In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me

I, for one, get tired of the constant refrain of hero worship while these guys say that there number one job is to get home safely.<p>They are afforded terrible powers to intervene in, and disrupt, someone&#x27;s life. That trade is made under the assumption that they do a dangerous job.<p>A benefit is afforded to them due to the responsibility that they bear.<p>Obviously, they want to have as much power with as little danger as possible. They want to maximize the benefit the receive (largely being above the law and a middle class existence) and minimize the repercussions of what they owe for it (possibly being in danger).<p>Its the same in other areas of American life where elites have abdicated their responsibilities but have become accustomed to the benefits afforded them to the point that they think it&#x27;s owed to them. That has to change.<p>EDIT: for clarification and spelling.

This is a really well written article. This also echo&#x27;s alot of the sentiment that many people have. I remember reading recently about the differences in police training from Germany vs the US. One of the things that stuck out at me was the huge amount of hours they spend training to &quot;not&quot; shoot, and learning how to de-escalate situations. It&#x27;s no wonder we have so many issues here in the US, it makes me sad.

<i>&quot;Rhoads defended the procedure, calling the officers’ actions “on point.” It’s not standard to conduct investigations beforehand because that delays the apprehension of suspects, he told me.</i>&quot;<p>That is dereliction of a police officer&#x27;s duty. The entire purpose of a police force is to <i>investigate</i> potential crimes, and then, if it is determined that a crime has occurred, to arrest those involved. This man, a shift commander, is literally saying that their policy is to shoot first and ask questions later. He should, at a minimum, be fired. Additionally, if he has actually structured his department in a way that has officers arresting people without prior investigation, he and all others carrying out this policy should be criminally prosecuted for false imprisonment.

&gt; It’s not standard to conduct investigations beforehand because that delays the apprehension of suspects, he told me.<p>When a man&#x27;s job depends on him apprehending suspects, then he will find a way to create more suspects for which to apprehend.

In the US the Police are a &quot;Guns &amp; Badges&quot; Culture thru &amp; thru. Only the truly &quot;macho&quot; are regarded with respect. There is no concept of de-escalation.<p>The bigger problem is that the policies &amp; incentives are built to reinforce this. They get promotions&#x2F;assets based on forfeiture laws, weapons based on Pentagon Surplus &amp; publicity based on Shootouts. No one ever got promoted for not shooting a (potentially innocent) suspect. Very very rarely does a cop get prosecuted for pulling a gun or inflicting other violence.<p>SO put a bunch of arrogant, power seeking people in a system which glorifies violence &amp; rewards forfeitures. What else do you expect?

I&#x27;m both disappointed and not all that surprised. I grew up here, and this is the product of something that has been brewing for twenty years.<p>The citizens here are to blame. The police are just giving the public what it wants. It&#x27;s a county full of McMansions and extreme paranoia. Lots of upper middle class people terrified that their fragile existence might be upset by [Mexican immigration, terrorism, &lt;insert fear here&gt;].[1] I&#x27;m not sure if 9&#x2F;11 was a turning point <i>per se</i>, but planes crashing into the Pentagon in neighboring Arlington didn&#x27;t help.<p>It wasn&#x27;t always like this. When I was growing up you&#x27;d almost never see a Fairfax County cop. Vienna was always a police state, but the small-bit speed-trap kind. Today, there are cops crawling around Tysons (where the biggest danger is rowdy teenagers).<p>[1] It&#x27;s notable that this story takes place just across the Potomac from where those parents got in trouble with the police for letting their kids walk home less than a mile from school.

