Police Shootings and Post-Mortems

(read as a blog post)

Last week, an officer shot a woman in Minnesota after she tried escaping with her car in a way that put him in danger. Most of the discussion I read on social media was around two topics: whether the car hit the agent or merely scraped him, and whether the agent was correct in reacting by shooting her.

Not only do I dislike the framing that there's exactly one side at fault. But my broader opinion is that, unless you're close to the woman or the agent, who's to blame in this specific instance is of little importance compared to preventing future deaths of the same kind from occurring.

To prevent future tragedies, the post-mortem should rather focus on preventing the conditions that led to the dangerous situation rather than determining who's to blame this one time.

In fact, if you think about it, for this event to happen, a few conditions had to take place at the same time. So, let's list them, and let's apply a simplified version of the "Five Whys" technique.

The Post-Mortem

Here's a list of the conditions that had to be true for the killing to happen, and their whys.

1. Those agents had to be there

Why were they there?

• They were part of an ICE operation.

Why was there an ICE operation?

• Because Trump was elected.
• An excessive presence of illegal immigrants.
• Why was he elected?
  • Mutual polarization.
• Why were there too many illegal immigrants?
  • Lax immigration controls and enforcement.

2. Those agents had to be in a state of tension

Why were they in a state of tension?

• Because of the ongoing protests against them (justified or not, that doesn't matter).
• Because of the mutual polarization.

3. That woman had to be there

She was in an area where tensions meant that it's likely that people aren't thinking properly. If my daughter told me she was going there, I would have advised against it, regardless of who's right and wrong.

Why was she there? Because she felt Trump and ICE were a threat worth protesting against.

• Why did the US end up with that President?
  • Mutual polarization.
• And why did ICE start to act in a, to put it mildly, polarizing way?
  • Excessive levels of illegal immigration.
  • A lack of by-the-book enforcement for too long.

4. The woman had to suddenly accelerate while a person was standing in front of the car

Why did she do that?

• Because she panicked and/or wanted to escape.

Why did she panic?

• Why were they masked? → Because activists dox unmasked agents.
  • Why? → Because of previous events in which agents used violence.
  • Why did they do so? → Poor hiring and training; they often deal with violent criminals; they do a lot of enforcement, because of a lot of criminals.
• She felt she had done something wrong (creating a nuisance, etc.).

5. The officer had to react by shooting

Why did he do that?

• Because of poor hiring/training.
• Because he tried to capture an illegal immigrant.
  • Why was there an illegal immigrant? → Because of lax immigration controls.

​

The list above is not exhaustive, and for the sake of brevity, I will end it here. But it reveals a few common factors which, as long as they are present, will make events like this a likely probability:

The Common Factors

• Mutual polarization
• Illegal immigration
• Poor hiring/training

If we were serious about preventing future deaths, we would focus on discussing the root causes, rather than, or on top of, assigning blame this one time.

The broader point: moving forward

Hopefully, the discussion above served as a reflection on how tragedies are discussed and on how effective such discussion is to prevent future tragedies.

One of the reasons our countries are not doing as well as they could is the focus of public discussions – on newspapers, on social media, in debates – about who's to blame rather than on what conditions we must prevent to avoid the repetition of tragedies.

I see this unfold particularly after elections. As long as the reaction of the losing voters is "how stupid is the majority of the electorate who elected a poor candidate," rather than "what conditions led them to elect a poor candidate," we will keep getting poor candidates.

​

For more information on mutual polarization and how to mitigate it, also see my previous post on depolarization.

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