Readers — Sometimes I hear about stories in an untimely manner — like berdesrakt
this one, which happened a year ago but is making my blood reach 212 degrees Fahrenheit, so I have to write about it even at this late date:
Apparently Homeland Security felt it needed to train officers to shoot with “No More Hesitation.” I.e., it wanted officers trained not to think twice when faced with danger. So to INSTILL that hair-trigger response, our government purchased target practice posters featuring kids, old ladies in their kitchens, and pregnant women.
What’s so disturbing about this? Don’t we WANT our protectors to develop nerves of steel?
No. We want them to develop quick instincts, critical thinking, and calm. The idea of not distinguishing between a likely and unlikely threat reminds me of Zero Tolerance: every “incident” no matter how small or ridiculous is treated the same as a clear and present danger. Thus a kid with a pen knife is treated as harshly as a kid with an Uzi. Homeland Security seems equally bent on creating a culture of obtuseness: “I don’t care if it’s a guy from Chechnya who bought a one-way ticket with cash or a gray-haired lady eating All-Bran in her kitchen, you never know who could be a terrorist!”
Moreover, when we start viewing absolutely everyone as a possible threat, it is a different world we see: A world filled with evil and disguises, rather than the world we really live in: far from perfect, but hardly Halo 3. Practicing on the target of a granny, or tween girl in her driveway, reinforces the idea that we are under siege by everyone, everywhere. Trust no one, ever. Be on guard at all times.
SCHOOL BUS TERRORISTS?
A couple of years ago I was speaking at a convention of school bus fleet owners. After my talk, which was about how we got so scared for our children, the next speaker came on stage: She was from the FBI and she spent an hour talking about how school bus drivers must always be on the alert for terrorists. She told the owners to tell their drivers to look out for anyone they saw along the bus route who wasn’t normally there. “I don’t care if it’s a mother with her three children. If she wasn’t there yesterday, WHY is she there today?” That’s not an exact quote, but it is the example she gave: Fear for the worst if you suddenly see a mom you don’t know, and her young kids.
The chances that a mom with three young kids was walking near the school bus with the intention of blowing it up — those odds were not discussed. The mere fact that the mom COULD blow up the bus was enough to merit a warning from this government employee.
It is good to be prepared. It is not good, or even safe, to be paranoid. When we are told that using our own perceptions, knowledge, compassion and humanity is a HINDRANCE to safety, we are being brainwashed into hysteria.
I’d rather have officers hesitate just long enough to figure out what’s actually going on, than have them so scared and suspicious of everyone that they aim, shoot, and then think. – L
41 Comments
They’re from the government and they’re here to help.
amen
Seriously, where do people like that FBI woman come from? Were they born and raised in a government-secured bunker? Weren’t they ever children? Do they live in an actual house in an actual neighborhood?
There is a quote by the great English Jurist, William Blackstone, regarding the goal of justice in a jury system:
“It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”
I feel the same way about the lives of police. I would rather 10 cops get shot, than one innocent person gunned down. Yes, I am aware that police are fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, etc, I DON’T CARE. They knew what the risk was when they signed up to put on the uniform. If they are so worried about going home to their families at the end of the day that they will shoot a pregnant woman, they shouldn’t be police.
I say this as the husband of a pregnant woman who likes to sit in public and knit. I don’t think it’s paranoid anymore to worry that some poorly trained, trigger happy cop will gun down my family because his cop brain didn’t see a pregnant woman making baby hats but a threat wielding two deadly weapons.
“I feel the same way about the lives of police. I would rather 10 cops get shot, than one innocent person gunned down.”
a) There’s a link in Lenore’s previous posting to the ten deadliest jobs. Police is not one of them. You should worry more about roofers and garbage collectors.
b) More police die by suicide than any other cause. If they’re looking for deadly enemies, they should try a mirror.
I can’t help but think that I would rather be shot by a child then shoot one. Regardless of the reason or circumstance.
Love the photoshopped guns, they look SO realistic. NOT.
