After twenty young children and six adults were fatally shot at a Connecticut elementary school in 2012, angry voices rose across the country, begging the US Congress to pass a meaningful gun control measure. It didn’t happen.
After George Floyd was murdered by police on a Minneapolis street in 2020, angry voices rose across the country, begging Congress to address police brutality by enacting the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. It didn’t happen.
Blacks have been killed by police at over twice the rate of Whites and Hispanics
And here we are again. Despite unabating mass shootings and incidents of police misconduct, the federal government has done little to stem the criminal use of firearms and imposed only temporary changes to reduce the use of excessive force by uniformed officers. In each instance, opponents have blocked more aggressive action — on guns, by citing the Second Amendment, which protects the right to “keep and bear arms”; and on excessive use of force, by citing privacy and legal protections for civil servants.
The number of mass shootings – four injured or killed by gunshot, as defined by the Gun Violence Archive – has increased to such a degree that each new incident (more than 80 already this year) renews calls for gun control legislation, as incidents of excessive force by police raise public contempt of policing practices.
The latest example, and one of the most egregious, came in January, when Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, was stopped by police in Memphis, Tennessee for erratic driving. What followed was five city cops kicking and beating him, all captured on police-worn body cameras and a “SkyCop” camera on a nearby pole, putting the lie to the cops’ assertions that Nichols resisted their commands. He died of his injuries three days later; the cops were fired and charged with murder.
As in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder, which was recorded on a teenager’s cellphone, the response to Nichols’ death was immediate and angry. “This violent act was not in pursuit of public safety,” Vice President Kamala Harris said at Nichols’ funeral service. “It was not in the interest of keeping the public safe. Because one must ask: Was not it in the interest of keeping the public safe that Tyre Nichols would be with us here today? Was he not also entitled to the right to be safe?”
The Memphis cops provided textbook evidence of the need for a Floyd Act, especially on three key points: the proscription of deadly force except as a final resort, the creation of a federal registry of police misconduct complaints, and restricted legal immunity for cops accused of using excessive force.
That last condition was the sticking point for the Act in 2021. Democrats wanted to expose cops to civil lawsuits for wanton acts of brutality; Republicans opposed it.
In the absence of legislation, President Joe Biden issued an executive order last May that addressed many of the goals of the Floyd Act. It did not, however, eliminate civil immunity. Nor is the order necessarily permanent. Any future president can rescind it.
In his State of the Union address before Congress last month, Biden again urged that the Floyd Act should be passed. “When police officers or police departments violate the public trust, they must be held accountable,” he said. “Let’s do what we know in our hearts that we need to do. Let’s come together to finish the job on police reform. Do something. Do something.”
Police brutality is hardly new, cemented into America’s cultural firmament since the 1991 beating of a Black motorist, Rodney King, by white Los Angeles police officers who had arrested him for driving while intoxicated. King was brutally beaten in an attack that was captured on amateur video and sparked riots across the city after four of the cops were acquitted of using excessive force.
In recent years, Blacks have been killed by police at more than twice the rate of Whites and Hispanics, even though they constitute only 14 per cent of the national population. Incidents have followed anything from routine traffic stops to suspected crimes. But some occurred in questionable circumstances, like the killing of Botham Jean, 26, who was seated on his sofa eating ice cream when an off-duty officer in Dallas, Texas entered the apartment thinking it was her own, and shot him. Or the case of Stephon Clark, 22, of Sacramento, California, who was suspected of breaking car windows when police found him in his grandmother’s backyard. Believing he was holding a gun, they fired twenty times, killing him. He was holding a mobile phone.
For many police experts, the key to preventing such tragedies is refocusing training towards “a proportional response” rather than tactics that escalate a physical confrontation.
“Our training here in the United States is out of date, antiquated and full of theories that no longer apply,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a private organisation that works to improve professionalism in the nation’s 18,000 police departments. Referring to the cause of Nichols’ death, he told me, “The old method of American training is about overcoming force. Until we can change training, we’re going to get those same outcomes.”
Wexler contrasted America’s approach to police training with Britain’s, where most cops don’t carry guns, and training reflects national standards and proportional response. “We have no national standards,” Wexler said. “Training here tends to be splintered, different in different places.”
His assessment was confirmed by Assistant Commissioner Rob Beckley of the Metropolitan Police in the Home Office. “The use of force by police officers in the course of their duties is much more tightly regulated in the UK and under significantly more control,” he told me. “In the UK violence and force by police officers is massively less than in the US. Direct use of force by police, resulting in death, causes about two or three deaths a year on average,” he said. “I think it is a UK policing success story.”
