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Sept. 2, 2014 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
32:02
Ferguson: A Police Officer’s Perspective
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Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance, and we'd like to talk today about Ferguson, Missouri, and the shooting of Michael Brown and the events that have transpired as a result of that.
I have with me a guest.
His name is John Sullivan.
He is an active duty policeman, and I'll be speaking to him about his perspective on these events from the point of view of an active duty officer.
Just to recap what happened.
Michael Brown was shot by Officer Darren Wilson on August 9th.
And there were initial reports about this that made it sound as though Officer Wilson had essentially shot Michael Brown in cold blood.
That was the version that first got out, and the result was about a week of rioting and looting.
And as is typical when blacks start looting, there were locally owned stores that wrote black owned on their stores in the hope that this would spare them from looting, but it doesn't seem to have worked.
On August 19th, after 10 days of disorder, Governor Jay Nixon sent in the National Guard.
But after two days of that, the guard was removed August 21st, and that was about the time when things began to get back to normal.
On August 26th, there was a huge funeral for Michael Brown.
Thousands of people attended a megachurch, and of course, Al Sharpton was the speaker.
And the incidents that have followed on this event may not yet be over.
Activists on Saturday were calling for mass civil disobedience on the highways all around St.
Louis to tie up traffic on Labor Day, allegedly in the hope of getting justice for Michael Brown.
Now, the aspect about this that particularly strikes me is that we are seeing what is, in effect, a repeat of something we've seen so often before in the Duke alleged rape case by the lacrosse players, in the case of the Gena Six, of course, if you go back to Tawana Brawley.
And of course, the Trayvon Martin business more recently.
Blacks get a half picture, an utterly incomplete picture of something that happened that makes it sound as though whites have been behaving in some gruesome, racially prejudiced way.
They go on the rampage and the media coddles this and only later on, bit by bit, things trickle out to make it clear that what the blacks are believing happened didn't happen that way at all.
So that is really the repetitive case of what happens in incidents like this.
And that aspect of the situation, I believe, has been largely covered by many other commentators, both myself at American Renaissance and many others across the web and in the media.
But today, in particular, I wanted to get Officer Sullivan's view on this event from the point of view of a police officer, because It was an encounter between a white police officer and a black, unarmed teenager, as we're so often told, that set off this train of very unfortunate events.
So, Officer Sullivan, I'm welcoming you on the program here, and I'd like to hear your view as an officer as to what happened between Darren Wilson and Michael Brown.
Well, good evening, Mr. Taylor. It's great to be on here, and it's an honor just to be on the First American Renaissance podcast.
My understanding of what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, is probably about the same as what everyone else has at this point.
But I guess the best thing to do for anybody looking at this, to understand why the officer acted the way he did, is to put themselves in their shoes.
If they got into a fight inside their vehicle with someone that apparently From what I've heard, Michael Brown broke Officer Darren Wilson's orbital bone around his eye, and they struggled for his gun inside the car.
And then Michael Brown started to run away.
Darren Wilson started to pursue him.
Michael Brown turned back around, made some kind of threatening gestures, and was just threatening him with his language, and then started to rush at Officer Wilson.
And then just to look at the General Giant's size, I think he's about 6'4", 292 pounds.
This man could do lethal force with his hands or just cause very significant injuries by attacking Officer Wilson.
And in that case, Officer Wilson, I think, would have done and did do what every other officer would have done in the exact same circumstances.
Otherwise, he would have put his own life at jeopardy.
And so that's when he opened fire.
Of course, uh...
The way you have described the scenario is radically different from what we originally heard, namely that Michael Brown might have been running away with his hands up, shot in the back, all of these things.
But it is certainly my understanding that as the facts have begun to trickle out, that the way this event transpired is, in fact, as you described it.
Now, could you tell me a little bit about How this event fits in to the kind of training you have as an officer in terms of the use of deadly force?
Well, there's different times when we're told that using lethal force is authorized.
And that's when ourselves are threatened with death or severe bodily harm.
Or if someone else is threatened with the same levels of force.
Then there's a third, pretty rare circumstance where there's a, it's called the fleeing felon doctrine, where someone that is known to be a lethal threat to others in the area, maybe like someone that, a good example I have is someone was robbing a number of convenience stores in my area and And every time he robbed the convenience store, he would shoot and kill the person that he was robbing.
And so they narrowed down to the particular area where this guy was.
