. "This study carries those findings significantly forward."
The timing, location and nature of the detected lesions support the scientists' finding that contaminants from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill are responsible for a spike in dolphin deaths in the Gulf of Mexico following the oil spill.
Direct cause of death in dolphins likely included chronic adrenal insufficiency resulting from adrenal gland effects, according to the study.
The adrenal gland produces hormones, such as cortisol and aldosterone, that regulate metabolism, blood pressure and other bodily functions.
"Animals with adrenal insufficiency are less able to cope with additional stressors in their everyday lives," Stephanie Venn-Watson, lead author of the study and veterinary epidemiologist at the National Marine Mammal Foundation, said. "And when those stressors occur, they are more likely to die."
The findings support a study of live dolphins in Barataria Bay, Louisiana, an area which was heavily oiled during the oil spill, and which showed the resident dolphins had poor health, adrenal and lung diseases, especially when compared with live dolphins in areas less affected by the oil spill.
Half of the dead dolphins found near heavily oiled Barataria Bay between 2010 and 2012 had a thin adrenal gland cortex, indicative of adrenal insufficiency, the study found.
One in every three dolphins found across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama had the lesion. In comparison, just 7 percent of dead dolphins collected outside of the affected area had the lesion, the report said.
Additionally, almost half of the dolphins found with this rare abnormality appeared to have died for no other discernible reason, the study found.
And more than one in five dolphins that died within the footprint of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill had a primarily bacterial pneumonia. Many cases of which were uncommonly severe and either caused or contributed to the dolphins' death.
"These dolphins had some of the most severe lung lesions I have ever seen in the over 13 years that I have been examining dead dolphin tissues from throughout the United States," Dr. Kathleen Colegrove, the study's lead veterinary pathologist based at the University of Illinois said in a statement.
In all mammals, inhalation of petroleum-based products can lead to damaged lungs, but dolphins are particularly susceptible to such harm because of their large lungs, deep breaths and extended breath hold times.
BP, who owned the Macondo well that spewed millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico following the April 20, 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, was unsatisfied with the results of the study and issued a statement.
"The data we have seen thus far, including the new study from NOAA, do not show that oil from the Deepwater Horizon accident caused an increase in dolphin mortality. ... Based on a review of available literature, we are unaware of any toxicological studies linking lung disease in bottlenose dolphins to exposure to oil or other environmental contaminants," the oil giant said.
For over a decade and a half, Project Censored researchers at Sonoma State University have been monitoring law enforcement–related deaths in the United States. In the most recent phase of this research, we interviewed members of fourteen families who had lost a loved one in a law enforcement incident. In this study, we let the families tell their stories in their own voices, and we report the commonalities in their trauma and mistreatment by law enforcement and the corporate media after the death of their loved ones.
Law enforcement agencies in the United States have been involved in excess of 600 deaths annually for at least the past fifteen years. In addition to the people dying on the street or in their homes through law enforcement–related activities, research shows that several hundred people a year die in local jails. In 2011, according to the Office of Justice Programs, 885 inmates died in the custody of local jails. Thirty-nine percent died within the first week of being jailed. This number, combined with deaths on the outside, allows us to estimate that more than 1,500 people die annually in law enforcement–related circumstances, whether in custody or in the course of law enforcement actions in the victims’ communities. It is reasonable to assume that some portion of these deaths is attributable to officer mistakes, overreactions, or deliberate acts that result in death.
But almost always, despite obviously questionable behavior by law enforcement personnel, no charges are filed. Investigations of law enforcement–related deaths, either internally within departments or by outside agencies, nearly always rule that homicides are justified and followed departmental procedures.
It is extremely rare for police departments to rule a death as unjustified, or to charge an officer with neglect, manslaughter, or murder. One of these rare cases was the 2009 New Year’s shooting of Oscar Grant by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer Johannes Mehserle. Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and received two years in prison. In a civil trial, Grant’s mother, Wanda Johnson, and Grant’s young daughter, Tatiana, received financial settlements from BART totaling $2.8 million as a result of the shooting.
In 1998, Project Censored cosponsored a research study with the Stolen Lives Project, a group born out of the October 22nd Coalition. Through funding from the San Francisco Foundation, Karen Saari, a legal researcher in Sonoma County, California, spent a good part of a year searching the newspaper databases LexisNexis and ProQuest at Sonoma State University for articles on law enforcement–related deaths. She was searching for police shootings and any situation reported in the newspapers where someone died in the presence of law enforcement officers. Besides gunshots, deaths included suicides, car accidents, shootings, drowning, and Taser use.
To our knowledge, this was the first time such a study had been attempted in the US. During the twelve-month period from October 1, 1997, to October 1, 1998, Saari found news stories on 694 deaths in the presence of law enforcement in the United States. Department of Justice figures at the time listed about 350 people killed by police in the previous year, so Saari’s research showed a significantly larger rate of death among civilians in law enforcement incidents than was previously known at the time.
The newspaper deaths reported in 1997 show that eighty-one were related to excessive application of restraint techniques, and that ninety-one were reported to be suicides, although the ruling of suicide was questionable in a number of cases. Deaths occurred throughout the US, with California leading the nation.
In 2011, Jim Fisher used Internet searches to identify 1,146 police shootings that year. Among these were news reports indicating that 607 people had died by police shooting. This was a slightly higher rate of shooting deaths than had been reported in 1997–98 but did not include Taser, restraint deaths, and suicides. Fisher found that the vast majority of the people shot had been between the ages of twenty-five and forty-nine, a result similar to Saari’s report a decade earlier. In 2011, two victims of the police had been fifteen years of age, and one girl had been only sixteen. Fifty of the dead were armed with BB guns, pellet guns, or toy replica firearms.
Project Censored sought to verify the numbers of law enforcement–related deaths in a more recent year. A team of Project Censored student researchers, including Greg Sewell, Rio Molina, Vanessa Pedro, and Jessica Clark, conducted a sample survey using Google, LexisNexis, and ProQuest for three months in 2013. They found fifty- two law enforcement–related deaths reported in US newspapers for May 2013, forty-nine deaths for August, and forty-seven for December. The total of 148 deaths in three months of 2013 suggests that as many as 600 civilians may have died in the hands of law enforcement officers over the course of 2013—numbers that are very similar to the 1997–98 and 2011 findings.
Prior research documents that the number of persons killed by local law enforcement officers in the United States that are reported in official sources does not match the number that are reported in the media. Determining the nature and reasons for this discrepancy requires putting together pieces of data from sources with divergent definitions and measurements of death by law enforcement.
Available statistics for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) track justifiable homicide by law enforcement, which the FBI defines as “the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty.” According to FBI data, justifiable homicides by law enforcement totaled 369, 367, and 393 deaths in 1997, 1998, and 2011, respectively. The FBI data for 2007–12 shows that justifiable homicides by law enforcement averaged 396 deaths per year. FBI data for 2013 is not yet available.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) provides data for 2003–09 on Arrest Related Deaths (ARD), including “homicide by law enforcement.” This is the most recent data published from the ARD data collection program, which uses a much more inclusive definition than the FBI’s justifiable homicides data. The ARD data “includes homicides by law enforcement personnel as well as deaths attributed to suicide, intoxication, accidental injury, and natural causes.” Thus the ARD reports 4,813 total deaths for January 2003 to January 2009, of which 61.5 percent (2,931) were classified as homicide by law enforcement. The homicide victims were classified as 42 percent White, non-Hispanic; 32 percent Black, non-Hispanic; 20 percent Hispanic; and 7 percent “other” or “unknown.” Males accounted for 96 percent of homicides. Related data also shows that from 1980 to 2008, most such homicides were intraracial, with Cooper and Smith noting that “two-thirds involved police officers and felons of the same race.”