The FBI woman’s line’s go along with the governments line of “the threat is there, it’s real, we need to deal with it.” Yet a government is good at directive, not nuance, so if we want a threat dealt with directly call in the Army. If you want nuance you deal with it personally.
If there is anything that B-grade 50’s movies taught me, when the government comes in to “handle the situation” you better duck.
From what I’ve read about this kind of training in the past, posters of women, children and the elderly were used to train officers when NOT to shoot.
I couldn’t find anything about this in the mainstream news. It looks like one nutso company that eventually backed off. http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/25/law-enforcement-targets-inc-discontinues It seems they were providing supplies but not the actual training.
This quote from the company is kind of scary though:
“I found while speaking with officers and trainers in the law enforcement community that there is a hesitation on the part of cops when deadly force is required on subjects with atypical age, frailty or condition (one officer explaining that he enlarged photos of his own kids to use as targets so that he would not be caught off guard with such a drastically new experience while on duty).”
“(one officer explaining that he enlarged photos of his own kids to use as targets so that he would not be caught off guard with such a drastically new experience while on duty).”
I don’t even have words for this.
Wait . . . maybe I do. I’ve become increasingly concerned about the militarization of our police forces (and increasingly heated rhetoric coming from those who fear the expansion of government power in the U.S.). We’ve come a long way from Mayberry and Sheriff Andy. And I think Lenore is onto something when she analogizes to zero tolerance policies and talks about viewing everyone as a possible threat. This attitude makes the world more dangerous, not less, I’d like to know how to put that genie back in the bottle.
I hope the FBI lady also detailed the riskiness of FBI agents in close proximity. I seem to recall more incidents of completely unreasonable force (up to and including killing) used against kids by FBI than by mommies at school bus stops.
Yesterday I was chatting with a couple at a gym place my kids go to. Her child had told my kid that he was homeschooled, so I mentioned that to start a friendly conversation. (I did a short homeschooling stint myself and I think it’s cool if it works for you.)
The parents told me that the reason they started homeschooling was that their kid had been kicked out of [private] school after the parents insisted that the school install a security door. They seemed to think all parents would be horrified to learn of a school without a security door. Of course I didn’t inquire into all the gory details of the dispute, but I can only imagine that the parents’ “request” had not been made in the most polite way, if it got their kid kicked out.
Now I don’t think these folks are exactly average in my neck of the woods, but it is sad to see people making major life decisions over stuff that doesn’t really matter. It may well be that homeschooling is perfect for their kids, but the attitude that their kid has to be on lockdown in order to grow up right is disturbing.
I wonder what these folks think of kids going out for recess?
“one officer explaining that he enlarged photos of his own kids to use as targets”
….
I’m not easily tempted to wish ill on others. But it would be quite interesting to see a custody hearing with those targets as exhibit A.
“They’re from the government and they’re here to help.”
With what? Overpopulation?
While I do agree that they should think before they shoot, someone being pregnant, a granny, a tween etc. does not prevent them from doing something that is actually shoot-worthy.
They ought to review that scene from Men In Black where Will Smith, after a training exercise, explains his split second reasoning for why he shot the cardboard cutout of the little girl and not the cardboard cutouts of various aliens. A good example of looking at ALL the details before coming to a decision.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRXNNqNfQBs
@5UpMushroom – yes, that!
Speaking of police abuses, can we talk about this comment from a few days ago?
This is the same thing that I was told while being investigated by CPS for letting my 6yo walk to the park. It’s not dangerous, not illegal, not “wrong,” but I can’t let her do it anyway because if the neighbors keep calling to report me then CPS will “have” to pursue a case against me.
Why would we “have” to be punished for doing nothing wrong, just because someone else keeps complaining?
It’s interesting that our police are basically taught to shoot first and ask questions later, while our military is taught to accept high-risk situations instead of risking harm to innocents.
Ha good point about that scene in Men In Black. I love that scene!
I expect officers to be trained that if they NEED to shoot a child or pregnant woman etc they will, but I also expect them to be trained to properly assess a situation and use good judgement and caution and only shoot when 100% necessary.
