Consider This from NPR - Do Police Officers View Themselves Differently As Public Perception of Them Changes?

Episode Date: July 23, 2022

This week dozens of family members of victims of the Uvalde Texas school shooting showed up at the town's first school board meeting since a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers in May.The atmosphere became tense and emotional as families confronted board members, demanding assurances that students and staff would be safe in the coming school year.The school board meeting followed the release of surveillance footage from the day of the shooting and an investigative report released by the Texas House of Representatives.The investigation found that a total of 376 local, state, and federal officers converged on the scene. But due to "systemic failures and egregiously poor decision making" on the part of the police, more than an hour passed before anyone confronted the gunman. Many Americans feel that the police stand between order and chaos. Yet the massive failure by law enforcement in Uvalde may change how the public views police and how police view themselves.NPR's Michel Martin speaks with Seth Stoughton, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Y'all do not give a damn about our children or us. I don't want to go to your guys' school if they don't have protection. And she's encouraging for her friends not to go to school too. And I can't help but wonder if they just didn't find our children worthy of being saved. This week, dozens of parents, teachers, and students attended an intense and emotional school board meeting in Uvalde, Texas. It was their first meeting with the board since 19 students and two teachers were killed by a gunman. Families demanded assurances that they or their loved ones would be safe in the coming school year. What are you going to do to make sure I don't have to wait 77 minutes bleeding out on my classroom floor just like my little sister did? The school board meeting came on the heels of an investigative report released by the Texas

House of Representatives. The report found that nearly 400 law officers from local, state, and federal agencies all converged on the scene, but communication was lacking and no one took charge. Several officers in the hallway or in that building knew or should have known there was dying in that classroom, and they should have done more, acted with urgency, tried the door handles. Republican State Representative Dustin Burroughs, who chaired the committee investigating the police response, spoke at a press conference earlier this week. If there's only one thing that I can tell you is there were multiple systemic failures. who chaired the committee investigating the police response book at a press conference earlier this week. If there's only one thing that I can tell you is there were multiple systemic failures.

Fellow committee member Democrat Joe Moody spoke to NPR this week. He said he was struck by the surveillance tapes. I've watched a number of videos where I want something every time I watch it to happen differently, but I know that it doesn't. I think one of the contextual pieces that's important when we note that there's nearly 400 officers on scene, nowhere near that number had an understanding of what was going on in that hallway. That number is far fewer. Mooney says some of the officers who arrived on the scene received little to no information or inaccurate information.

All this fueled the ineffective response on May 24th. And while all of this was couched in the bland language of bureaucraties, it all added up to an epic failure. So you get that piece of information, that sounds very different. So it was a failure of the systems that should have been in place to be able to produce a better result in that scenario. Consider this. Many Americans think of law enforcement as the one standing between order and chaos. Will the ineffective response by police in

Uvalde change how the public views police and how police view themselves? That's coming up. From NPR, I'm Michelle Martin. It's Saturday, July 23rd. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. For years, the police have been confronted with calls to change the way they do business in the wake of the killings of civilians, mainly, though not exclusively, black and brown people.

But recent weeks have brought a new wave of scrutiny of police practices for a very different reason, the failed response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. I think the natural tendency in policing or in public conversations about policing is to individualize problems. This officer made a bad call. This officer did something wrong. And one of the things that I think this report really brought to bear is we're talking about systems failures here.

This isn't an officer or a group of officers that made a bad call. Seth Stoughton is a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Before that, though, he was an officer with the Tallahassee Police Department, where he also trained other officers. I asked him what, if any, self-reflection the failure in Uvalde may have caused among police. From training to equipment to command structure to interagency communications, there were systemic failures,

not just at the incident, but at these multiple agencies leading up to the incident. I think that forces us to confront, or at least I hope it forces us to confront, this reality that we need to think about policing from a systems perspective. We need to think about it as an institution and not be quick to dismiss individual incident failures as purely individual failures, to recognize that they can be symptoms of deeper problems. You said that there's a tendency to sort of individualize response to failures like this, that people, you know, just, well, that's, I guess when it comes to sort of police misconduct,

people tend to call it like the bad apple syndrome. They said, oh, no, that's just a few bad apples. It's not a system problem. Is that normal human tendency has been exacerbated. of the rogue cop and the bad apple have become so entrenched that I think everyone now knows, regardless of what ideology or political persuasion, everyone knows what you're talking about when you say policing bad apple or when you start having that conversation. I take your point that the rogue cop, kind of the bad apple, is such a staple of television and the movies and all of this that, I mean, it's almost like a part of the culture. But I think what really stood out to people in the Uvalde situation is that you had literally 400 people, almost 400 people from all these different agencies, from the tiny local police department to the border patrol to the state police. They had all this, you know, heavy equipment and all these, you know, things.