WHAT DOES THE DATA TELL US?
There are several hundred people who die annually during encounters with local law enforcement (or shortly thereafter in hospitals, as measured in one database). Variations across years and jurisdictions may be attributable to a variety of factors, including increased use of Tasers, and increases in the proportion of justifiable homicides by law enforcement that involved victims deemed mentally ill. For example, Loftin et al. found that Supplemental Homicide Report data for justifiable homicides by police in 1976–98 differed significantly from National Vital Statistics Data on deaths at both the national and statewide levels. The authors concluded that both databases under-report justifiable homicides by police.
Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) analyses of FBI data on justifiable homicides show that such killings declined from 1980 to the early 1990s, then rose again in the mid-1990s, declined till 2000, then rose slightly again. Although the data trends described above apply to both justifiable homicides by law enforcement and private citizens, the BJS report notably stated, “The number of justifiable homicides committed by police exceeded the number committed by citizens.”
Unfortunately, there are notably different ways that law enforcement–related deaths are defined and measured, which makes comparisons across data sources, jurisdictions, and years problematic. In addition, there are missing data for some jurisdictions for some time periods.
THE MILITARIZATION OF DOMESTIC LAW ENFORCEMENT
The social science literature has addressed these issues in a number of ways, especially by examining the process of militarization of law enforcement agencies in the United States. We see a transition from the deployment of police as individuals within a community-oriented process to an increase in the deployment of teams of Paramilitary Police Units (PPUs), most notably as SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) teams. This has been coupled with a transition to a more aggressive rather than community-oriented form of “cop culture,” fueled by media representations that support a “show balls” attitude where street-level police are portrayed as getting things done, not mired down by procedure and bureaucracy.
Researchers distinguish between militarism and militarization. Militarism describes an ideology, while militarization refers to the implementation of that ideology. At the core of militarism as an ideology is the belief that the threat of force or its actual use is, in the words of one prominent scholar on the issue of police militarization, “the most appropriate and efficacious means to solve problems.” Militarization is a process that police agencies undergo. This process began in the late 1970s and intensified during the 1980s, especially under the Reagan administration’s “war on drugs.” In 1981, an amendment to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act (PCA) and the Cooperation Act of 1981 authorized the transfer of military training and weaponry to federal, state, and local police agencies, escalating the national trend in law enforcement to adopt military objectives, methods, and equipment. As Peter B. Kraska summarized, “[T]he normalization of PPUs into routine police work, the patrol function, and in so-called ‘order enforcement campaigns,’ points to an enduring internal militarization not likely to recede anytime in the near future.”
In 1992, under George H. W. Bush’s administration, the “weed and seed” initiative was implemented. This project was intended to “weed” out criminals and to “seed” social programs in blighted urban neighborhoods. President Bush insisted that the drug war was to be fought house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, and community-by-community, which laid the foundation for the militarization of law enforcement. The reality of this program was that it expanded the budget of law enforcement and spent very little on social programs.
Then, as Stephen Hill and Randall Beger summarized,
Following the Oklahoma City bombing incident in 1995, President Bill Clinton proposed amending the PCA to allow the military to aid civilian authorities in investigations involving “weapons of mass destruction.” In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration sought to gut the PCA to allow the military a wider role in disaster relief efforts. Stephen Muzzatti has also documented how, using “successful” drug task forces as a model, US law-enforcement agencies sought to create Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) with the FBI throughout the 1990s. By the end of 2001, there were already close to 100 such units. Thus, in Muzzatti’s opinion, rather than initiating the process of police militarization, the “War on Terrorism” has “normalized and accelerated” it.
A survey of law enforcement agencies conducted in the 1990s about the creation of paramilitary-style units discovered that over 89 percent of the responding agencies with city populations over 50,000 citizens had at least one or more paramilitary police units. This same survey found that 70 percent of the responding agencies with city populations of fewer than 50,000 citizens also had at least one or more paramilitary police units. In March 2014, the Economist reported that federal grants, made possible through the war on drugs and more recently the “war on terror,” provided funds for the purchase of heavy weaponry used by paramilitary police units. “Between 2002 and 2011 the Department of Homeland Security disbursed $35 billion in grants to state and local police,” the article revealed. According to the Associated Press, the US Department of Defense provided military surplus equipment, including 165 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles (or MRAPs), to nearly 13,000 law enforcement agencies across the country that participate in what is known as the 1033 Program. This program permits the transfer of military surplus to law enforcement agencies. In fiscal year 2012, $546 million worth of property was transferred this way.
Beyond funding and equipment for paramilitary police units, police academies emphasize weapons and training. According to Matthew J. Hickman’s 2005 study of 626 state and local law enforcement academies that offer basic training, “the greatest amount of required instruction time was in firearms skills (median sixty hours).” When combined with forty-four hours of self-defense training, along with twelve hours on nonlethal weapons training, officer weapons and self-defense training comprised around 16 percent of total academy training hours.
Jennifer Hunt and Peter K. Manning observed that, within law enforcement circles, it was a much graver error for a street cop to use too little force and to begin developing a reputation among fellow officers as a shaky officer than to engage in excessive force and be told by colleagues to calm down. When officers do not use enough force they are subject to reprimand, gossip, and avoidance in the police subculture. Using excessive force may establish an officer’s status as a street cop who does real police work rather than as an inside desk man.
Research has documented that law enforcement officers typically hold shared beliefs about the importance of aggressiveness and selectivity in the conduct of their professional duties. Police culture research shows that officers hold positive attitudes toward aggressive stops of cars and “checking out people,” as well as favorable attitudes toward selective enforcement of laws (e.g., assigning felonies a higher priority).
The dangers associated with law enforcement work often prompt officers to distance themselves from citizens, whom many officers orient to as threats to their safety. The coercive authority that officers possess also separates them from the public. The cultural prescriptions of suspiciousness, and maintaining an edge over citizens by creating, displaying, and maintaining their authority, all serve to further divide police and the members of the communities they supposedly serve and protect. Officers who are socially isolated from citizens, and who develop strong loyalties to the fellow officers on whom they rely for protection, often develop an “us vs. them” attitude toward citizens. The group culture among officers and the mechanisms used to cope with the strains of the occupation, are related to the use of coercion over citizens—that is, it is the culture for officers to “show balls” on the street during encounters with citizens.
JUSTIFYING USE OF FORCE
Legal justification for the use of force is most frequent when law enforcement officers deem suspects to be resistant, when citizen or officer safety is threatened, in cases of increased suspect culpability, and when making arrests. “When the encounter is officer-initiated (i.e., proactive),” one scholar suggested, “officers may be quicker to assert their authority and to do it more forcefully, perhaps because police legitimacy is lower than when the officer is invited or called on.” A final factor helps explain variation across different agencies in the use of force: “Findings suggest that the use of force over citizens is a function of officers’ varying commitments to the traditional culture of policing.”
