“YOU’RE NEXT!”
That is what Lebron James tweeted in reference to an officer-involved shooting during which an officer in Ohio shot a 16-year-old black girl in the process of stabbing another teenage black girl, arguably saving that victim’s life.
“You’re Next, *accountability” he posted along with a photo of the officer. After some criticism, he took it down and posted, “I’m so damn tired of seeing Black people killed by police. I took the tweet down because its being used to create more hate — This isn’t about one officer its about the entire system and they always use our words to create more racism. I am so desperate for more ACCOUNTABILITY”.
This all occurred after the conviction of Derek Chauvin on all counts in connection with the death of George Floyd. Recall that ex-Officer Chauvin kneeled on the back and neck of George Floyd during an arrest for over 9 minutes and became the subject of the most viral video of 2020. Recall also that Chauvin was quickly terminated by Minneapolis PD and shortly thereafter criminally filed on for murder. After a fair trial, he was convicted. Floyd’s family was awarded $27 million. Now that is starting to sound like accountability.
Chauvin and the video were roundly condemned by every law enforcement department in the nation. He was also lambasted by every police officers’ union in the country, including the LAPPL. He had zero support from law enforcement officers, and yet city after city burned. Unbelievably, Chauvin’s actions somehow were imputed to 800,000 law enforcement officers by radical anti-police groups with the full help of the media.
The media promoted the myth that African-Americans were being hunted down and murdered by officers all over the country. Actual statistics were never presented and probably would have been drowned out by the cacophony of talking heads anyway.
In fact, there were 15 unarmed blacks shot and killed last year by law enforcement officers out of a population of 40 million, according to Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute.
The local media completely ignored the fact that LAPD statistics for 2019, five months before the Chauvin incident, concerning officer-involved shootings showed that for 1.6 million documented citizen contacts, two black suspects were shot and killed by LAPD officers. One was in the process of bringing a machete down on a prone officer, and the other was fleeing a murder arrest and pointed his gun at the officers.
The chances of an African-American suspect being shot and killed by an LAPD officer is .000001 percent of all police contacts. Hardly evidence of an intent to seek out and murder black citizens. But, that is not the public narrative.
LAPD went through 13 years of a consent decree starting in 2000 and ending in 2013. During that time, there were a lot of changes made in training and policy. We were even studied by Harvard in 2009.
The Harvard Kennedy School completed an examination of “Policing Los Angeles Under a Consent Decree: The Dynamics of Change at the LAPD.” The findings deserve a lengthy quote. “To answer those questions, we examined the LAPD using multiple research methods. We undertook hundreds of hours of participant observation from patrol to the command staff; we analyzed administrative data on crime, arrests, stops, civilian complaints, police personnel and the use of force. We compiled surveys conducted over the last decade of police officers and residents of Los Angeles, and then conducted three surveys of our own, one of residents. another of LAPD officers, and a third of detainees recently arrested by the LAPD. Finally, we conducted a series of formal focus groups and structured interviews with police officers, public officials and residents of Los Angeles. While some questions remain unanswered, this ranks among the most comprehensive assessments ever conducted of a police department outside of a time of crisis. We found the LAPD much changed from eight years ago, and even more so in the last four or five years. Public satisfaction is up, with 83 percent of residents saying the LAPD is doing a good or excellent job; the frequency of the use of serious force has fallen each year since 2004. Despite the views of some officers that the consent decree inhibits them, there is no objective sign of so-called “de-policing” since 2002; indeed, we found that both the quantity and quality of enforcement activity have risen substantially over that period. The greater quantity is evident in the doubling of both pedestrian stops and motor vehicle stops since 2002, and in the rise in arrests over that same period. The greater quality of stops is evident in the higher proportion resulting in an arrest, and the quality of arrests is evident in the higher proportion in which the District Attorney files felony charges.” [emphasis added]
In the next decade, LAPD officers received more training, and things continued to improve. Use of force policy was updated three times, adding formal requirements for de-escalation training.
As recently as April 27, 2021, the Inspector General did a report on de-escalation, giving officers high marks for de-escalation training compliance. Seventy incidents in which a suspect was arrested or taken in for an involuntary psychiatric hold were audited. In 32 of those cases, the suspect was armed. In those 70 cases, only one resulted in a reportable use of force. This sounds like accountability.
In fact, as the hue and cry roared across the land for police reform, LAPD had already implemented most of the recommended policies. It didn’t matter. Los Angeles still burned.
There is an illogical aspect to the blowing wind of public opinion when it comes to law enforcement that does not seem to apply to other professions. Doctors, for instance, cause the deaths of between 80,000 and 100,000 people in the United States every year through medical malpractice. However, when a doctor saws off the wrong leg, hospitals aren’t burned down across the land. No one parses every death into racial categories to see if there is an imbalance in the treatment of minorities. State and federal legislatures do not race to pass legislation to “reform” the medical community. The media does not run daily stories on the problem of medical malpractice deaths.
And yet, when one officer, 2,000 miles away from Los Angeles, commits law enforcement malpractice, the effect is cataclysmic on all other law enforcement officers nationwide. When that officer is roundly condemned by every other officer in the profession, when that officer is promptly terminated from his position, when criminal charges are almost immediately brought, and when a guilty verdict is delivered after a fair trial, one would expect the national media and our political leaders to loudly proclaim that the system works!
Instead, it is like blood in the water of a shark pool. From the president on down, the rallying cry is, “We have just begun!”
And that is the point of this article. Believe Lebron James when he says, “you’re next: and….
Be legally careful out there