&quot;I understood the risks of war when I enlisted as an infantryman. Police officers should understand the risks in their jobs when they enroll in the academy, as well. That means knowing that personal safety can’t always come first. That is why it’s service. That’s why it’s sacrifice.&quot;<p>I think that sums it up well. Many police officers do indeed act like they don&#x27;t understand the risks or even purpose of their own jobs. Policing has become an end in and of itself. It&#x27;s no longer about protecting and serving but about policing and arresting and jailing. It doesn&#x27;t matter if there is no crime, people will be arrested. It doesn&#x27;t matter if there is serious crime, low-level offenders will be the primary target. And of course, nothing is more important than officer safety. These officers are cowards who should be ashamed of themselves. They don&#x27;t have an altruistic bone in their body and probably wouldn&#x27;t lift a finger to save a baby out of a burning building. It is the citizens&#x27; lives that matter, that the police are sworn to protect. It is the citizens they serve. But that indeed has been lost.<p>Given all this, is it any wonder that much of the population no longer trusts police, many from negative personal experiences? The author is right. Until there is a huge shift in the way police treat citizens, this problem of trust will get worse. For many, it is a problem of hate, and in many cases, rightly so.<p>Yet the police and many other people insist that the change has to come from citizens. If only we give up our guns. If only we give up our freedoms. These things just make the problem worse by blaming the victims and forcing the citizens to give up even more for the well being of the police.<p>There is no movement from the pro police camp, and it&#x27;s been their turn for decades now. Until there is, hate and animosity from the community will continue to grow.

I&#x27;m confused as to why a report of a squatter requires any kind of raid to begin with...

Two years ago, I was in the US for a month and volunteered to chauffeur two Chinese students to a Celtics game as an outing (I was working for a homestay&#x2F;education consulting company at the time).<p>On the way back at night, driving through a small town in central Massachusetts, I passed a cop car, going at the speed limit. The cop immediately pulled out and began tailing me, but did not turn on his lights.<p>I tried to maintain a constant speed, a couple miles above the 35 mile per hour speed limit, since I know cops treat excessively slow speeds as an indicator of drunk driving.<p>Eventually, after 15 minutes of being tailed, I hit my foot a bit too heavily on the gas, and went to 45 miles per hour. He instantly turned on his lights, and pulled me over.<p>The officer was extremely skeptical when he got to the car, especially since the name on the car&#x27;s registration was my company&#x27;s, not mine, and I had two minors in the back. After some questioning and prodding about where we had been and what we had been doing, he let me go with a warning.<p>I shudder to think what would have happened if I had pulled over in the same situation, but black. The officer was serving no sort of duty except to troll for problems where none existed.<p>I haven&#x27;t returned to the US since: it turns out there are many places I can live where I don&#x27;t have to have nerve-wracking interactions with hostile law enforcement, ever.

I sometimes find ex-military folks analogies between their wartime service and situations in civilian life rather forced, but this analysis is exactly right. I used to ask myself why the Israeli Defence Forces would risk innocent palestinian civilian lives to kill the terrorists who hide among them by using drones or airstrikes instead of the kind of techniques they would no doubt use if the terrorists were surrounded by Israeli civilians. The simple answer is that the life of an Israeli civilian is considered (by the IDF) to be worth more than that of a palestinian civilian.<p>The same was clearly true in the United States&#x27; early approach to counter-insurgency in Iraq, as described in this piece, where the life of an American soldier is clearly much more valuable to the US Government than those of the Iraqi civilians we went to &#x27;save&#x27;.<p>The sad thing is the comparison I would always quote was &quot;what would the police do in the United States, if you had a dangerous criminal surrounded by civilians?&quot; They probably wouldn&#x27;t use an airstrike, they would probably use some other technique with a higher risk to the police, but a lower risk to the civilians they are sworn to &#x27;protect and serve&#x27;<p>This article (and lots of other data) suggests that is changing: if everyone is a suspect until proven innocent, there is no need for police restraint. The worse that can happen is a dead &#x27;perp&#x27; I guess...

&gt; <i>The culture that encourages police officers to engage their weapons before gathering information promotes the mind-set that nothing, including citizen safety, is more important than officers’ personal security.</i><p>This seems like the thing police forces need to change in order to fix the situation.

Now that whites are far more directly endangered by police, one sees articles like this pop up all the time.<p><i>&quot;In a very real sense, the &#x27;middle class&#x27; is not an economic category, it&#x27;s a social one. To be middle class is to feel that the fundamental institutional structures of society are, or should be, on your side. If you see a policeman and you feel more safe, rather than less, then you can be pretty sure you&#x27;re middle class. Yet for the first time since polling began, most Americans in 2012 indicated they do not, in fact, consider themselves middle class.&quot;</i> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gawker.com&#x2F;ferguson-and-the-criminalization-of-american-life-1692392051" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gawker.com&#x2F;ferguson-and-the-criminalization-of-americ...</a><p>The author still argues in favor of policing. (Just like he doesn&#x27;t question whether he had any right to invade another country.) Advocating that police return to his side, against the common domestic enemy.