Criminology researchers have found that newspaper articles employ various strategies of symbolic communication to construct images and mobilize meanings that legitimize police violence. Daryl Meeks observed that “urban policing has been assisted by pejorative media representations of the urban underclass, which serve to increase the fear of urban crime while exacerbating the stereotyping and social labeling of the urban underclass as an undeserving, dysfunctional, and non-contributing group of the American social structure.”
John Thompson defined “expurgation of the other” as the symbolic construction of scapegoats who must be resisted or purged. Along these lines, news articles typically portray deadly force victims or perpetrators as evil, strange, or threatening manifest expurgation. Police officers and officials allegedly call upon such images when concocting “cover stories” for police homicides. One specific type of expurgation—reference to prior criminal history—merits special designation because it is a core feature of “cop vigilante” narratives but marginal to self-defense justifications because police shooters are rarely aware of victims’ criminal pasts.
Research on police officers has noted the negative attitudes that police hold toward citizens, and of officers’ distrust of the citizens they police. In addition, officers have historically not believed that those outside the policing profession would assist them in performing their duties, and even if “outsiders” did try to assist, they would not be of any real help.
In sum, the traditional view of police culture posits that officers should, almost uniformly, hold strongly unfavorable views of both citizens and supervisors, show disdain and resentment toward procedural guidelines, reject all roles except that which involves fighting crime, and value aggressive patrolling tactics and selectivity in performing their law enforcement duties.
Mainstream newspapers periodically document and problematize the inability or unwillingness of police and judicial agencies to hold police accountable for killing civilians. Absent from these investigations is a discussion of how these same newspapers often normalize, obscure, and rationalize police violence. The victims of police homicide are generally not presented in the same sympathetic manner as are most murder victims. The use of crime frames raises the specter of the predatory criminal, a vilified and racialized media icon. Patterns of expurgation and reactive/passive and active constructions suggest that news stories generally present police killings as the logical consequences of victims’ lawless or troubled behavior.
In 2001, B. Keith Payne performed a set of two experiments showing how race affected respondents’ perceptions of whether an object was a harmless tool or a dangerous weapon. The experiments revealed that research subjects made reflex associations between black male faces and guns. The first experiment showed that, when time was unlimited, participants identified guns faster when primed with black faces compared with white faces. While the first experiment demonstrated a racial bias in reaction times, the second showed that the bias was replicated when participants were forced to respond rapidly: when primed with a black face, participants more frequently misidentified a harmless item—such as a nonthreatening hand tool—as a dangerous handgun.
GIVING VOICE TO VICTIMS’ FAMILIES
Based on the hypothesis that changes in police behavior would likely reduce the number of law enforcement–related deaths in the United States, we decided to interview the families of people who had died in law enforcement–related incidents. Our research team interviewed fourteen individuals who were immediate family members of people who died in law enforcement–related incidents in northern California between 2000 and 2010. At least one year had passed between the date of the death of their loved one and the date of the interview. Interviews were recorded and transcribed for analysis and comparison. All the names of the interviewees and the victims are to remain anonymous to protect the families’ privacies. Researchers used a standardized interview guide with thirty-four questions and were trained in sensitive interview techniques by a professional post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) counselor. The research methods for this study were approved by the Institutional Review Board for the Rights of Human Subjects at Sonoma State University.
What follows is a brief outline of the key facts, as reported by family members, for the fourteen cases, as well as the families’ opinions on the death of their loved ones. In all fourteen cases, the investigating police departments ruled the deaths justifiable homicide. In case #9, a narcotics officer was indicted by the grand jury but was found innocent in a court trial. All the family members interviewed strongly believe that police overreacted and that their loved one should not have been killed under the circumstances.
CASE #1. White male, age 29, San Anselmo, prior history of mental illness, in-home traumatic episode, victim charges police with small steak knife, shot to death.
INTERVIEWEE #1: “I think [the police officer] acted hastily. . . . The cop that did it shouldn’t have a gun. . . . He is the problem.”
CASE #2. Black male, age 19, high school senior, Hayward, shot in back of head while running away from Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police, no record of mental illness, no weapons present.
INTERVIEWEE #2: “The police and the media just said . . . the officer felt threatened by my son and had to shoot him. Very few newspapers changed their story or apologized when they found out my son was shot in the back of the head.”
CASE #3. Black male, age 30, Rohnert Park, prior drug use, shot in back running from police after car chase, no record of mental illness, no weapons present.
INTERVIEWEE #3: “He was running from the police. . . . They shot him in the back . . . murdered by the police.”
CASE #4. Black male, age 27, Oakland, prior drug use and sales, no history of mental illness, shot in back running from police, threw away handgun before being shot, financial settlement to family from civil trial.
INTERVIEWEE #4: “He had to run because he had a pistol on him. The police chased him. He ran around the corner and threw away the gun. The cop saw him throw away the gun and I guess decided it was OK to go ahead and shoot. He was shot two or three times in the back.”
CASE #5. Black male, age 23, San Francisco, bipolar and depressed, confrontation in movie theater over smoking, shot forty-eight times by nine officers, no weapons, financial settlement to family from civil trial.
INTERVIEWEE #5:“[The police] evacuated all the theater . . . and they got in and shot him forty-eight times. [The cops] posted stuff on my son’s website. I checked the IP address and it came from the police station. [They wrote,] who cares about your dead baboon on welfare?”
CASE #6. Black male, age 73, Ukiah, long history of mental illness, local psych unit asked police to pick him up so he could take his medications, runs to his apartment chased by police dog, dog attacks him and he responds with sharp object, shot several times in back and side by police.
INTERVIEWEE #6: “In my opinion he was murdered.”
CASE #7. Black male, age 30, Rohnert Park, self-employed rapper, prior arrests for marijuana and passing counterfeit money, no recorded mental illness, ran from police after traffic stop, shot in back, no weapons present.
INTERVIEWEE # 7: “He ran [from the car after a stop] and was shot immediately in the back. And then he was dead. He and the officer that shot him . . . had gone to school together and played basketball together.”
CASE #8. White male, age 39, Petaluma, prior depression and minor drug use, not taking his medications, traumatic episode called 911 himself, rampaging in his parents’ home, Tasered by police three times and dies, no weapons present.
INTERVIEWEE #8: “The police . . . are supposed to protect you and take care of you, and we were following the rules.”
CASE #9. Latino male, age 40, San Jose, prior felon, no history of mental illness, mistaken identity car chase by undercover narcotics officers, runs from car and shot in back by officer, bleeds to death after delayed medical care, no weapons present, financial settlement to family after civil suit.
INTERVIEWEE #9: “My uncle happens to drive by a stakeout and he fits the description of a Mexican guy with a mustache . . . in a blue van. The undercover narcotic officers gave chase . . . my uncle didn’t know who they were. . . . He ends up on a one-way street and stops his car, and starts to run away. My uncle jumps a fence and the officer shoots him in the middle of the back. They let him lay there for eleven minutes bleeding. . . . Finally they let the ambulance in and he dies on the way to the hospital.”
CASE #10. Black male, age 16, 127 lbs., Sebastopol, no prior criminal record, depressed, traumatic episode in van parked in family driveway with small carving knife, pepper sprayed and shot six times by county sheriff, financial settlement to family from civil trial.
INTERVIEWEE #10:“The officer was highly reactive and he didn’t assess the situation, he immediately jumped into plan of action and that escalated the situation rather than contain[ed] it. Both officers said they feared for their life, yet these officers were both more than twice the weight of my 127 lb. son.”