That Men in Black scene is not only funny but has merit.
Lets train to to recognize legitimately strange situations and not just “err on the side of she coukd have been a terrorist”
The exact quote is:
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
— President Ronald Reagan, Aug. 12, 1986
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhYJS80MgYA
Unlike a lot of his aphorisms, this one was not meant with humor.
Folks have a good point — this paranoia of “*anyone* could be an abductor/terrorist” is precisely the same thing as “zero tolerance” policies — but larger, as it affects us all.
The Blackstone quote mirrors what I’ve been saying too — better that a few children (and animals) suffer, than that all of us live in terror of being seen doing something “wrong”.
Land of the Free and Homeland of the Paranoid.
Sheesh. Even MIB agent J knew you only shoot the little girl if you can clearly see she’s up to something bad. This is taking that ridiculous comedy movie scenario and eliminating the officer’s sense of judgment and restraint even from THAT.
Omigoodness I made the Men in Black reference without having read the other comments and realizing someone else had already brought it up! LOL Great minds, and all that.
Unicorn chaser, y’all!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10770663/Missing-three-year-old-boy-found-in-toy-claw-machine.html
Synopsis: Mom and 3yo are home alone. Mom goes to pee. 3yo, who loves stuffed animals, decides to go visit them. Mom comes out of bathroom, sees NO KID ANYWHERE, immediately calls cops. Cops, instead of freaking out at her with guns, go to look for kid. Meanwhile, across the street, a bemused crowd is watching a contented little boy playing with ALL THE TEDDY BEARS inside one of those magic claw machines. (How? Even the vendor isn’t sure!) Vendor is called, machine is unlocked, kid goes home with Mom, and nobody ends up in jail, the psych ward, or the CPS files, because everybody involved realizes that kids occasionally do this kind of thing.
Forgot: Vendor decides that if he loves ’em that much, it might be best if he were given one of his own, and does so.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the vast amassing of government for which it stands, one nation, under siege, with indignity and paranoia for all.
“I couldn’t find anything about this in the mainstream news. It looks like one nutso company that eventually backed off. http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/25/law-enforcement-targets-inc-discontinues It seems they were providing supplies but not the actual training. ”
No, it was one company creating training aids to spec from the government, which the government then decided to claim never to have intended, blaming the company for coming up with the idea in the first place…
Just another case of the gov blaming private industry for its own failures.
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the vast amassing of government for which it stands, one nation, under siege from within, with indignity and paranoia for all.”
corrected that for you.
I don’t really see the problem with the cardboard cutouts. They are teaching the officers to shoot on the basis of evidence (the gun in the targets hand) rather than prejudice. On the training scenes I’ve seen there are plenty of cardboard cut outs of women children and elderly people who don’t have guns, with the training being designed to get officers to distinguish a threat. Unless they are getting rid of these and just training the officers to expect every person they encounter to have a gun, it seems like a sensible approach.
I’m not that keen on every police officer having a gun (I don’t think the skills required to correctly judge a situation and use a gun correctly rare all that common) but training those that do to base their actions on the threat rather than on prejudice seems sensible.
And I’m not that keen on the idea if 10 officers being shot for every 1 person they shoot. If an officer is shot by a criminal than I would think most likely the public at large would be in greater danger too. I wouldn’t expect that most people who would shoot a police officer would avoid shooting anyone else.