&quot;nothing ... is more important than officers’ personal security&quot;<p>I&#x27;m not sure this is true. If it were, why would they put themselves into potentially violent situations? It seems to me the priorities are<p>1. Make the arrest. 2. Officer safety. 3. Public safety. 4. Justice.<p>In that order. They are related, to get 4 you <i>sometimes</i> need 1-3. But not always.<p>&#x27;Militarised police&#x27; is correct, because this corresponds exactly to what we&#x27;d want of our warfighters.<p>1. Carry out the mission. 2. Be safe. 3. Keep 3rd parties safe. 4. Be ethical and moral.<p>It&#x27;s a far cry from &#x27;to protect and serve&#x27;. Personally I&#x27;d be happy with a squatter in an empty apartment getting away more often in return for not deploying an armed raid with no confirmation based on a single report.

This discussion of strategies for reducing the use of force by police is more constructive and sensible than most on this issue:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;harvardlawreview.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;law-enforcements-warrior-problem&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;harvardlawreview.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;law-enforcements-warrior...</a>

Virginia is a special puzzle.<p>For Violent Crime in 2011, it ranked 46th of the 50 states. Property Crime was 43rd.<p>The Federal &amp; State Incarceration Rate was 13th, and general funds spending on corrections (2008), it was ranked 11th highest.<p>Sometimes Europeans are alarmed by the high US incarceration rates, with our 700-800 per 100,000 over twice most other countries. If you want your eyes to just pop out of your head though look at the state by state numbers. (The US is a big place, and all social trends are not perfectly distributed.) Louisiana incarcerates over 1400 of its 100,000, four to fourteen times most other countries. The one thing you can say for Louisiana, though, is that it also has over double the national murder rate. So maybe it has other endemic problems that are running both numbers up simultaneously.<p>Virginia&#x27;s up there in incarceration with 900-1000 per 100k, but it doesn&#x27;t have the violent crime stats that could even attempt to excuse it. It has below average homicide and violent crime rates.<p>It&#x27;s a high incarceration state for no damn reason.<p>Some resources:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justicepolicy.org&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;justicepolicy&#x2F;documents&#x2F;va_justice_system_expensive_ineffective_and_unfair_final.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justicepolicy.org&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;justicepolicy&#x2F;documents...</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deathpenaltyinfo.org&#x2F;murder-rates-nationally-and-state#MRord" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deathpenaltyinfo.org&#x2F;murder-rates-nationally-and-...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Crime_in_Louisiana" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Crime_in_Louisiana</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vsp.state.va.us&#x2F;Crime_in_Virginia.shtm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vsp.state.va.us&#x2F;Crime_in_Virginia.shtm</a>

&gt; He explained that it was standard procedure to point guns at suspects in many cases to protect the lives of police officers. Their firearm rules were different from mine; they aimed not to kill but to intimidate.<p>That&#x27;s nuts. At least they haven&#x27;t gone that crazy in Norway - the police instruction on firearms are still: &quot;Only aim at someone you&#x27;re authorized to kill&quot; -- eg: someone posing an immediate threat that can&#x27;t be avoided by de-escalating the situation (so it&#x27;s not enough for someone to threaten to kill a police officer, if that officer can easily back away and secure the area&#x2F;wait for backup -- but more along the lines of someone aiming a gun at someone).<p>And this makes more sense to me too: Everyone is entitled to self-defense if they fear for their life -- if someone threaten you with a deadly weapon -- be that a knife or a gun, it&#x27;s entirely rational to try and kill them in order to save yourself. You might of course serve out the rest of your life in prison if you make the wrong call -- but you&#x27;ll be alive.<p>Just because someone is a cop, doesn&#x27;t mean they can&#x27;t be(come) a murderer. This is why it&#x27;s so important for police to practice restraint. They work for us, not against us after all (or should, anyway).