CASE #11. Latino male, age 34, San Jose, prior drug use, no history of mental illness, single officer confrontation 3:00 AM in front of his children’s and ex-partner’s home, Tasered by officer, physical struggle, shot four times, no weapons present.
INTERVIEWEE # 11: “His autopsy report showed that he had been hit four times with bullets through his left side. He was unarmed. The police said they are trained to stop a threat. And I said, Well my god if this officer felt threatened what about a shot to the leg or something . . . and he responded, No we are trained to shoot center space in the body. You know if you can’t shoot center space you won’t be a police officer.”
C A S E #12. White male, age 24, Santa Rosa, mentally ill ward of the state, schizophrenic, in and out of care facilities since age 14, stopped taking medication and had psychotic incident in his home shared by three men, picked up small kitchen knife and is Tasered and then shot by police four times, small financial settlement from civil suit.
INTERVIEWEE #12: “There are probably a great many combat veterans in the police . . . you have been taught to kill. They could have stepped back. The first thing they could have done is not make him come out of his room. Anyone who knows anything about mental patients who are off their meds—just get them somewhere quiet and alone.”
CASE #13. White-Korean male, age 30, Santa Rosa, mental illness (bipolar and PTSD), fired gun because he was afraid of intruders in his attic, taken outside by police, ran at officers shot, no weapon in possession at time of shooting.
INTERVIEWEE #13: “They kept shouting orders at him, I believe there were six officers, they approached in formation all of them with their guns aimed at him, and to someone in this mental state it was extremely threatening way to approach him. [They had him on the ground] and kept shouting confusing orders to him, turn your head to the right, turn your head to the left, then he jumped up . . . and they shot him with a rifle in the chest, right in the heart. None of this would have happened, all they had to do was say we are here to help, we understand you are hearing intruders, do you mind if we take a look?”
CASE #14. Black male, double amputee in wheelchair, age 61, and his son, age 21, Oakland, police arrive seeking proof of vaccination for dog that was reported to have bitten someone in the home, father killed with one shot to heart, son killed with thirteen shots, officer dies (family says from friendly fire), police claim son had a shotgun, mother says no gun in the house, tape recording hidden by police for six years revealed cooperative son and no shotgun blast.
INTERVIEWEE #14: “I think the reason officers do what they do is because they can. It is just like any human reaction that if there are not consequences, then you have a green light. . . . They don’t pay lawsuits, the taxpayers do. They seldom get fired for wrongdoing. So basically what they do is with impunity because they know the odds of any negative impact coming back to them . . . is negligible.”
We asked the families to tell us about their loved ones’ backgrounds, education levels, favorite memories, and what they were like as a person. We thought this was important to give a human face to the deceased. Each person killed by the police had family and close relationships. Some had mental illness, but were under care and working to improve. Some had prior run-ins with the law. By asking these questions, we learned about aspects of the victims’ personalities and humanity that were missing from the official police and news accounts of their deaths.
The deceased were described in the following terms: creative, artistic, loving, warm, compassionate, nice, trying to figure out where he belonged in the world, having a sense of humor, loved motorcycle riding, delightful, good hearted, happy, friendly, happy-go-lucky, helpful to a lot of people, reachable, fun, outgoing, passionate, kind, sweet, gentle, intelligent, spiritual, loved weightlifting, leader, good with people, popular, great smile, and very caring.
Some favorite memories were described as follows: fishing on the San Francisco Bay; he taught me how to drive a stick shift; he could impersonate anyone; we liked to walk together down Stage Street; he was wonderful on the stage, acting; we played basketball a lot as kids, he loved baseball but would only bat—never played outfield; he made my heart smile; he was very happy when he got a baby brother; bobbing up and down in the water free and happy; and my favorite memory is being hugged by him.
Most of the families complained that the police lied to them after the death of their family member and that the media backed up the police. In most cases, immediate family members were isolated from each other, as they were taken to the police station. Families were kept from knowing that their loved one was dead. Questioning by police was designed to build a negative case against the deceased.
INTERVIEWEE #1: “It is always the same, the police . . . just band together.”
INTERVIEWEE #2: “There was a knock on the door, and a parent’s worst nightmare came true to us. The media and the official report said he had been shot in the chest. When we got to the hospital we found out he had been shot in the back. The doctors told my wife and me that he had very little possibilities of survival, and [in] the case he did survive, it would most likely be in a vegetative state. After three agonizing days, we decided to disconnect him from life support.”
INTERVIEWEE #3: “They didn’t want to give me any information . . . when you get a phone call in the middle of the night that somebody’s just died, you kind of want some information. Then the newspaper wrote like he was terrible, a gang member. He was murdered by the police.”
INTERVIEWEE #4: “Well, from the beginning we felt the police were covering up something that happened. . . . They said they shot him because he pointed a gun at them—that never happened [he was shot in the back]. Channel 2 came out and my aunt asked me to do the interview . . . they needed to put a report on TV. They [just] want you to see the face of someone on TV in pain.”
INTERVIEWEE #5: “When I got to the hospital, three officers came to me and [said], “You need to follow us to the homicide department. Your son died at the scene.’ So they interrogated me for five hours. Then what I didn’t know was his girlfriend was in the room next to mine. So, when they finally let me go—didn’t offer me a ride cab or nothing. I call his girlfriend, and said, ‘Your man is dead,’ and I heard her screaming ‘mother fuckers,’ . . . all along she was asking (the police) ‘How is he,’ ‘Tell me he is OK,’ and they kept saying, ‘He is just fine.’ So they were interrogating both of us to see whatever kind of dirt they could find on him to discredit his case. They lied to her for five hours about his condition.”
INTERVIEWEE #6: “I don’t think [the media] focused on the police investigation. There was nothing on the fact that this was a criminal act by the police. It was there and then it was gone.”
INTERVIEWEE #7: “I think it was in the paper for one day, and then it was gone. It just disappeared like it never happened.”
INTERVIEWEE #8: “We witnessed what happened (about 10:00 PM) and we were put in a patrol car, no shoes, my husband was still in his pajamas. . . . It seemed like hours before they took him out of the house in an ambulance. They wouldn’t tell us if he was alive or dead. We were taken into the police office and told not to speak to each other about the incident. At 3:00 AM, the Petaluma police came in and told us he had passed away.”
INTERVIEWEE #9: “The [police chief] lied to us. One of the detec- tives said something negative about my cousin, and the chief said they should take the guy off the case, but that never happened. They interviewed both my cousins, separated them out. The newspaper called my grandma saying, ‘We heard your son got shot,’ my grandma calls my mom all hysterical. . . . First the media was trying to dehumanize him like they do . . . when someone gets shot by a cop. Later as the facts came out, the media kind of changed its mind on things, but a lot of the time they were just there for the story.”
INTERVIEWEE #10: “I started towards the van (to see my son) and the police pushed me away towards the house. They detained us in this room, I looked out the window and his body was on the driveway with a blue sheet and a white sheet over it, his hand was sticking out (with handcuff on). I was really disturbed. I couldn’t go to see (my son). They held us for an hour then took us to Santa Rosa Police Department. Our house was searched, our computers were seized, our home was photographed, wastebaskets searched, vitamins placed in a row on the counter and photographed. We were treated really unfairly. The police investigation was very biased. In our case, the Santa Rosa police conducted an investigation of the Sonoma County sheriffs (who shot our son), but the sheriff’s office was investigating another case (at the same time) for the Santa Rosa police.”