It goes hand in hand with the latest from Obama’s assistant for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism who gave a speech the other day at Harvard. Apparently parents are now being pressured to snitch on their own kids if they think they might be “terrorists.” She states, “Local communities are the most powerful asset we have in the struggle against violence and violent extremism. We’ve crunched the data on this. In the more than 80 percent of cases involving homegrown violent extremists, people in the community—whether peers or family members or authority figures or even stranger — had observed warning signs a person was becoming radicalized to violence. But more than half of those community members downplayed or dismissed their observations without intervening. So it’s not that the clues weren’t there, it’s that they weren’t understood well enough to be seen as the indicators of a serious problem. What kinds of behaviors are we talking about? For the most part, they’re not related directly to plotting attacks. They’re more subtle. For instance, parents might see sudden personality changes in their children at home—becoming confrontational.”
http://www.sdjewishworld.com/2014/04/16/white-house-official-terrorism-prevention-starts-home/
They crunched the data. Oh yeah? Let’s see them. Again, no real evidence is necessary. Just state it. Present it as fact. The people will believe them. Now they want to drive a wedge directly into our families. They’re nuts. No, they’re psychotic.
Catherine Austin Fitts, former HUD secretary under George W. Bush reviews a book called Political Ponerology by Andrzej M. Lobaczewski:
“Political Ponerology is “a science on the nature of of evil adjusted for political purposes.” The author, Andrzej Lobaczewski, describes himself as a Polish psychologist who — with many other colleagues — found meaning living through Nazism and then Communism by studying how evil happens and triumphs in a wider political and economic system.
“Lobaczewski’s hypothesis is that a small percentage of humans are born psychopaths. He describes the research to back up that data that was destroyed and supressed. Another minority percentage are of a nature to go along with psychopaths while the vast majority of people are essentially healthy. The majority who are healthy have a difficult time understanding that some people are not — they can not fathom being a psychopath or acting like one.
“No one has worked harder in the last five years to understand the Tapeworm than Harry Blazer. It was Harry who discovered Political Ponerology and sent it to me. I found it chock full of deeply useful insights that can inform organizing to shift our situation. For example, Lobaczewski discovered that dealing with psychopathic systems made healthy people neurotic. However, they could heal very quickly when he gave them a scientific framework for understanding what had happened and why. With a sound framework, they could start to differentiate who was healthy and who was not and to devise strategies to deal effectively with psychopaths in power. Rather than having their relations with all humans destroyed, they were able to discriminate between healthy and unhealthy and increase their immunity to the drain of unhealthy culture and systems.””
https://solari.com/blog/ignotas-nulla-curatio-morbid-a-review-of-political-ponerology-by-andrew-m-lobaczewski/
By J.T. Wenting Sat Apr 19th 2014 at 1:30 am
“I couldn’t find anything about this in the mainstream news. It looks like one nutso company that eventually backed off. http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/25/law-enforcement-targets-inc-discontinues It seems they were providing supplies but not the actual training. ”
No, it was one company creating training aids to spec from the government, which the government then decided to claim never to have intended, blaming the company for coming up with the idea in the first place…
Just another case of the gov blaming private industry for its own failures.
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Let me clarify what I meant by saying that it was one nutso company. I’m sure that the government did order the posters. However, the posters were a few of many that are used to train police/agents when not to shoot as well as when to shoot. The problem was that the spokesperson for this company started promoting these particular posters as if they filled some kind of dire need to immunize police/agents from hesitating to fire on vulnerable people. I don’t think that was the intent of ordering the posters.
“I don’t really see the problem with the cardboard cutouts. They are teaching the officers to shoot on the basis of evidence (the gun in the targets hand) rather than prejudice. On the training scenes I’ve seen there are plenty of cardboard cut outs of women children and elderly people who don’t have guns, with the training being designed to get officers to distinguish a threat. Unless they are getting rid of these and just training the officers to expect every person they encounter to have a gun, it seems like a sensible approach.”
So are we saying that everyone who is holding a gun needs to be shot? Even if a little kid has a gun in his hand, he needs to die? We really have lost it then.
@SKL Good point, thank you.
The whole “cop need to train shooting at kids and pregnant kids” has something bothering in it. Seriously, how often small kids and pregnant women go on shooting rampage or represent similar active threat?
Cause that is the only “shoot-worthy” situation I can see. Both kids and visibly pregnant women should be relatively easy to overpower for trained men, even if they would participate in crime.
I would see a cop shooting a kid or youngster cause he mistakes random object or toy for a gun as a much more likely to happen event. In any case, I would prefer the training to teach them how to solve situation without shooting whenever possible over teaching them to shoot whenever something resembles a gun.