This reminds me of Sandra Bland who was put into jail for three days because of improperly signaling a lane change. Police in the US is totally out of control it seems.

I once used to believe that the problem in the US is that guns are so widely available, but today I&#x27;m not so sure about that anymore, because there are many very safe countries that rank high in number of guns per capita like Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Austria, Canada and Germany.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_c...</a><p>In Switzerland every male has a military type machine gun and two magazines at home and in my country, Austria, there are regions that rival Texas in terms of gun ownership.<p>Today I tend to believe that this might be a problem of city planning (and preventing ghettos). The US has cities that are much larger than the largest cities in the countries cited by me. But I might be wrong here.<p>Anyways, I do not doubt that police in Austria and Germany would act no differently than in the US if they had reason to expect that they could be shot every time they stopped a car. Thankfully this is not the case.

I feel like if the author had been black he wouldn&#x27;t be around now to write that article.

There was no report of anyone being harmed -- of any violence occurring. <i>The police</i> escalated the situation to a violent confrontation.<p>Fail.<p>P.S. If they had raised a sudden firefight, where might some of the resulting rounds traveled and impacted, particularly in what might be a fairly population-dense apartment building(s) setting?

The chief of police has posted a response: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fcpdnews.wordpress.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;25&#x2F;a-message-from-the-chief&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fcpdnews.wordpress.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;25&#x2F;a-message-from-the...</a>

I wonder if the majority of cops become more empathetic after reading pieces like these and take extra precautions not to become <i>those cops</i> under public scrutiny?<p>Or do they just get even more set into the <i>us vs. them and we know what&#x27;s better for the dumb masses</i> mindset?<p>I would love to hear an actual cop&#x27;s opinion on how the recent media coverage has affected his&#x2F;her individual performance and the overall performance of the police force in general.

The solution in the US is supposed to be US democracy.<p>A first step is freedom of the press so that citizens can become informed.<p>A second step is for problems to be exposed in the press as in the OP.<p>A third step is for citizens in the area with such problems to inform their elected officials that the police need better supervision to solve the problems.<p>Fourth, with enough concern from voting citizens, the political supervision of the police needs to tell the police chief, etc. to clean up their act.<p>If problems continue, then the mayor, etc. needs to get the Chief of Police a new job, say, cleaning the sidewalks with a toothbrush -- &quot;Get&#x27;m nice and clean, now, y&#x27;hear. Good to see you doing well at the work you are best suited for.&quot;.<p>With more concern, lawyers, including the local prosecutors, can bring legal cases against the police. As in Baltimore now, a few serious legal cases against the police can calm down the whole police force like a few million pills of Valium.<p>Net, via our democracy, the power, essentially all of the power, really overwhelming power, is fully in the hands of the voting citizens. All citizens have to do is find a sympathetic candidate and pull a lever in a voting booth.<p>With any kind of serious activity by voting citizens, police arrogance can disappear like a snowball in a hot July in Vegas.<p>The police need to be worried now: Somewhere in the US is a billionaire who believes in the US Constitution and is ready to spend a little money to set up police <i>sting</i> operations, have hidden cameras recording everything, make a really big public story about the abuses, have teams of lawyers filling the court dockets with every legal case they can come up with, and then organizing some political activity to get the politicians on board.<p>The story for the police? Simple: Clean up your act on your own or the voters, politicians, and lawyers will do it for you.<p>Too much of the police have talked to themselves too much and talked themselves into believing a lot of nonsense reasons why they should treat the citizens like dirt. Well, that treatment and those reasons won&#x27;t cut it, not for even a minute, once the sunlight shines on the situation -- instead, voters, politicians, and lawyers have the power, overwhelming power, and will stop the nonsense.

This story could have easily ended much worse if the Iraq vet had armed himself against the intruding police as suspected home invaders.

Every time you aim a gun at an innocent persons&#x27; head without first doing due diligence before escalating, you increase the chances of an accident or misunderstanding which results in an innocent person dead.<p>Which we hear about all the time. So WTF?<p>In any event, why would a squatter merit such a hostile response?