INTERVIEWEE #11: “[My mother, my cousin, and I] went down to the police station to find out what happened. We were immediately separated and not allowed to talk to anyone. We were put into little rooms and left for hours (3:00 AM to 10:00 AM). We kept asking, Is he OK? They responded he was in the hospital with shots in his arm. My sister was at home and they announced his death on the news. [The police] were withholding the fact that he had died because they needed us to talk to them. The officer came in and told me to get off the phone, and I exploded saying I am not getting off the fucking phone, you know that the father of my children had been shot and killed by you guys.”
INTERVIEWEE #12 did not respond to this question.
INTERVIEWEE #13: “The police took my daughter-in-law and her kids to the police station and questioned them for hours, including my two-year-old and ten-year-old grandchildren. I didn’t know any of this until the police came to my door the next day. They said, ‘Are you aware your son had an altercation with the police last night?’ He continued, ‘Well, there is no easy way to say this, but your son was killed,’ and they then just started asking me questions about our relatives’ names, addresses, and phone numbers and any information they could get from me. . . . Some of the things the media wrote right, and some definitely were wrong. They didn’t come to check with the family about the facts. So I wasn’t happy with the news coverage.”
INTERVIEWEE #14: “I drove home and there were 8 to 10 police cars around the house. They would not tell me what had happened. One said, ‘I will take you downtown and you will be told there.’ They put me in a room by myself for a half hour before anyone came in to tell me what happened. My youngest son was in the house and he was taken down to the police station and interrogated as well. They wouldn’t let us back in the house until 2:00 to 3:00 AM the next day. It was all over the news, and the police lied about having to shoot our dog because it was running loose in the house. That dog was always chained.
“It was a media circus for a week. They could have cared less about my husband and son. The only reason the media was interested in this case at all was because it was the first time an officer had died in a really long time.”
Certainly, the sudden death of a loved one is a very traumatic event for anyone. However, adding in isolation, interrogations, and lies will undoubtedly magnify the trauma. These families carry a deep-seated anger toward the police or other law enforcement officers, not only for killing their loved ones but also for what they see as gross mistreatment by authorities after the event. Not only do they understand that after a law enforcement–related death police immediately circle the wagons and go into protective mode, but they also see the media as complicit in accepting press releases from the police unquestioningly and conducting little in the way of investigative reporting.
Unfortunately, cases like Oscar Grant and our fourteen interviews continue to emerge in northern California, and the nation and the police seemingly always rule the death “justified homicide.”
In March 2014, San Francisco police shot to death a twenty-eight-year-old black man in a security guard uniform wearing a Taser. Police claim he started to pull his Taser, and they shot him fourteen times. Family members and community question how police could have mistaken a Taser for a gun.
In February 2014, an off-duty San Antonio Police Department officer shot twenty-three-year-old Marquis Jones in the back. The off-duty officer was working security at a local restaurant. After a minor accident involving the car in which Jones was a passenger, he turned and walked away from a confrontation between the officer and a friend. The officer pushed aside the friend and fatally shot Jones in the back, without warning. Jones’s parents are now suing the city of San Antonio, the officer, and the owners of the restaurant.
MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE ANDY LOPEZ CASE
In November 2013, investigative reporter Dennis Bernstein described the death of Andy Lopez at the hands of a Sonoma County sheriff:
On October 22, at 3:14 in the afternoon, 13-year-old Andy Lopez was walking to a friend’s house on the outskirts of Santa Rosa, California, to return the friend’s toy rifle, when two Sonoma County sheriff deputies drove up behind him in a marked police car and say they mistook the replica AK-47 for a real gun. Sheriff’s Deputy Erick Gelhaus, a training officer with 24 years’ experience in the department, later told investigators that he shouted at the boy to drop his “gun” and that when Lopez turned, Gelhaus feared for his life and opened fire, riddling the eighth-grader with seven bullets from a 9 mm Smith & Wesson handgun. According to the other deputy, who was driving the car and who did not open fire, the shooting was over in just a few seconds, even before he had time to move from behind the wheel and take cover behind his door.
Part of the tragic irony of this shooting was that it occurred on October 22nd, the very day that the national Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation uses to encourage awareness of police homicides.
In a twenty-eight-minute independent “Groundswell for Peace” production, Elaine B. Holtz, host of the long-running program Women’s Spaces, discussed the findings from an independent autopsy with Frank Sainz of the Justice Coalition for Andy Lopez (JCAL). The autopsy showed a pattern eight shots, with seven hitting Lopez, including a shot into his side through his heart. At no point did Lopez actually face the sheriff; he was shot in the side, wrist, and back. Frank Sainz went on to say that “incompetent deputy Sheriff Erick Gelhaus made a mistake. . . . He is [a] loose cannon, who is known to pull his weapon.”
The Andy Lopez shooting created a firestorm of protest, marches, demonstrations, and other arrests for several months in the Santa Rosa area. Many people could not understand how the sheriff did not determine that a thirteen-year-old boy in shorts was just a neighborhood kid out for a walk. The day after the shooting the Santa Rosa Press Democrat published a photo provided by the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department, comparing Lopez’s plastic toy gun to a real AK-47. This comparison led many readers to immediately assume that the sheriff had good grounds to shoot Lopez. Letters to the editor went so far as to blame his parents for letting him play with a look-alike weapon. The Press Democrat did not publish images of a youthful Andy Lopez depicting him as a smiling, thirteen-year old who bore no resemblance to an armed adult criminal.
A Sonoma State University (SSU) student research team in the Spring 2014 Investigative Sociology class examined the extent to which local media coverage of the Andy Lopez shooting influenced public opinion regarding the case. They also explored if the media’s portrayal of the shooting was adequate, fair, or complete. The SSU students concluded in their report, “After reviewing a variety of media source depictions of the Andy Lopez shooting and speaking to community members about their perceptions of the case, we have concluded that the local media’s coverage of the event has influenced the community to believe the shooting was justified.” On July 7, 2014, the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office announced at the end of their five-month investigation it would not file criminal charges against deputy Gelhaus for the Lopez shooting.
EXTERNAL ACCOUNTABILITY AS ONE POTENTIAL SOLUTION
It is cases like Lopez’s and others listed above that remind us that it is unlikely that all of these law enforcement–related deaths are justified. As interviewee #10 stated, “If there are one hundred police fatalities, statistics will tell you that (all) hundred wouldn’t be justified. . . . If every single police fatality is justified, can justice prevail?” Interviewee #10 also questioned the validity of police agencies investigating each other, instead of an external community review process.
The question becomes what can be done to help families find justice in these tragic cases?
The Spring 2014 SSU Investigative Sociology research team also wrote about how the city of Davis, California, has a unique method to investigate police-related issues. Davis uses an independent police auditor and ombudsperson to review and investigate police behavior.
Bob Aaronson is the independent police auditor for the City of Davis, working directly for the mayor. Aaronson’s responsibilities include taking and reviewing police department citizen complaints, as well as interacting with community members and organizations. In an interview, Aaronson explained that his work benefits both the police department and the community it serves. The different experiences of community members and police officers lead to misunderstandings. In his role as an independent auditor, Aronson is able to bridge this gap by explaining to officers how they are being perceived, and by helping the community to understand the duties of the police.