They knew he was there, and they knew that if he was going to get away, though, if he had the chance to, then he would go on and rob and keep on killing people like he was.
And in order to stop that, they would have to use lethal force, even if he wasn't presenting any force against the officers trying to capture him.
So those are the different circumstances when we're trained to use a lethal force.
And we're also told never to meet force.
We always try to exceed what's being presented to us.
For example, if somebody comes at us with a baseball bat, we don't take out our baton.
And fight back in the same level of force like that.
If somebody's coming out with a baseball bat or if somebody's big enough to present that kind of threat to us just with their own strength, then we have to respond with something higher in order to protect ourselves.
So, so far as your training is concerned, if the events in Ferguson on August 9th took place as you have described them, then...
The officer responded in an entirely appropriate way.
Is that your view? That is appropriate.
It can depend on the size of the officer versus the size of the person threatening the officer.
Sometimes a normal person could be attacking maybe a much smaller officer.
There's a lot of female officers out there nowadays.
And then they would have to maybe take a higher level of force in order to defend themselves.
And that's not necessarily using their firearm, but maybe using their Aspatan in order to defend themselves, rather than maybe just going hands-on with the subject.
An Aspatan, that's a club.
Yes, yes. It's just like the new version of the billy club that I guess officers used back in the day.
Now they have a baton. What about the use of tasers or the use of pepper spray?
I mean, under what circumstances would you do that rather than shoot a guy?
Because shooting him could be final, whereas the whole theory of tasers and pepper spray is you can stop the threat without killing a guy.
Well, it's interesting that, at least in my department, they were very, I guess, vague with determining what you should do in each circumstance.
Because there's so many different hypothetical scenarios you can come up with that they're not able to answer every situation that's out there.
Basically, if someone is going to threaten you with bodily harm, like a severe bodily harm, where you're not just going to be released the same day in the hospital, You need to respond with the force appropriate to defend yourself.
Now, it's basically up to the officer at the time.
They have to have that good judgment, and that's why departments around the country are very careful to hire the best candidates available.
And that's why it's important for us to hold our departments accountable and make sure that they keep doing that.
Well, we hear over and over that whenever there is officer misconduct, every other officer, not just on the force, but in the whole country, they stand shoulder to shoulder, the thin blue line, and they will never rat out a fellow officer.
Is that your experience?
Or do you find that officers are perfectly prepared to criticize misbehavior by other officers?
I think I'm going to go.
Or just like in any other place, they're going to be heavily critical of each other, especially when you're dealing with things like getting into fights with violent, strange people that are very unpredictable.
Then they can be very hard on each other.
But I think, you know, that's when you're looking at a police officer's actions across the country and just going based off of what that officer said or what the department is saying versus people like, I think they got one of the witnesses to the whole thing with the Michael Brown shooting was that man, I think his name was Dariah Johnson, and he had just helped Michael Brown in a robbery just a few minutes before the whole incident took place.
And so officers are going to take that into account, and they're not going to trust a word that guy says.
So, I mean, there is a certain camaraderie, but at the same time, we all want each other to do the best job possible so that we don't have to answer for the actions of bad officers.
Well, it's my impression, really, that there's practically not one sworn peace officer in the entire United States who would have behaved as this alleged eyewitness said Officer Darren Wilson behaved.
That is to say, to just gun down a guy at 20 or 30 feet in the back with his hands in the air who's about to surrender.
I just, it's just very, very difficult for me to conceive of a trained American police officer behaving in that way.
And I'd like to hear your view as to whether or not that is likely, but I'd also like to hear your view as to if that were to happen, surely other police officers would utterly condemn that kind of behavior rather than sort of creating this monolithic blue wall of silence and protection.
Definitely. Yeah, just for someone to do that, it is very unlikely for an officer to do that, incredibly unlikely.
Though, I mean, there's, I guess, tens of thousands, I believe, of police officers in the United States, and there's tons of incidents that happen every day.
And at some point, it can get to the point where something like that can happen.
But if it were to happen, then police officers would not stand up for that officer.
I mean, I've seen police officers be arrested before and down at the jail.
And I see other officers handling that situation as professionally as possible.
They don't feel bad for the police officer.
Usually they feel disgusted at how...
That police officer could have broken the law and betrayed the public's trust in the way they did.
So police officers take these kinds of things very seriously.
When there's a clear breach of a policy of just common sense, then other police officers aren't going to stand up for that person whatsoever.
