When a police officer shoots a petty criminal, here’s why we focus on the police officer
Timothy P. Carney
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Timothy Johnson walked into Nordstrom in Tyson’s Corner mall in northern Virginia last month and apparently stole two expensive pairs of sunglasses. Store employees alerted the local police. Two officers chased Johnson as he ran away from the mall.
It was a winter night, and Johnson ran into an unlit patch of brush and woods as one officer shouted, “Get on the ground!” Both officers fired their guns, at least one hit Johnson, and he died.
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You can watch the video here:
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The Fairfax County Police Department has fired one of the officers and placed the other on leave. You can read a good news story on it here.
There’s a big debate we should have over some of these issues.
Should the police have chased Johnson? Did they actually fear Johnson was reaching for a gun? Should they have just waited for him to emerge from the small wooded plot? Was there a training shortcoming? Does Fairfax County need to change its policies? Did the officers follow the policies?
Rather than wade into these questions right away, I want to take a step back and talk about why these questions about police conduct are the most relevant, and I want to start by pointing at less helpful ways public officials and folks on social media address this question.
First, there is the response that is common on social media, which is to divert from the questions about police behavior in order to point out the bad behavior of the man shot by the police.
Yes, you shouldn’t steal. Yes, you should stop running if the police tell you to. Yes, if this man hadn’t stolen, he would be alive today.
But, no, these are not even close to the most relevant arguments the public should be considering as the details of his death come out.
Why? For starters, Johnson is dead and cannot benefit from this advice.
But mostly, police, as public servants, deserve public scrutiny in a way that private people do not. It’s not merely that police salaries come out of taxpayer-funded coffers — even if somehow they were all privately funded, they would owe an account to the public in a way no regular person would. That’s because our society gives police something of a monopoly on the legal use of lethal force and the power to detain.
With this great power comes great accountability. If, as a parent, you want to point out that even larceny could endanger your life, go ahead and do it. But as public commentators, we ought to focus our attention on those who are directly accountable to us.
Another unhelpful, if common and understandable, reaction is this one often expressed by politicians and activists: “Tim certainly didn’t deserve to die over sunglasses stolen from a department store.”
Of course he didn’t. Also, that’s not an apt critique of the police or anyone else in power here. Nobody shot him for stealing sunglasses.
You can believe 100% that the officer was in the wrong, deserved to be fired, and deserves to be prosecuted, and that still doesn’t make it true that the officer shot him for stealing sunglasses. The officer chased him for stealing sunglasses, and the chase resulted in the shooting, but we all ought to possess enough logical ability to agree that the initial domino in this horrible chain of events wasn’t the motivation for the shooting.
Personally, I think Johnson’s death is an argument for why the officer shouldn’t have chased him into a dark wooded plot. There was no reason to think this man posed a threat to anyone else. Encircling the plot would have been easy. Alternatively, letting a thief escape would have been preferable to putting oneself in a position where the officer would be so stressed and afraid.
Prudence largely consists of avoiding situations where you are likely to do the wrong thing or where the right thing to do has terrible consequences. When you’re carrying a gun, imprudence is particularly morally weighty.
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Maybe you disagree with my assessment. Great, make your counterargument.
But the live debates here are over the rules of engagement and the officers’ adherence to those rules. Flat, simplistic statements such as “Don’t break the law” or “The penalty for shoplifting shouldn’t be death” are ways of avoiding the worthwhile debates.