US Police Use of Force Shaped by Race-Based Fears: Academic

In an e-mail interviews with Tasnim, Prof. Michael J. Benza commented on the use of force by the US police forces, particularly after numerous footage from cases of violence against African-American people sparked furious protests across the US.

Mr. Benza is a senior law instructor at Case Western Reserve University, a private research university in Cleveland, Ohio.

What follows in the full text of the interview:

Tasnim: The recent wave of protests in the US, as in Chicago, supports the notion that stereotypes and discriminatory presuppositions are somehow still maintained by US police officers. Do you think this is an accurate description? 

Benza: First, stereotypes and even discriminatory presuppositions are part of modern policing, as they are of everyday life. We all make decisions based on a wide range of factors and those factors do include race, gender, etc. That does not in and of itself make it improper. However, there is "bad" impact of these factors in how police-civilian interactions take place. Because the law allows officers to use force (and I see no way to say that officer cannot use force in some circumstances) the issue becomes in controlling the use of force to stay within the bounds of the law. Unfortunately, this allows and even encourages officers to use race, gender, age, etc. as factors in deciding whether it is necessary to use force in any given situation. So a police officer approaching a 68 year old, white woman with a cane will perceive the danger differently than the same officer approaching a 19 year African-American man. This is not necessarily racist in the bad or unconstitutional sense but simply a matter of facts. But what if it both targets are 19 year old men and the officer uses race as the reason to use force against one and not the other? That is where we have issues. And what is currently happening in the US is a discussion that this latter scenario seems to be playing out and leads to conclusions that the use of force is not based on reality of fear but on race based fears.  This has to be balanced against the officer's perception of fear or danger. Ultimately, I am not sure how this will play out since we have a long history in the US of not being able to talk about race issues. But what we are seeing now is a movement to at least talk about it and once we start talking then we can start to address the issues.

Tasnim: US politicians seem less concerned about this sort of issues, unless protesters pour into the streets or it provokes a barrage of criticism in the media. What do you think?

Benza: I think politicians are concerned about this issue but also have bigger or more pressing issues that take center stage. Also, since politicians respond in part to public opinion if an issue is not a big issue for the American people it is not always a big issue for the politicians. Additionally, there is political danger in entering this area - the more one criticizes, attacks, or focuses on police conduct the more a politician could anger some segment of her supporters. Rarely does a political decision not anger one side or another or many in any issue. Politicians also might be dealing with the same problem the law does - how do we allow police to use force when necessary but stop it when not necessary?

Tasnim: How probable do you think it is that similar incidents would occur in future? Will public protests and demonstrations have a real effect?

Benza: We have always had this problem and always will. There will always be bad police officers who use their badges and guns for improper reasons, and not just racism. But we will also always have bad criminals who will fight the police, including trying to kill them to avoid capture or other reasons. We are now having a real discussion about this issue because we are now able to see what is happening. Nothing about the recent high profile use of force cases are unfortunately unique. Some segments of society have always been the targets of abuse or of disproportionate reactions but the police but now we have video to show what is happening. In nearly every case to hit the media if there had not be a video there would be no press coverage because nearly every single one had the officers involved describing a situation that would result in the use of force being found "justified." The officers know what to say happened in order to justify the use of force and that does not even require them necessarily to lie, it just looks very different when the video shows something that contradicts their statements.

Tasnim: How does the US academia react to these developments? Has any specific theme or debate been brought up there?

Benza: Academia reacts pretty much as you would expect. Academics exist in part to disagree with each other. That is how we keep the intellectual debate moving forward and try to resolve the issues. That being said, there is a rising discussion that we need to re-examine the law surrounding use of force by officers. We have created a sort of one size fits all law that asks whether it was "reasonable" for the officer to be afraid. What we are now starting to discuss is whether there needs to be a more nuanced evaluation taking into account factors that might make the actions of the officer actually unreasonable as a societal standard. For example, the issue of race continues to be a point of discussion because we all know and recognize that people use race (as well as host of other features such as age, gender, size, etc.) to make threat assessments. There is nothing inherently wrong with this as long as race is a neutral factor and not a biased factor (which is usually impossible to separate out) but it is still a disturbing factor when it seems that use of force is applied disproportionately to certain groups. This has led to wider discussions about how to factor that into the law.

Tasnim: What about social and human rights activism? Have the sensitivity and cause of those activists evolved after the controversial killings of people of color in 2015?

Benza: I think it is too early to tell if there will be a wider impact. Quite frankly the issues now being discussed are not new. Minority groups have long complained about improper police tactics and use of force but have been largely ignored because the use of force was most always ruled "justified". Now that we have the proliferation of cameras, from dashcams on police cars, body cameras on police officers, security cameras, to cell phones, etc., the police are finding it harder to explain away some but not all of the use of force cases. I will say that I believe that in most cases the officers’ use of force is legal but I also think that does not make it always right. But the cameras are now showing that we cannot simply accept an officer's statements about what happened as truth. The real difficulty now is that it is often hard to tell, even with video, which is which. The reality of use of force is that it often looks ugly or bad because it is after all use of force. An officer is recorded beating a person which looks terrible but you have to understand the total context to understand if it is valid or not.