And yet the response was completely lacking, I think. And so I guess what's so dissonant about this is that it's so contrary to the way we have been accustomed to thinking about police. You know, they're the warriors, the people, you know, who are standing between, you know, us and the bad guys, that kind of thing. And I'm just wondering what this, does that whole episode, are people thinking about that? Are people in law enforcement that you talk to, has this kind of changed their image of themselves? Has it caused them to do some soul

searching? I mean, the real answer to that specific question is no. What I'm hearing from most of my friends and contacts in law enforcement is a particular version of the bad apple commentary, but this one's the cowardly apple, right? These were cowards. They made a cowardly decision. This is something that we saw in Orlando in the Pulse nightclub shooting. There were accusations within policing that the officers were being cowardly by not rushing in more quickly. When we're pointing at an officer's failure or the failure of a group of officers and we're saying they're cowards, that's really just another way of individualizing the problem. This was a moral failing on their part, as opposed to identifying more systemic issues. I do think, though, that it puts some strain on the rhetorical metaphor that's been used in policing and this idea of cops as

warriors, of running towards the sound of gunfire, of requiring broad public and political support so that they continue to act with unparalleled courage under combat conditions. When you have an incident of this magnitude and you don't see officers living up to that rhetoric, you can look at it and just say that it's an individual failure on the officer's part. But again, I think a more systemic review, a more comprehensive, holistic review is useful here. And I think it really identifies the problem with that rhetoric, especially when we start to identify that this isn't the only incident of its type, that there are other incidents and not just mass shootings. There are other instances, for example, when officers used force and publicly explained the use of force in situations where it seems excessive by saying, well, I was afraid. That's a very different picture than this public rhetoric of the fearless and courageous police warrior. And I think it's worth interrogating.

You know, it's interesting because the day after the Uvalde shootings marked the second anniversary of the killing of George Floyd, you know, former President Barack Obama was one of the people who noted that. And of course, he got the typical, you know, criticism on social media from the usual sources. What happened in each case is very different. I do wonder if you see any way in which they are related or that they provoke similar things to think about. It sounds like you do. I absolutely do. If you look at the statements given justifying the officers' actions in both cases, I think they are rooted in fear. The officers involved in the George Floyd situation were afraid of him, the statement said. They were afraid of the crowd.

They were afraid of the crowd. They were afraid of the situation. And when you see the statements coming out of Uvalde, I believe it was the police chief who said the officers didn't want to go in because they didn't want to get shot. Well, of course they didn't want to get shot. No one wants to get shot. But you can't use that as a justification for not doing the job that you signed up to do. The same thing is true with use of excessive force. An officer might say, well, I used this degree of force because I was really afraid. Okay, but you still have a professional obligation to act appropriately, even in high-pressure situations where there might be some degree of risk, let alone the professional obligation to accurately assess that risk in the first place. Looking individually at the two incidents, the officers acted very differently.

Overly aggressive officers as opposed to officers who are not aggressive enough. But when you look at the justifications for those actions, I think there are commonalities that we, frankly, that we need to identify and that we shouldn't ignore. Coming up, what does it take to get law enforcement to change? really around the world, but certainly around the United States, which were, you know, obviously embraced by some constituencies and very much resisted, you know, by others. There is no question that it did provoke a rethinking of police practices, even if it didn't evoke an embrace of new police practices or new practices around, you know, criminal justice. It certainly provoked a lot of thinking. And it certainly provoked the public to think about law enforcement in ways that they perhaps had not unless they were directly

affected by law enforcement conduct. Do you think these current events will shape public opinion? I know that public opinion isn't necessarily your wheelhouse, but what do you think? Do you think that these events that we've been talking about here are adding to a shifting view of law enforcement in this country? And in what way? I do. When you look historically, public opinion about policing has been shaped to a very significant extent by public actions by officers. In the civil rights era, one of the turning points that brought a large swath of middle-class white society to the side of civil rights protesters was seeing the images on the news of what police were doing to protesters. In the aftermath of Rodney King, what started a lot of conversations, not just private conversations, but also public conversations about how police agencies are

regulated and what their policies are and criminal charges for officers, those conversations were started because of what the public saw in that high-profile incident. When policing has been the focus of sustained public attention the way it has been at least since George Floyd's death in 2020, but even before that in the summer of 2015 with Walter Scott and Michael Brown, I think we are more attuned as a society to identify and focus on police issues. And I think we need to do that. We're at the place as a society where we have the potential to reinvent the way that we think about and do policing. But that'll only happen if people are paying attention. Do police change their behavior? I mean, do they do it because of outside pressure from the public? Or do they do it because they don't think the practices that

they've become accustomed to work anymore? Or do they do it because of a different moral clarity that the things that they're doing are wrong or all of the above? Yeah, I think there's been a lot of resistance to change in many aspects of policing. Again, so again, I think it's helpful here to take a historical look. But we also see a lot of changes, including big cultural changes that are externally imposed. Society is demanding a certain level of change. Police agencies have given up weapons that officers loved using because of public pressure. So it's not that public pressure drives all police change. There are certainly a significant amount of internal changes in the

evolution of American policing, but public pressure drives a lot of change in policing. Seth Stoughton is a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. He's also a former police officer. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Michelle Martin.