In fact, it would be quite the opposite.
We'd be very severe in judging that person and letting everyone else know that we're not like that.
Well, that's what I would expect.
That's the only thing that really makes sense to me.
And this notion that somehow every police officer is going to stand up for an allegedly racist cop who killed a black guy in cold blood, that seems to be the way certainly the large majority of blacks think about this and the way the media treats the whole thing.
But back to this question of meeting a threat with an appropriate level of force and that the appropriate level of force can depend on the physical strength of the officer.
It's my understanding that as a consequence of this, female officers are in fact more likely to use lethal force because they can't handle the situation physically.
Do you know anything about that?
Is that in fact the case or is that just a rumor I've heard?
Well, the thing is, like, use of forces, I mean, I guess across the department, it's going to be happening pretty often, but in officers' day-to-day, we really don't run across it too often.
People are surprisingly cooperative, at least where I work.
But my experience is that when female officers do have to use force, everyone typically stands up for them.
The public is also a whole lot more supportive of a woman defending herself, especially if it was a man as large as Michael Brown.
If it was a woman that was in the boots of Officer Darren Wilson instead of him, then we might not be having...
I see.
I see. Do you get any instruction in terms of how blacks behave?
Is there any recognition in the academy that blacks are considerably more likely to commit certainly violent crimes and even other kind of crimes than other ethnic or racial groups in the United States?
When I was going through the police academy, I was looking out for how they would treat these people.
These sensitive subjects like race and sex and such.
And I was a bit surprised and then on the other hand not surprised based off, you know, my understanding of how race works in the United States that they really didn't touch the subject in any way other than to say that police bias against blacks and other minorities and different races exists and that to stay away from that as much as possible.
But they never acknowledged that blacks or Hispanics are more likely than whites and Asians to commit violent crimes.
And the only thing that they really pointed the finger at were officers that I guess would notice this and then would
take extra legal steps to to go out of their way to
combat crime among these different groups like Just like for instance not to pull over blacks and Hispanics
just for for the race And of course, that's illegal, but just to be on the
lookout for that thing but really it was just like I think it was one of those
checklists that the Academies have and governments have where okay, we got to
have this the this police bias class. And so let's get this over with
And it was kind of tucked in among just talking about criminal profiles and looking out for that kind of thing.
Cars that don't look like they're running too well, maybe it's more likely that a criminal is driving that versus an upstanding citizen or something like that.
But it was something that was never really talked about and skirted and Well, that's very interesting.
So the question, well, what about age?
The fact that young people commit more crimes than old people, or the fact that men commit more violent crime than women.
Was any of this touched on, or is this something you just have to figure out through common sense?
I think that was all just kind of handled through common sense.
And, you know, I guess people that should know better about race differences, I guess that just becomes part of their common sense.
You know, if they're going to be working in an area where there's more blacks and Hispanics, they're going to have different kinds of crimes and maybe just more of certain kinds of crimes as well.
Stuff relating to sex differences and age differences.
And everybody knows that if you're going to be pulling over some elderly couple in their 70s, that you're going to be talking quite differently with them and just use their common sense.
So much of police work is just learning how to talk with people and how to interact with them.
And so that's why they try to recruit officers that are going to have that certain common
sense and sense of social understanding so that they don't go hands on with some woman
in her 80s for no reason.
Well, I tell you, I think that being a police officer, certainly in a mixed race urban area
in the United States, would be one of the toughest possible jobs you could have.
And I have an enormous sympathy with the men who are willing to do that.
And I think that they have to be trained well.
I think it's absolutely essential to get the best possible people to begin with.
And we've had notorious cases in New Orleans, for example.
Where standards were lowered and the police force just completely fell apart during Hurricane Katrina.
But what was your sense in your training class or in your department as to whether or not the standards have been lowered or bent in order to get minorities or are standards pretty high and what is your sense not only of your department but of other departments that you might have heard of?
I think my department has very high standards.
I've never failed to be impressed with the standards that they've had.
Although they are part of the American zeitgeist of lowering standards, I guess, for some, in order to attract recruits that know Spanish, that are from an Hispanic background.
With each academy coming through, you'll see, okay, here's the few black guys, or maybe here's the black girl.
Here's the guy that knows Spanish that's maybe from Bolivia or something like that, some exotic place.
But then the rest of them, you know, every department knows it still needs those people that are going to be in touch with what the community is like, how they think about things.
