America once again faces its demons. Michael Brown (Ferguson), Laquan McDonald (Chicago), Breonna Taylor (Louisville), George Floyd (Minneapolis). And today Tire Nichols. The funeral of this young African-American, who died after being beaten on January 7 by five police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, takes place this Wednesday in the presence of Kamala Harris. A death that has revived debates on the violence of the police, which kill each year more than 1,000 Americans.
Former Seattle-area police commander and current deputy director of the Washington State Police Training Commission (CJTC), Jerrell Wills believes that there is “a problem of resources and priority in the training” of the forces of order, but also of “culture”. He responds to 20 minutes.
With your experience, how do you analyze the video of the arrest of Tire Nichols?
What is obvious is their catastrophic tactics, which comes from bad training. You have multiple officers unable to subdue a single person without using force, pepper spray, Tasers. They shout contradictory orders. It is Tire Nichols who is trying to calm them down and not the other way around. It is inexcusable.
The police, like the victim, are African Americans here. Can we still speak, like the civil rights activist Van Jones on CNN, of racist behavior?
When it’s a white officer and a black suspect, it’s easy to conclude that the policeman is racist. But you never know a person’s innermost convictions. What is more important is the system, their mission. It doesn’t matter that the police are black. They wouldn’t have treated a white motorist the same, with such excessive force.
You can’t let your fear drive your decisions
What impact do these repeated slippages have on the relationship between the police and the African-American community?
These images, which are circling in the media and on social networks, perpetuate the feeling that our disadvantaged communities are a war zone and that black people are being hunted. This contributes to people trying to run away or resisting the police out of fear.
As long as law enforcement goes into a black or disadvantaged neighborhood with the sole purpose of enforcing the law rather than helping the locals, the situation will not improve.
There are more guns than people in the United States. How does a police officer feel when he is the first to intervene in a risky situation?
You have to be honest with yourself and recognize that you are afraid. But you can’t let your fear drive your decisions. At the very beginning of my career, I had to intervene in the face of an armed person in the midst of a mental health crisis, who was probably looking to be killed by the police (suicide by cop). We managed to avoid the worst with my partner by returning to the training base, using distance and staying in cover to communicate.
An intervention rarely goes as fast as people think. Police officers often say “everything happened in a split second”, but this is rarely the case. You have to take the time to breathe. The brain needs oxygen to think clearly. But sometimes the more people there are, the more chaotic a situation can become.
The majority of police services devote less than 5% of their budget to training, which lasts about twenty weeks, five times less than in many countries. Does the problem start there?
Yes, there is a problem of resources and priorities. The training of our police officers is twice as short as to become a beautician. Being armed and having the power to deprive a person of their liberty should require more training, but also continuous training. Public authorities talk about it but do not devote the necessary budget to it.
The vast majority of candidates for this profession have noble aspirations
What aspects of the training need to be improved?
We talk a lot about de-escalation, space and time management, but it all starts with communication. Officers need to have much more in-depth knowledge to communicate without having to use force, including in cases of mental health crisis. We must also focus more on defensive techniques, such as jujitsu, to control a situation without resorting to other offensive tools.
Why are American police officers so aggressive, with this almost Hollywood mentality of embodying the law?
That’s how I was trained. We were talking about “ask, tell, make” (ask, order, compel). Thankfully, that’s not the case anymore, but it’s going to take at least a generation to shake off that mentality that’s ingrained in law enforcement culture.
Does the recruiting system sufficiently filter out the bad guys?
It is a relatively rigorous system with a background check, interviews with professionals and psychologists. A huge majority of candidates who choose this profession have lofty aspirations. The behaviors that we see have, most often, been learned. Bad behavior by a police officer is usually a failure of leadership, with a supervisor who has instilled the wrong culture or the wrong goals.
Is there a systemic problem with these elite forces like Memphis’ Scorpion unit, which the city just disbanded?
You have to know what is the problem they are supposed to solve, what data has been collected, what is their mission, if the community has been consulted, how are they supervised and held accountable. If your goal is to fight the most dangerous criminals, you can’t treat everyone that way. And more often than not, the chosen police officers are those who have already shown a tendency to be aggressive. They were rewarded for the most arrests or drug seizures.
Each state, city or academy has specificities
Are violence prevention initiatives carried out by neighborhood residents – sometimes ex-offenders – effective?
When you involve people from the community, when there is cooperation (with law enforcement), it can make a difference. You need to be a partner, identify those who threaten the residents of the neighborhood, who often want help. Forming a relationship of trust is an important first step.
In the Senate, the major reform born after the death of George Floyd remains outstanding, in particular on qualified immunity which partly protects the police. Can the situation improve without a national overhaul?
I don’t know if a federal law is the answer. Each state, city or academy has specificities, and you can have different results with the same approach. But there is clearly a need for systemic changes in policing, starting with enforcing existing laws. Tennessee and Memphis already have a “ duty to intervene (forcing a policeman to intervene if he sees a colleague skidding). During the intervention of Tire Nichols, there were many agents present. They did nothing.