Why Are Police Officers More Dangerous Than Airpla Essays

Why Are Police Officers More Dangerous Than Airplanes? [pic] Pagan Kennedy AUG. 11, 2017 382 Photo [pic] CreditAngie Wang "It's 2:30 in the morning and my phone rings. My daughter says, 'Daddy, you need to come to the hospital,' " Michael Bell told me, of the moment in 2004 when he learned that his son had been shot by a police officer in their hometown, Kenosha, Wis. Twenty-one-year-old Michael Bell Jr. died that night from a bullet wound to the head. In the nightmarish hours that followed, his father expected independent investigators to arrive on the scene and find out what had gone wrong. A former Air Force pilot, he knew that when an accident happened in the military, a forensic team performed an exhaustive review. Above all, he wanted to make sure that if a mistake had contributed to his son's death, it would be identified and fixed, so that nothing like it would happen again. This investigative method is standard in aviation. When a plane crashes, experts pick through the wreckage to determine the cause and make recommendations to prevent the next accident. The process is so effective that for the last several years, the death rate from crashes of American commercial planes has been zero. But no comparable system exists in policing - and that may help explain why you are far more likely to die at the hands of a cop than to perish in an plane crash. Police officers in the United States now kill about 1,000 people and wound more than 50,000every year. Of course, no independent team arrived to perform a forensic analysis of the younger Mr. Bell's death. Instead, the Kenosha police department spent two days investigating its own officers before ruling that the shooting was justified. The police officers claimed that Michael had "failed to make a complete stop" (and tests later showed Michael had been drinking), so they followed him to his house and parked behind him. According to the police, the young man had lunged at them and tried to pull a gun out of an officer's holster. Photo [pic] The family of Michael Bell (in picture), a young man who died in police custody, recount the story of how their son died at a Citizen's Tribunal in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. CreditNarayan Mahon for The New York Times Mr. Bell hired his own investigators. They contend that it all began with faulty equipment: Officer Erich Strausbaugh's holster caught on a cable dangling from one of the cars' side-view mirrors, so that when he tackled Michael, he felt a powerful tug on his belt. Assuming that the young man had grabbed for his weapon, he called out to his partners, "He's got my gun." Michael's mother and sister, who were watching nearby, yelled that Michael did not have the gun. But it was too late. Continue reading the main story "My blond-haired boy was killed," Mr. Bell said, "and then blamed." He continued, "If that was how it was for my family, then I knew that the families of African-American, Hispanic or Asian boys didn't stand a chance. That was one of reasons I started raising a ruckus." Police violence is tangled up with racism and systemic injustice. We desperately need to do more to address that, foremost by shoring up the criminal-justice system so that it holds police officers accountable when they kill. But it's also true that deadly mistakes are going to happen when police officers engage in millions of potentially dangerous procedures a year. What aviation teaches us is that it should be possible to "accident proof" police work, if only we are willing to admit when mistakes are made. Mr. Bell, in fact, does not blame Officer Strausbaugh, who committed suicide several years later. "The officer made an honest mistake," he said; the problem is that "the police department covered it up." In 2010, the family received some vindication when the City of Kenosha agreed to pay $1.75 million to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit. Afterward, Mr. Bell paid to erect billboards asking: "When police kill, should they judge themselves?" In 2014, Wisconsin passed a law requiring independent investigations of police actions that result in a civilian death. Mr. Bell is still pushing for reform, touring Wisconsin with graphs and charts