They're going to have... There's officers that have great work ethic, that are physically active.
I really don't see too many officers in my department that are overweight at all.
So I've been very pleased in my department.
And I guess when you live in a certain area where there's more people, the police department is going to have a higher budget to deal with.
And so they're able to attract better candidates for the job.
But if you're living out in the middle of nowhere or if you're living in a very dilapidated city, then it's going to be quite the opposite.
It's really going to affect the kind of officers you're dealing with.
I would suspect that all of that has a tremendous impact on department morale, too.
If you have high quality people working with other high quality people,
then there is a kind of spirit of accomplishment, of task well done,
that would make a huge difference it seems to me.
Absolutely.
And I have a friend that works for another department not too far from where I am from.
And she actually has, her department, they just don't get the funding they need whatsoever.
And the political establishment of where she's working just does not care for the police at all.
It's a very kind of pro-black influence.
And I guess it's not incidental anti-police bias that has just driven other officers away.
Because the thing is, you know, being a police officer, once you get the different qualifications and the certifications, it's not too hard to just move to another jurisdiction if you don't like it where you're working to.
People do that all the time.
And move away from my department and move away from my friend's department.
And her department is just losing people left and right.
And then you end up having police department shifts where there's hardly anybody working that shift.
They might need like 12, 15 people for that particular part of the city, and they only have four people working, and then like a sergeant over top of them.
Gosh, it sounds like police departments can go into a kind of a death spiral.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
And the thing is, the problem with that is then imagine if you're calling the police because somebody broke into your car, and then they show up and they've been worked to death for not only that day, but the past several weeks and several months.
And that officer is going to be a whole lot more gruff and unpleasant to deal with versus
someone in a department, a police officer that has their own area where they have a
much more moderate workload and call volume.
Well there is something else that I really am curious to know.
And that is whether in your experience as an officer, when you make a stop or when you
deal with people who are potential criminals or witnesses to crime?
Do you find consistent racial differences in the way the public responds to you as an officer?
Well, I guess that's part of the fun of the job and actually part of the danger is with traffic stops.
You never really know what you're going to get every time you stop a car.
You could stop a really nice car and it turns out the person inside is wanted for some dastardly crime.
And you can oftentimes, you know, I work night shift now, When I stop somebody, I have no idea what they look like at that point when I'm walking up to their car.
I often don't know how many people are in the car.
Sometimes I get kind of a glance of silhouettes as I'm approaching their car.
And so it is pretty different, the different kinds of people you're going to approach and their reactions to you.
But what I find is, as far as the racial differences go...
Asians have always been very cooperative with me, and I guess that should be no surprise to anybody listening to this podcast.
And that includes people that maybe were born here and have a good grasp of English, and those that grew up, I guess, in East Asia or Southeast Asia and have very little grasp of English, but they still have that same respect for authority that Asians here have as well.
Whites are still pretty cooperative.
Sometimes you can get downright boring by how everybody's just yes sir and no sir.
Not that I want people to be fighting with me or anything, but it's almost like so much of the time we're just kind of bureaucrats driving around and making sure people have their...
Headlights working and things like that and not running stop signs and not driving drunk.
With Hispanics, I've noticed they're actually pretty legally savvy.
They always want to know why they're stopped because if so many Hispanics, they're illegal immigrants and where I work, they can't Get a driver's license if they're here illegally.
And so they always want to know why they were stopped.
Because if they can beat the reason for why they're stopped, like if I didn't stop them for a good reason, then the ticket will get thrown out in court.
And that can be a hefty fine for driving without a license.
But the thing is, with Hispanics, I think the biggest crime I've seen them commit is driving under the influence of alcohol.
And that becomes difficult, though, because in order to give a field sobriety test...
I have to, I guess, work through my Spanglish and see if they can understand what I'm saying.
And I ultimately depend on their cooperation because they can pretend to know no English whatsoever and start doing the test wrong on purpose, pretending like they just can't understand.
And then they can pass off as if, oh, I wasn't driving drunk.
I just failed the field sobriety test because I couldn't understand the instructions.
And so that's a big problem.
If you're driving down the road at night, you're going to be passing tons of drunk drivers.
And just like me, you're not going to be knowing what kind of person you're passing or who's passing you and how incredibly drunk they can be.
But with blacks, I've found that they're much more likely to be defensive, even over small things.
