Episode 123 - Lancaster Tasing Incident
Date: 2018-06-29 | Duration: 11:55
Topics
Failure to comply, or failure to understand confusing instructions?
Transcript
[0:03]
This works this time. I’m back to talk about the—there’s a new video out of police action in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. If you haven’t seen it yet, I tweeted it so you can take a look at it in my Twitter feed. It’s going to be another one of those situations of Yanni and Laurel; people are going to see what they want to see in this. I’ll play it for you, but you can see the good version of it in my Twitter feed. But first, let me play it for you, then I’ll read Shaun King’s tweet where I first saw it, and then I’ll tell you how to have less of it. So let’s see if I can play this in a way that’s at least a little bit viewable.
There are two police officers. One is a woman; she’s off-camera so you’ll hear a woman’s voice.
[1:05]
He’s asked him to sit down. Now he’s telling him to put his legs straight out, but he’s not putting his legs near them. Now let’s just show the key part here. Listen to the female officer’s voice because what she says is a little bit confusing. What she says is, “Put your legs straight down and cross them.” But we see that just before he gets tased, it looks like he’s trying to cross his legs because it’s not obvious to him—and this is reasonable—that you don’t know how to cross your legs when they’re there. Obviously, she means cross them at the ankles. Listen to it and watch her say, “Put them straight down.”
[2:15]
Watch her say, “Put them straight down and cross them.” Now he crosses them back. Here’s what I heard. First of all, nobody gets away without a little bit of blame in this one. Should the police have handled this better? Probably, but I’ll let the police figure that out. To me, it looks like there might have been a better way to deal with this, especially since the backup arrived immediately. They should have known where the backup was. They should have known that he’s sitting and he’s compliant, but he wasn’t a hundred percent compliant at first. In other words, when they said, “Put your legs straight out,” it seemed that he was hesitating to do that. I assume the reason they wanted him to put his legs straight out is that it would be harder—
[3:16]
—harder for him to pop up and run away if he were inclined to do that. Having his feet underneath him where he could jump up, maybe that’s a less secure situation for the police. But I think where things went wrong is as he was starting to comply and he started to put his legs out a little bit, almost straight but not completely—not completely complying, but complying-ish—probably not enough to get you tased. Up until the time he started to cross his legs, it seemed to me—and again this is just Yanni and Laurel, everybody’s going to have their own view of it—but it looked like he was moving in the direction of complying more than he had originally, which should have been fine. If somebody is moving in the direction of complying, that person probably shouldn’t get tased. The police probably have some questions to answer.
[4:19]
I’m not a police expert, so I can’t give you an opinion about whether they crossed any line of procedure. But when I listened to it, I also was confused about the direction, because “put your legs straight out” and “cross your legs”—it’s easy to imagine those as being not the same thing. “Cross your legs” is sort of—you pull them up close to you and sit cross-legged. That’s the most common way somebody crosses a leg. It’s a stressful situation, and in a stressful situation, you’re not hearing right. There’s some confusion. When somebody says, “Put your legs straight out and cross them,” I’m not sure that’s the best situation to expect somebody to comply. In my opinion, this was just a mistake. It was a mistake by the police.
[5:22]
Their communication was not as crisp as it needed to be. She could have said, “Put your legs straight out and now cross them at the ankles,” and that might have been better. We don’t know. I assume he’s a native English-speaking perp; I haven’t seen anything that would say he wouldn’t. He seemed to be complying enough that he understood English. I think this is a legitimate mistake on the police’s part because the one police officer was not clear in her instructions, and it looked like at the moment of tasing he was doing something that looked a lot like one of the police officers just told him to do. I’m going to agree that the police have some explaining to do. However, having said that, I think it was a legitimate mistake on the police’s part—just some unclear language.
[6:23]
Not the sort of thing that you should necessarily be fired for. We’ll let the police figure that out. It was definitely a mistake in my opinion. Well, in my opinion, it’s a mistake—that’s not “definitely.” Now let’s talk about the perp at the very beginning. The perp, or let’s say the—is that the right word? The perp, the person under custody, let’s call him just the person under police control. He did seem to be not complying in the very beginning. Now, if I had done what he did, as white as I am, I would expect to get tased. So I don’t know that this is clearly a white-black thing, because if you put me in that same situation, I think I’m getting tased. Now, somebody is saying, “Laughing my ass off, no you wouldn’t.” There is another element to this that I haven’t mentioned: I’m small and old and not—
[7:28]
—not very dangerous. If I tried to run, both of them could probably catch me within a block. I’m guessing that the police would not have felt there was much of a risk with me. So probably they would have felt less problem and maybe they would have given me a little more flexibility. That’s possible. The person they stopped looked young and healthy. The two police officers were a woman and a guy who didn’t look like he was going to win the Olympics. The person that they had under their control was physically probably superior to both of them, meaning that he was young and strong and they were neither of those things, relatively speaking. It’s possible that in that situation, if you put a large, capable white male in that situation and it looked like he wasn’t complying, I think he gets tased too.
[8:28]
There’s no way to know that because we retreat to our biases. If you’re Black, you assume that that’s not the case; if you’re white, you assume that it is. That’s the Yanni and Laurel. There’s no way we could know. The cops, I believe, are both white just based on the video; that’s the most I can tell about it.
But here’s the part I wanted to add: I think that this video and others of its kind should be put together as a training video—partly for the police, but partly for the citizens. If you put me in that same situation, I’m positive that I would not have been tased because I would have handled it differently. What I said before is if I did the same thing he did—if I handled it the same way and I was a larger, younger male who was a little bit more dangerous, more of a flight risk—I expect that I would have been tased.
[9:29]
In reality, I would not have handled the situation anything like this. Here’s the first thing I would have done: I would have engaged the officers so that we were having a conversation. What I saw was them yelling at him and him not doing with his body what he needed to do. If he was talking, it was low; I didn’t hear any. But I would have said, “Do you mean like this?” The first time they said, “Put your legs out,” and I hadn’t complied exactly, I would have said, “Completely out like this?” Because the moment you ask them for clarification, they understand that the situation is about making sure I understand it. It’s not a compliance problem; I’m having a “making sure I understand your instructions” problem. The moment you change the frame from not complying to “I’m not sure I understand, let me understand exactly—”
[10:32]
“—exactly what you mean. Is it like this, officer? Are you talking about this? Is this right?” I talked before about asking directly, “How can we all stay safe?” It depends on the situation; you might not always be able to say that. But asking the officers for clarification about what they’re asking you to do probably is going to keep you safe every time. That’s my assumption.
I’d like to see some experts in this sort of thing weigh in. I would imagine that there are ways that this could be stitched together with other videos and become an actual training video. “They’ll think you’re being a smartass.” No, not if you’re sincere. Sincerity would have come across. If you’re being sarcastic about it—“Do you mean like this? Is this good enough, officer?”—then you’re going to get tased, maybe. But if you say, “Officer, are you talking about—”
[11:33]
“—straight out like this? When you say ‘cross your legs,’ do you mean while they’re still out?” I think the police created a situation that was ambiguous, so they have to answer for that. Whoops, looks like I’ve got to go and I will talk to you all later.