Propaganda about police use of force

Apropos of the horrifying video making the rounds on Twitter today, of a police officer shooting into a car full of passengers, a few days ago I was pointed at a Fox News segment including some police use-of-force training.

Check it out. It's a fascinating work of propaganda.

Consider what the exercise has Rev. Maupin do. Without any apparent training in preparation, Maupin is presented with a series of scenarios that are transparently designed to make him panic. First he encounters a possible car thief who surprisingly overreacts and suddenly shoots Maupin. It's startling, and primes him to be quicker to perceive threats. Then Maupin encounters an intimidating person who fearlessly advances on him despite him having his gun drawn. It's scary, and coming right after the previous scary exercise it inspires him to panic and shoot the unarmed man ... in a violation of police use-of-force rules.

I only know what I read on the internet about the police use of force continuum, but I strongly suspect that the exercises we see in the video are intended as the beginning of a responsible police training process, meant to demonstrate to cops how easy it is to do the wrong thing. “Those deadly mistakes you just made are why we are going to drill you hard in this training. So that when that confrontation comes on the street, you won't do what comes naturally, you will do what you've trained.”

This kind of preparation is one of the benefits of a police force, and part of why we respect good cops so much. They are skilled professionals who face stressful, dangerous situations that we know that ordinary citizens would screw up and can be expected to handle them well because of the preparatory training which they receive. In this, police are like firefighters and airline pilots and other people who need to be cool in the face of danger and surprises.

In the Fox News segment, the exercise is framed not as a cautionary tale but as a justification for police shootings.

Watching, one can easily sympathize with Maupin shooting an unarmed man in the exercise. The situation was scary, and it's easy to imagine doing the same thing. But Maupin is not a cop trained in multiple ways to handle a belligerent person, physically and otherwise, he's just a guy who was handed a fake gun and told to see how he would use it. So of course he reached for the obvious tool.

Notice how the exercise is chosen to reïnforce narratives conservatives have offered about the threats police face. Darren Wilson says that Michael Brown charged at him menacingly, despite being unarmed, and here we see that scenario portrayed as a situation which police are trained to handle. It helps to make the genre of Officer Wilson's bizarre narrative of his shooting of Michael Brown seem to make sense. I am well aware that cops have been shot at seemingly-routine stops like the first exercise, or that big scary guys advance on cops like in that second one ... but I also know that a cop is less likely to die on the job than a trucker, cab driver, farmer, or the guy who picks up your trash. On TV, cops get into gunfights every week, but in real life many police officers never have cause to fire their weapon.

Notice also how editing serves the narrative. Maupin says, “People need to comply with law enforcement officers for their own sake,” which sounds like he's endorsing the authoritarian view that I have heard from many commentators who say that if Black people who have been killed by police had just obeyed police orders, they would have been safe. But Maupin doesn't say that deference will ensure one's safety, or that deference is justified. He just says that it is prudent. I wonder what else he said. I wonder what he said immediately after that sound bite. “It's too easy for a trigger-happy cop to panic when you don't obey their orders”, maybe?

Fox News is, of course, propaganda. But it's chilling to see it work as propaganda not just for the Republican Party but for the idea of an authoritarian police state in which police are justified in shooting unarmed civilians.