Like maybe they have a brake light out and I just stop them and I'm Seeing if maybe they're driving suspended or don't have a license or if they're wanted.
Officers are always trying to look for this bigger arrest rather than just telling somebody that their brake light's out.
And they're filled so much with self-pity like, oh man, I'm always getting stopped for my brake light's out.
And I'm like, well... If you fix it, you won't get stopped anymore.
And I just don't really have any patience as a man for any other man to be talking to me that way.
It's like, oh, poor me.
I got stopped. And they often don't even get tickets for stuff like that.
It's very rare to get a ticket for something so small.
And then there's sovereign citizens out there.
And there's kind of the black equivalent of the Moorish nation.
And that's a group that actually, I think, from what I've understood is that The national group of the Moorish Nation is very against any of their members going around and saying that they don't have to obey the laws.
And that's basically what these sovereign citizens and Moorish Nation members are about, is saying that, oh, I can go where I want and how I please.
You know, the laws don't apply to me.
I'm not a citizen. Of this country or state or locality.
And so you have no right to stop me, but they still stop once you let them up, usually.
Well, the sovereign state folks are mostly white, are they not?
Yes, so you have that kind of racial duality.
There's the sovereign citizens who are probably pretty right-wing, and then all about their individual rights, pretty libertarian.
And then there's the, I guess, the black equivalent of the offshoots of the Moorish nation.
I see, I see.
That's a group I certainly don't know very much about.
But some of them will then claim that I'm a member of the Moorish nation, and so you have no authority over me.
Yes, yes. Although they do obey generally what you're saying because they know that if they don't, they're going to be, you know, put in handcuffs and taken to jail if they don't sign a ticket, for example.
They don't want to get into a police chase over something silly.
Right. And so they'll show up to court and they make these ridiculous arguments saying that they're not citizens under the United States.
And the judge just looks at them and it's like, you're here for a traffic ticket.
This isn't the Supreme Court.
Right. And so just talk about, hey, you had some marijuana on you.
You had a concealed weapon.
So let's talk about that instead.
And they rarely want to.
But they usually just like to grandstand for their cause.
Well, I'll tell you that on those rare occasions when I've been stopped by the police, I don't react very well to a man coming up to me and giving me orders.
And I am, of course, always very polite and cooperative, but psychologically there's something in me that doesn't like it.
I don't even like it when the TSA, the transportation safety people, tell me to put my stuff in the bin.
I just don't like being pushed around.
And although, of course, you would never guess that to see the way I react, I feel this resistance to authority.
And I can imagine that for many black people, especially young black people, fed on all of these stories about how the power structure oppresses them, it becomes impossible to suppress that sort of testosterone-fueled feeling of, well, don't you push me around.
But I gather from what you're saying that although they may be Yeah, that's typically the case, but just like everything out there, there's always going to be those wild cards.
I remember one police chase I went on to.
It was involving these two young black guys that had broken into a car at a neighboring mall.
And it just went on for a good long time.
And I was actually able to talk with the guy once we did catch up with him.
Their car crashed in the neighboring city.
And we were able to take them into custody.
And he had to go to the hospital because he had sprained his knee from a pre-existing injury.
And just talking to him in person, engaging in that kind of self-pity and denying all the charges against him.
There was marijuana in his car.
And just completely denying that, he couldn't find some cash that was in his back pocket right away, and so he instantly jumps to the conclusion that the police had taken that money out of his pocket.
And then when he was about to be taken down to jail, they were checking his pockets again.
We kind of research people.
And then we're like, hey, what's all this money doing in your pocket?
It's like, oh, there it is.
No apologies or anything, of course, from this guy.
But just, yeah, it is pretty rare for somebody to be outright physically hostile.
Well, you know, it's interesting what you say about this self-pity attitude among blacks.
We're going to have to wrap up pretty soon here.
But that's not something I necessarily would have guessed in the case of, say, young black men.
But perhaps that's part of what is driving the reactions to whenever the media reports something that can be interpreted, as in the case of Ferguson, as some kind of oppression against blacks.
It's this welling up of self-pity that results in this kind of reaction.
Yes. But anyway, well, Officer, I'm very, very grateful for your having spent the time to discuss these incidents.
We've come far afield from Ferguson here, but I think that our listeners will be very, very interested in what you had to say about what it's like to be a white man wearing a badge in our multicultural America.
So thank you very, very much for joining me.
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