Evanston, IL— Last month, three police officers in this quiet university town were involved in a shooting incident that left one man, 32-year-old Desrick York, dead with 10 bullets in his body. Mr York was the father of school-age children and considered very much part of the community. He was, according to reports, caught up in an argument over money.
State authorities have just ruled that Evanston police were "legally justified" in issuing 11 rounds (an additional one hit a fellow officer in the hand) because York allegedly was holding a four-inch knife and wouldn't drop it when the officers ordered him to. But when he grabbed the knife, and why, are still in question. York was intoxicated, witnesses report, and may also have been high on marijuana. In either condition—with or without any type of accompanying mental illness—three armed policemen could easily induce extreme amounts of fear. That's the problem here, raising the troubling question: Did York's behavior warrant his being shot at all, much less ten times? Wouldn't Mace have sufficed if his behavior was threatening?
The incident is about to spark a civil lawsuit, the Daily Northwestern reported yesterday; Evanston police have received word that a local attorney will soon file one.
"I realize the number 11 is off-putting," Evanston Police Department Chief Richard Eddington conceded to seven members of the media. "[But] in police shootings nationally, this number of rounds is not outrageous."
Maybe not, but that may itself be a problem needing careful, rational discussion. The matter of police overreacting on the job, tasing and even shooting unarmed suspects, is sparking national attention, not least because the factors contributing to these incidents don't always stem from the suspects or the circumstances. Witness the furor over the beating Rodney King took in March 1991; the shooting forty-one times of unarmed street vendor Amadou "Ahmed" Diallo in New York City in February 1999 (he was gunned down by plainclothes police); and the unloading, in November 2006, of fifty bullets into the unarmed groom Sean Bell, 23, and two of his friends after a bachelor party in New York City. One could go on.
10 bullets. 41 bullets. 50 bullets fired into unarmed men who happen to be African American: Such obvious overreactions by police cannot be said to constitute anything close to appropriate force. In the Evanston incident, the Police Chief volunteered a follow-up explanation for the number of shots fired that raises many more questions than it answers: "It takes just one-quarter of a second to discharge a round and ... the shots came from three different sources, in quick succession and in the midst of an 'adrenaline dump.'"
I thought I'd misread that first as "adrenaline pump," but I'm not sure the actual phrase makes its consequences any easier to accept. In a quarter of a second, or thereabouts, Evanston police "dumped" 11 rounds from three angles, as if one of them had set off a chain reaction. "Of the 11 shots fired in the April 26 incident," the Daily Northwestern reports, "10 struck York while the final one hit an officer's ring finger as he was attempting to push York away, Eddington said." But if they were that close, one has to ask, was York really such a threat to them? The phrasing shifts in the next paragraph of the report. Once York got "close enough that one officer could push him away, the officers opened fire, Guenther said. The first officer fired five shots, the second fired four and the third fired two."
"According to witnesses," Brian Rosenthal writes at the Daily Northwestern, "York had been drinking alcohol throughout the weekend and was probably also high on cannabis at the time of the incident, the chief said. Results of toxicology tests are not yet available." It will be important to establish what they are. But even suspending for a moment the question of intoxication and all the misjudgment it can cause, a question nonetheless nags: What if York also (or separately) had been mentally ill? What if his reaction to the police involved more fear than aggression? In the case of Diallo in New York, witnesses report that he was trying to escape trouble rather than causing it. (And if you're wondering whether such fear is justified, rent Terry Gilliam's masterpiece Brazil [1995], an eerie foretelling of the consequences when police and legal authorities refuse to be answerable to the populations they serve.)
To police effectively and appropriately is a tremendously difficult task. Police officers face danger all the time from overanxious, overstressed, and overarmed communities that are worried—sometimes even hairtrigger unhappy—about work, debt, holding on to properties, and much more. I'm not discounting the number of complex criminal activities that also occur in these communities. Nor do I envy the police their job or the stress that accompanies it. (A literature search for "police stress" on PubMed produced 446 hits; thousands more arose at PsycINFO under "police" and "occupational stress.") But questions have to be asked about whether overreaction—including from physical and psychological stress—is compounding an already tense situation, resulting in grievous mistakes that a split-second decision cannot undo.
After Oscar Grant III was shot two hours into New Year's Day, 2009 by a transit police officer at a BART station in Oakland, California, footage of the unprovoked attack, broadcast by local news stations, quickly went viral on YouTube. In two videos captured by appalled witnesses, Grant is seen to comply with Officer Johannes Mehserle's order to raise his arms and lie down. Grant complies calmly, without a struggle. The footage is unequivocal in showing that Mehserle then drew his gun and fired into Grant's back. Grant died in hospital several hours later; the bullet had punctured his lung. What, we must all ask, did he die for? What truly had he done wrong?
Online comments on San Francisco Gate at the time struck me as astonishingly polarized. One set of commentators was appalled at Mehserle's clearly unprovoked attack. Their anger was immediately read as incitement by another set of commentators, equally angry, who decried the policing conditions in Oakland and wanted at all costs to defend Mehserle from the charge of overreacting.
In the age of YouTube, however, which presents evidence of shocking incidents caught on tape, that stance often entails refusing to see what's right before our eyes. It requires disbelieving what the cameras have filmed, or catching oneself hoping that the incident is isolated, exceptional, or somehow warranted. It requires trusting that a group of police officers, armed with extremely dangerous weapons, is justified in arguing that an "adrenaline dump" somehow explains its firing 10 shots into a man who was drunk and perhaps a bit high.
Christopher Lane, the Pearce Miller Research Professor at Northwestern University, is the author most recently of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness.