Aaronson also stated that his job provides external accountability, which he believes is a benefit to both the department and community. Aaronson suggested that establishing a civilian review board or other community oversight could benefit both the community and the police department. He believes that police departments want to do the best job that they can and that they appreciate community feedback that helps them do a better job. Aaronson also stated that if civilian oversight is properly administered, it has a tendency to reduce the number of lawsuits filed against police departments in law enforcement–related actions.
CONCLUSION
The best available evidence shows that more than 1,500 people die every year as a result of law enforcement engagements. At that rate, law enforcement related deaths are neither unusual nor trivial. They constitute a major social problem. However, the public is poorly informed about the scope of this social problem for two basic reasons. First, official investigations of law enforcement–related deaths nearly always determine that those deaths were justifiable homicides. Second, news accounts of law enforcement–related deaths typically emphasize official law enforcement perspectives, while they vilify the victims and marginalize the perspectives of the victims’ families.
The national push toward militarized police with homeland security oversight is certainly not reducing this death rate. Long-term racism continues to show abuses affecting people of color to greater degrees than white people. The culture of policing tends to reward aggressive behavior and diminish efforts to mitigate shooting deaths. And families of law enforcement–related death victims are mistreated and abused by police departments and the corporate media.
The hiring of an independent police auditor by the City of Davis is one step in the right direction, but much more is needed. We propose that the widespread development of democratic citizen involvement in community policing is essential to addressing this problem. This means that local community members, politicians, and police departments need to seek real citizen oversight, with paid independent staff who can research and review police policies and behaviors. Community policing would help to minimize the circle-the-wagons syndrome that is characteristic in the aftermath of many law enforcement–related deaths.
We also recommend a comprehensive review of police training, which must put greater emphasis on the use of nonlethal interventions and non-aggressive practices, especially in mental heath cases. Given the testimony presented above, mental health and social service support for the families of victims of law enforcement–related deaths is an important social justice need for people already suffering serious trauma.
We propose that news organizations employ their own ombudsperson who can operate like university professors with tenure, to undertake in-depth investigations in cases such as Andy Lopez’s, where the evidence calls into question any official judgment of justifiable homicide by law enforcement. In those instances, news organizations’ ombudspersons should work in cooperation with community police review boards in order to assure full transparency in the review of law enforcement actions and policies, and to encourage that law enforcement departments make policy changes and take corrective actions to retrain, or to remove from service, officers found to be unjustifiably aggressive or violent.
In the long run, these proposals promise to save cities money by reducing lawsuits, and, more importantly, they promise to save lives by encouraging law enforcement officers and agencies to act in ways that protect community members, and that hold them accountable when they do not.
The authors wish to acknowledge research assistance by Sonoma State University students Rio Molina, Vanessa Pedro, Jessica Clark, Tara Kostan, Alejandro Agua, and Jesus Vasquez (2013–14), and Amelia Albertini, Reham Ariqat, Veronica Bowers, Sandra Campos, Samantha Burchard, Sabrina Clark, Angelica Contreras, Alora Fowler, Kristin Laney, Ryan Larkin, Adam Lesh, Chris McManus, Rebecca Newsome, Adrienne Mead, Angela Pak, Blanca Rios, Chris Riske, Joe Risko, Ronni Poole, Jameka Rothschild, Steven Rutherford, Ryan Stevens, Lindsey Tanner, Lesley Tiffany-Brown, Josh Travers, Garret West, Chelsea Wilson, and Aragon Wyatt (2009–10).
Almost everybody, it seems, likes to murder prying reporters or just any man or woman with a plastic press pass hanging around their necks.
The ISIS beheadings of hostage freelances James Foley and Steven Sotloff are only the most recent of more than A THOUSAND deliberate killing of journalists since 1992 usually by assassins in the hire of bad regimes seeking revenge for embarrassing disclosures. In the past year or two the incredibly daring, one-eyed Marie Colvin killed by Assad’s Syrian dictatorship; Anna Politkovskaya assassinated by Putin’s thugs for blowing the gaff on Soviet atrocities in Chechnya, and Norbert Zongo the weekly editor in Burkina Faso shot and burned to death by the country’s president.
Woodward and Bernstein never had it so good because they did their digging in safe and solid Washington D.C. where they only faced the possibility of Nixon denting their reputation. But elsewhere in almost any country you name, from South Africa to Israel to our neighbor down south in Mexico the tap-tap-tap sound of your laptop may be accompanied by the tap-tap-tap of an AK47 or a hand grenade tossed into your office. In Mexico, for example, I’m amazed anything at all gets reported given the slaughter of journalists by the cartels sometimes with government connivance.
The same goes for Gaza, Israel and the Occupied Teritories. In just this year alone a few of the shot, bombed or beaten to death reporters were freelance Ali Abu Afash, Simone Camilli of AP, Mohammed Nour al-Din al-Deiri and Rami Rayan of Palestine Network, film maker Khaled Reyadh Hamad, and Hamid Shihab – note the ethnicities. Doing your job it’s easy to get caught in a crossfire; doing your job it’s also easy to infuriate the Israeli press office or Hamas snooping for “collaborators”.
According to the excellent Committee to Protect Journalists, here’s a hit list of the deadliest countries to work in (numbers indicate how many journalists killed):
Iraq 166, Philippines 76, Syria 68, Algeria 60, Russia 56, Pakistan 54, Somalia 53, Columbia 45, India 32, Mexico 30, Brazil 29, Afghanistan 26, Turkey 21, Sri Lanka 19, Bosnia 19, Tajikistan 17, Rwanda 17, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory 16, Sierra Leone 16, Bangladesh 14.
Except for a short time in Belfast, Northern Ireland during “The Troubles”, where my Kevlar got shredded from both sides (IRA and Ulster Defense Association), I’ve never been a war journalist or properly speaking a “foreign correspondent’. My heroes haven’t been cowboys but ordinary pen-and-notebook reporters under fire. It began years ago when I was a child and the only news you could trust out of Hitler’s Europe came from daring, risk-taking print reporters like William Shirer, Paul and Edgar Mowrer, John Gunther, Dorothy Thompson, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn – who often had to fight their own publishers to get out the truth.
Foreign-based journalists are incredibly brave if only because they risk their lives not for nation and glory but merely a pressing deadline from a not always sympathetic editor. (There are a few reporter-lemons like Lara Logan, Judith Miller and Doonesbury’s spotlight hogging Roland Hedley The Third.)
These days I’ve zeroed in a few overseas reporters, mainstream and otherwise, who over time I’ve found reliable and sufficiently “contrary” which is all I really want from a journalist. My current heroes include the relentless Patrick Cockburn who despite polio covers the fiery, treacherous Middle East with amazing tenacity – and the kind of human sources our CIA chronically ignores.
Of the mainstream TV reporters I’ve come to trust NBC’s Richard Engel who brings home the story despite bullets and shells exploding around him and being kidnapped by Syrian government’s sadistic militia. Robert Fisk, loathed by the Israelis, has covered almost every fight from Northern Ireland to the Syrian civil war; since he works for a paper with a pay wall I don’t read him much any more, and he may still be suffering from a near-fatal beating by Afghan refugees furious over a U.S. air force bombing. Another pacifist, Chris Hedges, formerly a terrific NYTimes war reporter, was a fine foreign correspondent under fire but in recent years has switched to chronic doomsaying.
