Amy Swearer is a Legal Policy Analyst with the Heritage Foundation and has written an article titled “The Other Half of the Jacob Blake Conversation,” which says we can’t have meaningful police reform if we pretend that law enforcement officers do not see our actions as civilians from a very different point of view. Swearer joined Newell on his program Monday morning to discuss.
“I thought your article was a very brave one to write,” Newell began. “I have tried to articulate some of the same positions you did, that this is a lot more difficult than throwing some policy initiatives together under the auspices of ‘police reform’ and then moving on them.”
“Like most people in this country, I recognize that there are times when law enforcement officers mess up, or do things that are unjustified and I want to live in a society where cops are trained to avoid that and held responsible when it happens. But if we’re going to truly analyze what happens in these situations, we have to look at the other half of the confrontation. It’s not always Breonna Taylor sleeping innocently in her bed - more often it's the Jacob Blake type interaction, where the actions of the civilian are truly and reasonably affecting a state of heightened alert among officers, putting them on edge and affecting the way that encounter goes, regardless of whether or not you think the shooting was reasonable at the end of the day.”
“Not unlike progressive discipline in the policing business - we used to refer to that as ‘force continuum,’ that you’re always reactive to the actions taken by the individual you’re attempting to arrest,” Newell said. “For every example of a truly innocent victim or offender, you can find another incident whereby you can better explain what the police were thinking. Because what looked innocent then led to disastrous outcomes for the officers.”
“That’s what I tried to show in this article,” Swearer said. “I go through several prominent examples where I link to video clips, body cams or dash cams, wherever there are encounters with an individual who is irate, keen on not going to jail, very non compliant, and all of a sudden, in the blink of an eye, someone’s pulling knife or a gun, and now we’re in very dangerous situation. It’s important for civilians to understand, these acts that people paint as mere non-compliance, you have to understand how officers view that. In their mindset, this just became a very different kind of encounter where things can go very wrong very quickly.”
“A common practice in law enforcement training is to take recent happenstances and study the do’s, the don’ts and the risks,” Newell said. “They end up reviewing each and every one of these videos. You try to prepare officers for all the eventualities out there. Some might say we become too defensive in posture as we deal with these things, but when you think about one’s life being held in the balance, I’ve been reluctant to go there. I would rather err on the side of caution.”
Hear the entire interview on demand.