FWIW Fairfax County, VA is about as rich, white, and suburban place that you can find in the US.

Why would they sent an assault team to look into a report of a squatter?

The author&#x27;s recommendation that the police build up community relationships to increase trust and reduce unnecessary confrontation reminded me of a book, Fixing Broken Windows [1], that made a similar recommendation for what it called &quot;community policing&quot;.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Fixing-Broken-Windows-Restoring-Communities&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0684837382" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Fixing-Broken-Windows-Restoring-Commun...</a>

It blows my mind that the police would not check with the management office security guard as to whether the unit was currently occupied...what if it had been rented that day?<p>this feeds into a problem that is a corollary to the above, which is the whole see something&#x2F;say something mentality with no repercussions for those that call the police on others...

To understand all of this, a great FB page to follow is CopBlock (disclaimer: not affiliated with them but a great news source). The way the police in America act today is borderline Orwellian, or perhaps it&#x27;s already crossed that line.

I live in Fairfax county. It has some excellent officers but the dept is atrocious when it comes to transparency and honesty with the citizenry.<p>The officer involved shootings of unarmed people are consistently swept under the rug.

Can this be the consequence of liberal gun ownership laws in the US? When anyone police interacts with can carry the gun it makes perfect sense to act as if they did. Hence excessive violence in trivial cases.

Probably the best article I read this year!

The comments here are amazing!

I read these type of people walk the fine line that separates criminals, the propensity for violence and murder while wearing a uniform doesn&#x27;t fix psycopathy. Not to say all police officers are built this way, and certainly there are elements that I can observe as an outsider that makes American style policing to be particularly and overwhelmingly lethal and excessive. I have a hard time buying the liuetenants response that this is the norm. What kind of fucked up policy allows guns drawn officers with questionable safety margin to kick out a suspected squatter? It raises even more questions like, what if the author was African American? Or maybe he had tattoo on his face? If people wearing a uniform are free to choose a response in their own thinking, how much of past fatalities by police force were caused by trigger happy and blood thirsty individuals that are clearly psychopaths? How can the public trust enforcers who more than coincidentally use excessive force before the usual buckshot is laid out? It must be truly terrifying to be American, and stories like this makes me inclined to keep my Canadian citizenship. Not taking the higher ground, we&#x27;ve had exactly such police brutality, but almost in most cases they&#x27;ve resulted in criminal conviction. On the other hand a super lax and incompetent police force like those in Korea or Japan is equally frightening, but much less than a trigger happy, God knows what type of disorder suffering badge wearing individual will react in high stress situations, especially one that is escalated entirely by themselves.

The issue is in USA only police kill if you don&#x27;t obey them (follow their verbal commands), possibly due to reduced middle class. Here is a hypothesis: to lower the issue, either the US citizens increase gun ownership or police don&#x27;t carry guns; till parity. Data point: Stanford experiment. More middle class and power balance. Then they&#x27;d be polite, like in the rest of the world. On you tube, you can see police outside of USA interactions... and there is &#x27;pushing&#x27; and such involved and sometimes their feelings get hurt. In USA, if you don&#x27;t obey or hurt their felling: you are dead.

I am baffled how he can even compare the military raids done in Iraq to the experience he mentions. Of course I&#x27;m not saying it`s not a harrowing experience, but it didn&#x27;t end up with him dead, or worse yet jailed in some obscure military jail without any recourse. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Taxi_to_the_Dark_Side" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Taxi_to_the_Dark_Side</a>

This article doesn&#x27;t add up. Even highly-paid local government servants (i.e. the police in this case) aren&#x27;t usually this stupid.<p>What it&#x27;s claiming is: if someone calls up the police to report that a squatter is occupying a neighboring apartment, there&#x27;s a SWAT raid on that apartment?<p>Nope. This was either in a very high-security zone, or there was some other extenuating circumstance.<p>Here&#x27;s my guess at why they didn&#x27;t bother with asking the security guard or management, and just went with the word from a neighbor. The neighbor is a high-ranking member of the local SWAT organization.