If a little kid somehow gets a gun and it pointing it at me or anyone else I love, yes, I expect the cop to stop the kid from shooting me or my loved ones even if that means shooting the kid. Kids should never get their hands on a gun in the first place but if they do somehow and are pointing it at my kid, I expect the officer to protect my child by any means necessary because I was not the one that allowed that kid to get a gun so yes, better that kid’s parents suffer than me. Same for a pregnant woman.
One would think that a little child with a gun would be able to be coaxed to put it down, and would not know how to accurately shoot at a target anyway. The danger of it actually killing an innocent human or a cop is remote.
It’s really upsetting to think that people are OK with the thought of shooting a small kid in self-defense.
I guess we should also shoot little kids who get into a car and try driving it. After all, being hit by a car is deadly.
“Unless they are getting rid of these and just training the officers to expect every person they encounter to have a gun, it seems like a sensible approach”
Well, too many times officers are shooting at anyone who has any sort of object in hand. Radley Balko (at whose blog Lenore has guest-blogged) has documented countless of these cases, usually involving no-knock raids, in which police have gunned down people holding cellphones, wallets, eyeglasses or drinking glasses. All on the grounds that the object might have been a gun and no time to discern what it was.
We have a local case in the news right now where a man is trying to sue for being shot by police. To make a long story short, police were called for a drunk and disorderly man who was walking around in front of a bar where he had been refused service because he was already well drunk. He was shouting loudly and obscenely, protesting the refusal of service. He was also removing his clothes.
The police arrived, saw the loud, staggering, naked man. He had something in his hand, so they shot him (non-fatal, obviously, or he wouldn’t be suing) because “it looked like a gun”.
The object was his boxer shorts which he had just removed.
SKL: to protect and serve. So if the child is about to shoot and kill another citizen it is their job to protect that citizen even if it means shooting the child. Hopefully they would be able to shoot to incapacitate and not kill.
But don’t tell me you would not be pissed if a cop did not shoot a child with a gun and then that child shot your child dead. You would rather of had them shoot the kid with the gun. Even if my kid was somehow the one with the gun, I would understand why they had to shoot him if they could not get him to lower the weapon immediately.
No, SOA, because the likelihood of a little kid being able to accurately shoot at a moving target from a distance is extremely low. And if the kids were close together, then shooting could hurt either kid or both. And if the concern was an accidental shooting, then no way is it justifiable to shoot a small kid even if he is a *possible* danger to himself or others. If you think your kid needs to take one for the team in that situation, that’s your business. I don’t accept it. You don’t train cops to shoot kids. You train them to deal with them as kids.
Anyhow, it is so extremely unlikely that a cop will encounter a small child actually trying to shoot someone, the danger of this training far outweighs the risks. The cops have been known to shoot innocent children. Not sure if it’s ever happened the other way around.
Thank you for the thoughtful commentary. I support your philosophy. “No more hesitation” policies are a fools exercise in a fantasy of paranoid chaos. Fear and hysteria are not an excuses to take a life. Critical thinking, logic, and education are more effective than any weapon.
I just googled “child shot police officer” and it brought up the following:
.Ex-NYPD officer kills wife in front of children
.17yo boy holding WII controller shot and killed by police
.Teen shot and killed by police in front of his parents (schizophrenic boy had been was threatening his mom with a screwdriver but had been calmed down and all was fine for 10 minutes before the shooter cop showed up)
.Death of Aiyana Jones [age 7, killed by a police officer]
.Cop’s heart sank on realizing shots fired at minivan full of kids
.Child shot by police officer was laid to rest (12yo boy who was playing with a toy gun was shot 2x by the cop)
Meanwhile the only incident involving a kid shooting a cop was where the cop was giving a presentation at a reading program and an anonymous little kid (age 6-8) somehow managed to pull the trigger of the cop’s holstered gun, slightly injuring the cop, who was obviously negligent.