Fear and Loathing Make a Cop’s Job Harder

L ast month, well before the news of the fatal police shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant, a 13-year-old boy, Adam Toledo, was shot dead by a police officer in Chicago. That the tragedy has faded from national consciousness makes it no less shocking or upsetting. Yet, when something horrific like this happens, it can be difficult to ascertain how exactly it came to pass when we, the jury in the court of public opinion, are presented with highly selective evidence, monolithically narrativized in an endless slew of “hot takes.”

There is a reason that real courts and juries operate differently — or, at least, are supposed to.

What we know so far from the police body-cam footage is that Toledo was killed at the end of a foot chase in a dark alley at around 2:30 a.m. The officer pursuing him, Eric Stillman, had been responding to a ShotSpotter alert, a technological police-alarm system that detects gunfire in real-time. Stillman had (correctly) suspected that Toledo was armed. At the end of the chase, Toledo did drop his weapon, only he did so in such a fast and understandably panicked manner, tossing his gun behind a fence, that when he turned toward Stillman, it was near impossible, under the circumstances, for the officer to tell that the boy was unarmed. “Hey show me your f***ing hands, drop it, drop it,” Stillman is heard shouting, as the boy turns and the officer fires one shot into Toledo’s chest.

The killing of an unarmed 13-year-old boy by the police is obviously a tragedy. But was it, in this case, a crime? And was it, in this case, avoidable? Toledo, a frightened child, cannot be blamed for tossing the gun out of sight then turning toward the cop in a panic. And it’s not at all clear that Stillman, an officer pursuing an armed suspect, should be blamed for firing a shot in what appeared to him, without the benefit of time or hindsight, a life-or-death scenario.

To give a sense of how quickly all this happened, consider the freeze-frame breakdowns from the footage, helpfully analyzed by City Journal’s Rafael A. Mangual. The first freeze-frame shows Toledo holding a gun. The second shows him turning toward Stillman. “This seems to be the point at which Toledo began to toss the gun behind the wooden fence, which the officer could not have seen through,” writes Mangual, adding that “the time that has elapsed between these two freeze frames is in the range of a few-hundred milliseconds.” And yet, it is only in the freeze-frame of Toledo being shot while raising his empty hands “at which journalists and commentators have decided to both start and end their analysis of this case.”

Consider another high-stress, high-risk scenario with law enforcement on one side and a panicked suspect on the other: the role of an FBI hostage negotiator. Imagine if, in some magic parallel universe where we had the ability to stop time, it were possible to introduce such a mediator into a situation like this and slow it down from milliseconds to at least a few minutes. The negotiator might instruct the cop to standby, then appeal to the suspect’s strongest impulse — survival. Everyone in this scenario wants the same thing: to get out of the encounter alive and unharmed.

In interactions such as those between Stillman and Toledo, short of being literally able to pause time, this kind of mediation is impossible. And yet, on the cultural and community level, there are all sorts of ways of initiating de-escalation.

Law enforcement works most effectively and safely when a community is policed by consent. This has been harder to achieve in America than in other places for various reasons. The threat level is heightened because of the prevalence of guns. And race relations have been turbulent since, within living memory, the police were enforcing racist and discriminatory laws. Since the death of George Floyd, trust between the police and the public has eroded considerably.

A survey conducted by Gallup from early June to mid July of last year found that confidence in the police had fallen five points to 48 percent from the previous year. This amounts to the “first time in the 27-year trend that this reading is below the majority,” Gallup explains. While Republicans’ support has gone up seven points to 82 percent, Democrats’ faith in the police has dropped six points, to 28 percent. The gap between white and black Americans’ confidence has also “never been greater,” according to Gallup’s editor in chief Mohamed Younis: 56 percent of white adults said they were confident in the police, while only 19 percent of black adults said the same.

Yet what people forget is that this distrust runs in both directions. A paper from the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine entitled “Reducing Lethal Force Errors by Modulating Police Physiology,” co-authored by a psychiatrist and psychologists, noted that: 

Both chronic and acute stress are associated with impairments in inhibitory control (eg, shooting when not appropriate). For example, adults exposed to an intense social stressor displayed more inhibitory control errors on a subsequent rapid decision-making task than study participants not exposed to the acute social stress.

During perceiving a threat to one’s life, “neural coordination of rapid behavioral responses happens within milliseconds.” Since this threat response — popularly referred to as “fight or flight” mode — can already “include perceptual distortions, tunnel vision, reduced fine motor skills, and loss of situational awareness; conditions that increase the probability of decision-making errors among police,” we should presumably be looking for ways to reduce social stressors to officers in the field.

Thus, adopting a public narrative that the police are evil, racist, and must be defunded is counterproductive, to say the least. Likewise, however, the police could also shift their mindset, focusing on the “shared interests of the neighborhood and the police department,” starting with “acknowledging the personhood of each member of the community.” This is the suggestion of Charles Huth, a SWAT team captain and watch commander with the Kansas City, Mo., Police Department.

Huth has explained how simple measures such as investing in technologies to prevent the necessity of shooting aggressive dogs during searches, stopping the vans in which suspects are transported from getting overheated in the summer, and other small acts of “being responsive in stressful situations,” all helped de-escalate aggression in a way that improved outcomes for both parties. Understanding the rationale behind this was key. As their reputation among the community began to change, so did their effectiveness. Captain Huth said:

Changing our mindset, more than mandating new behaviors, deploying new technologies, or implementing new policies is what is needed. This mindset shift helped our SWOT team capture more illegal drugs and guns in a three-year period than we had in the previous decade, while at the same time transforming from the most complained about unit in the department to receiving zero community complaints in six years.

In other words, after this mindset shift, there was a threefold increase in productivity and a 100 percent reduction in community complaints.

Of course, not every case is going to have a good outcome. And not every split-second decision, made in extremely difficult and stressful circumstances, is going to be the right one. It is tragic to think of the fear that Toledo, a child mixed up with things he shouldn’t have been, must have experienced in his final moments, and the absolute devastation that his death will cause his family and loved ones. It is also tragic to think of the awful burden that the officer who shot him will carry around with him for the rest of his life. But as the media headlines sensationalize this tragedy, casting Stillman in the role of murderer and villain, a cop representative of the evil of his profession — it is worth remembering that neither fear nor loathing makes anyone any safer.