I’m sure you have your own favorites, but mine is a friend and colleague, A.J. (Jack) Langguth, former NYT Saigon bureau chief and one of the great popular historians of war from the Romans (“A Noise of War”) to southeast Asia swamp (“Our Vietnam”) where he was wounded in the field with a damaged diaphragm which eventually helped kill him a few days ago. His ”Hidden Terrors” is a groundbreaking expose of U.S. connivance with, and training of, Latin American torturers.
As a war reporter, human being and friend he was unobtrusively brave. I’ve known a number of war correspondents – Mary Holland, Len Doherty, Murray Sayle and others – but Jack had a gift for personal friendship unparalleled in journalism in my experience. There are probably scores of his former students out there at low-paying drudge journalism jobs who were helped and touched by this big, calm, modest man. We owe him, and his gallant sisters and brothers in the field, a huge debt.
This past week marked the forty-first anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that expanded the right to privacy to include a woman’s right to an abortion. It also marked yet another tragic shooting, this one at a mall in Columbia, Md., that left three dead, including the gunman who committed suicide. On the surface, it may seem like abortion and gun violence don’t have anything in common but the way these issues have historically been framed — abortion as murder and the right to bear arms as essential — reflects how tightly we clutch our guns and Bibles in an effort to maintain founding principles, ones whose merit should be challenged based on our ever-evolving society.
If there’s anything that needs comprehensive reform, it’s current gun laws — not abortion rights.
Our nation is no stranger to gun violence — in fact, it’s often our bedfellow, and the facts are startling. In the first nine months of 2013, there were six mass shootings in the United States with at least 20 of those having occurred since President Obama was elected. What’s even more startling is that half of the deadliest shootings in our nation have occurred since 2007.
After 26 people — including 20 children — were slaughtered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012, the media, public and to a degree, political response had the same message: it’s time for comprehensive gun control laws to be enacted. But, we hear the same message after every mass shooting — we heard it after the shootings at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Tuscon, the Washington Navy Yard, the Sikh Temple, the Seattle Coffee Shop, Fort Hood and more. While mass shootings are the form of gun violence that most frequently dominates the media, it’s important to note that a plethora of U.S. cities having higher rates of gun violence than entire nations.
Given the consistent gun violence in our country, it’s getting harder and harder to support the Second Amendment without recognizing that it badly needs to be reevaluted. As Harvey Wasserman wrote for The Huffington Post in 2011 after attempted assassination of Rep. Gabbie Giffords (D-AZ), the Second Amendment “is granted only in the context of a well-regulated militia and thus the security of a free state.” He uses the National Guard as an example of this kind of organization, not armed individuals seeking personal retribution. Wasserman argues that this kind of “murder and mayhem” that has escalated “has been made possible by the claim to a Constitutional right that is not there,” meaning that outside the ‘well-regulated militia,’ the Second Amendment holds little relevancy, especially in our current society.
If you take all this into consideration, paired with the fact that nine in 10 Americans support expanded background checks on guns, it’s logical to assume something is being done to curb gun violence, right?
Wrong. Just over a month ago, The Huffington Post reported that despite legislation being proposed, including one that would have enacted comprehensive background checks, Congress has not passed any gun control laws since the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012.
It seems pretty asinine that we live in a country whose state legislators are more likely to restrict abortion than enact comprehensive gun control laws (I’m looking at you, Rick Perry). Take Texas, for example. Last summer, the state imposed catastrophic abortion restrictions under the omnibus anti-choice bill HB 2 that have closed clinics and left patients to travel hundreds of miles to get an abortion. Texas is currently in a reproductive state of emergency but gun rights advocates fear not, because it’s easier to get a gun than an abortion.
How’s that for warped logic, especially when you consider that family planning and women’s reproductive services are good for the economy. Restricting access to reproductive health care can force women to carry unwanted or intended pregnancies to term, thus limiting her ability to fully participate in the workforce and contribute to the economy. A woman’s right to bodily autonomy and agency surrounding her decisions about pregnancy isn’t just good economics, it’s necessary as we build a more gender equal society. Viewing women as primarily baby-making receptacles does nothing for equality. If anything, it promotes the idea that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, not the workforce.
Efforts that restrict access to abortion and reproductive rights but uphold dangerous gun laws magnifies the disconnect between public opinion and actual representation and reflects the desperation of status quo stakeholders to maintain the three Ps: power, privilege and the patriarchy. There’s no bigger threat to these structures than disrupting their history of power but our current social, political and economic environment calls for change. If we want to save more American lives, it’s not women’s bodies that need regulation — it’s gun laws.
In the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that killed twenty children and six adults, gun sales soared across the United States. It is a sadly familiar response in a country where nearly half the population keeps a gun at home (as of 2011). After each massacre, whether a mass shooting in a Colorado movie theater or the attempted assassination of an Arizona congresswoman that killed several bystanders, Americans have bought guns at a higher pace than they did before the rampage.
Lax gun laws in the United States also have devastating effects south of the border: over 250,000 guns are smuggled into Mexico each year, contributing to the country’s warlike conditions. As an urgent debate about gun control continues after regulations aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of criminals were defeated in Congress, we turned to Mexican artist Pedro Reyes, who in two major projects spanning the last several years, has responded to gun violence by transforming weapons into art.
***
In 2007, I was invited to Culiacán, a major drug trafficking center that is also one of Mexico’s most violent cities, to launch a campaign where residents were asked to donate weapons that were then melted and made into shovels to plant trees. We received 1,527 guns, steamrolled them and transformed the metal into 1,527 shovels we used to plant the same number of trees.
This project, Palas por Pistolas, developed in response to a situation that has only gotten worse. Over the last six years, more than 70,000 Mexicans have been killed in drug-related violence. There are now voluntary gun donation campaigns throughout the country. People are eager to clean out the huge number of weapons that Calderón’s presidential term brought. But we can’t stop the flow of guns on our own: we need change within the United States.
As it stands now, the United States is an extremely dangerous neighbor. It’s impossible to buy a weapon in Mexico; there are no armories here. But with such lax gun laws across the border, drug traffickers only need to take a short drive to Walmart or any other of the nearly 7,000 gun retail shops along the U.S.-Mexico border.
For my latest project, Disarm, I have taken guns seized by police in Ciudad Juárez and turned them into musical instruments: guitars, drums, marimbas and so on. I think about Disarm as a form of exorcism, expelling a demon that has overtaken the body. In the United States, demons of war and violence possess the social body. There are 89 guns for every 100 citizens in the United States. The country spends more than the next 13 nations combined on its military. You have to defeat and tame the demon before you can expel it. In the instruments I’ve built from guns, the weaponry appears intact—though, of course, it is no longer functional—so that people still have to deal with this demon.
To get to the root of the cartel wars, the United States will need to end its War on Drugs, which has, in my opinion, spawned the violence in Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses. Marijuana has never killed anyone, while a single weapon can kill people for generations, because there’s no planned obsolescence in these objects. A gun manufactured 50 years ago may function as well as it did the day it was made.