Not so here. A survey by the Washington Post found that US police fatally shot an average of 1,031 people each year between 2018 and 2022, many of the incidents rekindling outrage over training strategies, prompting calls to “defund the police” and giving impetus to the Black Lives Matter movement.
It’s a rare cop who’s willing to testify against a misbehaving colleague
Part of the problem is that proliferation of privately-owned guns and rising rates of violent crime in some cities don’t encourage police to take less aggressive approaches to a conflict situation. And it’s a rare cop who’s willing to testify against a misbehaving colleague. As a result, changes in training are slow. But Wexler suggested several ways to drive down acts of brutality:
- Standardise training
- Initiate an instant review of a high-profile event to learn what officers did right and wrong
- Ensure that one supervisory voice controls a situation
- Raise the criteria for new recruits, with greater emphasis on moral character and less on superficial disqualifiers, like having used marijuana in high school
Some departments have begun to eliminate special squads like “Scorpion” in Memphis and “Red Dog” in Atlanta, which were created to patrol high crime areas, using whatever tactics they felt necessary. The Memphis cops who beat Nichols were part of Scorpion. And a growing number of cities are assigning mental health counsellors to join cops responding to potentially dangerous situations.
One strategy that will not necessarily make a difference, Wexler said, is eliminating immunity to expose officers to civil lawsuits for misconduct. He pointed to Memphis, where even the body cameras worn by the cops didn’t matter.
“These officers were fired from their jobs and charged criminally,” he said. “If that isn’t enough to deter them, I don’t know what is.”
Congress doesn’t seem to know, either.
The culture wars of cartoon candy
Like so many other workers around the United States, the cute cartoon “spokescandies” famously used to advertise M&M chocolates were laid off last year. After ten years in the spotlight, they were replaced by actor/ comedian Maya Rudolph.
Who cares, really? Well, here in ultra-sensitive, divided America where even Smartie-style sweets can spark another round in the culture wars, some people care a lot. Television viewers cried “Woke!” last year after the colourful spokescandies had a style makeover. The Green spokescandy swapped her fashionable go-go boots for trainers, while the Brown abandoned stiletto heels for less sexy, clunkier ones. The company had previously added a chunky, Purple spokescandy – intended to embrace body positivity, diversity and inclusiveness.
Anti-woke fans of the original cartoon characters, such as Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, complained on Twitter that Mars Wrigley, the candy maker, “will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous – until the moment you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them.”
Mars eventually gave in to popular pressure, announcing the spokescandies’ retirement and Rudolph’s arrival. Or so it seemed until her big entrance in a 30-second ad during the primetime Super Bowl on 12 February, touting “MaYa” M&Ms that bore her likeness and were filled with… clams.
Yet later that very same day – ta daaa! – MaYa and the clams were gone and the spokescandies were back, this time wearing sensible white shoes instead of the culturally-divisive heels.
Or maybe we’re reading too much into this. The real intent here appeared to be using the political divide to sell more candy, and if you’re looking for a winner in this battle of the American culture wars, it was Mars Wrigley.
Farewell to the wrong arms
In Missouri, women lawmakers have lost the right to bare arms while children have kept the right to bear arms.
After a party-line vote in the Republican-controlled state House of Representatives, female members are now required to wear clothing that covers their arms and shoulders when the House is in session. Blazers or cardigans will do. The chamber is two-thirds men and two-thirds Republicans.
The farewell-to-arms rule was proposed by Ann Kelley, a Republican representative who said she wanted the House to apply the same dress code to all members. Men have always had to wear a jacket; now women can no longer go sleeveless.
“Men are required to wear a jacket, a shirt and a tie, correct?” she said in the floor debate. “And if they walked in here without a tie, they would get gaveled down in a heartbeat. If they walked in without a jacket, they would get gaveled down in a heartbeat. So, we are interested in being equal.”
Democrats expressed dismay that colleagues, most of them men, would size them up to determine what they should wear at work as if the calendar was stuck in the 1950s.
“Do you know what it feels like to have a bunch of men in this room looking at your top trying to determine if it’s appropriate or not?” said Democratic state Rep Ashley Aune.
To the Democrats, the sartorial change made as much sense as the Republican response to a measure that would ban children from carrying a firearm in public without adult supervision. In another party-line vote, the ban was defeated as an infringement on gun rights.
“While it may be intuitive that a fourteen-year-old has no legitimate purpose, it doesn’t actually mean that they’re going to harm someone. We don’t know that yet,” said Representative Tony Lovasco, a Republican from a suburb of St. Louis. “We don’t charge people with crimes because we think they’re going to hurt someone.”
So, kids plus guns: what could possibly go wrong?
Michael Janofsky is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. He previously spent 24 years as a correspondent for The New York Times