The two big cultural shifts that we have to undertake in this century, I believe, are a new policy toward drugs and a new policy toward guns, which are intrinsically related projects. First, in terms of health, prescription drug abuse causes many more deaths than the use of illegal drugs. Then there are the “side effects” of the War on Drugs, whether mass incarceration or the gun violence that an illicit drug market fuels. For gun companies to thrive, you need conflict. You need fear, you need wars and you need crime. This doesn’t mean that all drugs should be legalized at once, or that all weapons should immediately be banned. But we obviously need a major readjustment. We are living in mayhem.
***
With both Palas Por Pistolas and Disarm, I think about the tradition of alchemy, where, simultaneous with the physical conversion of a substance, a psychological transformation is supposed to occur. As children use former weapons to plant trees, or musicians play instruments that are visibly composed of guns, they engage in a concrete activity that is positive, but also in a ritual that builds trust.
A cultural rejection of weapons as an industry must come about if we want to see real change in the prevalence of guns. Investing money in a company that makes weapons should be regarded as dirty—a sin. If you are investing in weapons, you are fueling death and suffering around the world. It should be a responsibility for everyone on earth to go on a crusade against guns.
Change will be difficult; even setting aside the economic interests maintaining the status quo, I believe there is a certain amount of violence in our nature that we can’t eliminate. We have to find ways to sublimate that violent energy, like smashing guitars into pieces or shouting into a microphone. If the people who set off bombs or commit school shootings had the opportunity to become artists, maybe they would be doing political art and not bombing!
We have to refocus the rage that exists in society and provide creative outlets for it. As Freud wrote inCivilization and Its Discontents, “The first man who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” We will always want to kill each other, but we can find new forms to channel our frustration into some sort of symbolic violence and prevent the emergence of real violence.
When weapons are widespread, you can either push to make them ubiquitous or rare. I believe that you have to organize actions that move in one direction or the other. In the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union acquired more and more nuclear weapons to outdo each other. Disarmament remains the harder direction to take. But I want to live in a world that is moving toward common trust rather than universal fear.
There's no question about it--American baby boomers are taking their own lives like never before. Suicide rates in the United States jumped dramatically for 35- to 64-year-olds between 1999 and 2010, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These self-inflicted deaths increased from 13.7 per 100,000 to 17.6. As a result, in 2010 more people died from suicide (38,364) than from car accidents (33,687).
The increase in suicide is particularly acute for older folks: Those aged 50-54 years saw their rates increase from 20.6 per 100,000 to 30.7, a jump of 49.4%. For those aged 55-59 years the rates increased by 47.8%. The rates for women, although much lower than for men, also climbed: "Among women," the report states, "suicide rates increased with age, and the largest percentage increase in suicide rate was observed among women aged 60–64 years (59.7%, from 4.4 to 7.0)."
Is Wall Street's version of capitalism driving up our suicide rates?
We really don't know why humans take their own lives. But we can get a sense of what events correlate with increasing and decreasing suicide rates. Ileana Arias, CDC deputy director, provides some suggestions:
“It is the baby boomer group where we see the highest rates of suicide. There may be something about that group, and how they think about life issues and their life choices that may make a difference....The increase does coincide with a decrease in financial standing for a lot of families over the same time period."
Dr. Arias is referring to research that shows a correlation between the rise of suicide rates and economic hard times. For example a 2001 study by sociologist Augustine J. Kposowa found:
"After three years of followup, unemployed men were a little over twice as likely to commit suicide as their employed counterparts. Among men, the lower the socio-economic status, the higher the suicide risk. Among women, in each year of followup, the unemployed had a much higher suicide risk than the employed. After nine years of followup, unemployed women were over three times more likely to kill themselves than their employed counterparts."
More Older Workers Join the Ranks of the Long-Term Unemployed
In winner-take-all capitalism, if your job disappears during a massive sustained job crunch, you will have a hard time finding another one. In fact, the older you are, the more likely you are to enter the ranks of the long-term unemployed (out of work a year or longer).
The 2008 Wall Street financial meltdown killed more than 8 million jobs in matter of months. Reckless bankers, not the unemployed workers, caused the destruction of jobs:
By the end of 2011 more than 31 percent of the total unemployed had been jobless for a year or longer, according to a Pew Trust study.
It also found that "unemployed older workers were the most likely to have been jobless for a year or more."
At that time, "more than 42 percent of unemployed workers older than 55 had been out of work for at least a year, a higher percentage than any other age category."
But wait, doesn't egalitarian Scandinavia have even higher suicide rates?
For decades, Scandinavia was known for its egalitarian economies and its high suicide rates. In fact, for much of the post-WWII era, countries with more egalitarian societies seemed to have suffered higher rates of suicide. This led to a widely accepted narrative that described countries like Denmark, Norway and Sweden as having fundamentally flawed socialistic economies that kill the desire to take risks and live fully. Allegedly, their high taxes and cradle-to-grave social benefits harm the most fundamental instincts to compete, to create and to thrive. While some claimed the higher suicide rates came from the lack of sunshine during the long northern winters, the dominant explanation always centered on the evils of Scandinavian egalitarianism.
But blaming egalitarianism no longer works since we now have a new leader in suicides -- ruthless, American-style capitalism. The most recent comparative suicide rate statistics for all age groups and genders show that we have higher suicides rates than Scandinavia: (per 100,000 people) :
Denmark 11.3
Norway 11.9
Sweden 11.9
U.S. 12.0
If we singly out the male suicide rates, normally three times higher than the female rates, the U.S. clearly leads the pack:
Denmark 15.3
Norway 15.7
Sweden 16.1
U.S. 20.0
Of course, die-hard anti-socialists still could argue that Scandinavia has become more capitalistic and unequal, while the U.S. is growing more socialistic thereby lowering the Scandinavian suicide rates while increasing ours. However, it's painfully obvious that American inequality is growing more extreme by the day. If the anti-egalitarian mythology were true, the U.S. should have the lowest suicide rates in the world. So maybe, it's time to consider alternative explanations.
A counter-narrative to the egalitarian myth of suicide:
Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers gambled the economy into the ground. Through mergers, acquisitions and leveraged buyouts they're still creating and recreating a form of capitalism that throws millions of older workers out on the street. To enrich themselves, financial elites helped to destroy defined pension plans as well as unions, which provide enormous protections for older workers. Wall Street also helps companies load up on debt that can bankrupt the pension funds that still exist. And now our financial barons are leading the charge for cuts in Social Security and Medicare to pay for the damage Wall Street has done to the economy. In short, the Wall Street version of capitalism makes life enormously insecure for the many, while enriching the few.
If you're a baby boomer who has spent a lifetime working hard, you could be hurting if Wall Street destroys your job and wipes out your savings. Because you are old, you could wind up lost among the long-term unemployed without much of a chance of ever finding a job again. At the very least, you are under a great deal of economic stress, the likes of which very few Scandinavians would ever experience.
Do suicide rates go down when Americans fight back?
Perhaps some scholars should test the following hypothesis: Do suicide rates in America go down when empowering movements arise? Did the rate of suicide among African Americans decline during the civil rights movement? Did suicide rates among women and the LBGT communities also decline as these movements emerged? Was there even a dip when Occupy Wall Street took center stage?
In short, what would happen to our overall feeling of self-worth if a major movement emerged to take on the Wall Street plutocrats and their Washington enablers? What if unemployed workers were part of a mass movement for jobs and justice as they were in the 1930s? Wouldn't that make us feel more hopeful?
Well, a national movement to take back our country from Wall Street sure would bring a smile to this boomer.
