“Toast,” I said.
“—in trouble,” Carifi said diplomatically. “Now on this particular scenario,” he continued, “this might happen a hundred thousand times. The people will listen to you, and it will end calmly. But it’s that one out of every hundred thousand, two hundred thousand calls that this happens.”
And there’s the nub of it. Let’s imagine you’re watching two men argue loudly in the middle of a street. It’s tense and uncomfortable. You might call the cops in hopes of making sure it doesn’t escalate. This isn’t an everyday occurrence (though it depends on where you live), but it’s routine enough that it presents no great crisis. I’ve witnessed such scenes in numerous countries, particularly in Italy, where loud, performative arguments on the street happen as a matter of course. In that context, no one so much as bats an eye, let alone calls the cops, unless punches are thrown. People argue loudly sometimes! That is not the case in the United States, where loud public arguments, indeed any displays of disorderliness, often carry more than a wisp of genuine danger, because you never know if the hothead who cut you off in traffic, or the drunk in the booth next to you at the bar, might be packing.
Policing in an environment awash in guns is fundamentally different from policing in one that isn’t. In every interaction in the simulator, I wondered when the gun would appear, and when I’d find myself reaching for my holster. Obviously the training environment and the desire to expose me to as much “action” as possible exaggerated the fear of the ever-present gun.
But afterward, in a conversation with former cops, they all told me the threat of the gun weighs heavily. Over his years as a cop and a supervisor, Steve Osborne told me,
I was involved in literally thousands of arrests. And everything goes smooth, everything goes smooth, it goes smooth. For me, it was when I least expected it, I had little to no warning, you go to ring the guy`s doorbell, there was some Wall Street guy, I went to go lock him up, he answered the door with a gun and a vest on. Stopped two guys in the street just to question them, the guy pulls out a gun for me and the next thing I know I`m in a fight for my life so you always have to be prepared.
THE SAME SPECTER OF the gun haunted Ferguson. The protests after Michael Brown’s shooting were almost entirely nonviolent. Chaotic, sometimes. Boisterous, aggressive, and profane. But the through line for most of them was that the protesters seemed in much more danger than the police. The police had guns, which occasionally they would take out and aim at protesters. The protesters had, at most, glass bottles to launch at the cops in their riot gear. On the long nights that would inevitably end in tear gas, as the standoffs grew tenser, and as disorder beckoned, my own anxiety centered on the possibility that we were just one hotheaded cop away from another dead body.
But on the cold night in November 2014 when St. Louis County state’s attorney Bob McCullough announced the grand jury’s finding for Officer Darren Wilson, it was a very different scene. We arrived at a protest outside the Ferguson police headquarters an hour or so after McCullough announced that no one would be prosecuted for Michael Brown’s death. There was more than a bite of menace in the air. Young men stalking around with their faces covered. Children, families, and elders who had been mainstays at earlier protests seemed noticeably absent, or they headed away as they sensed trouble was about to start. In the several-block walk from where we parked the car to the street outside the police headquarters, I thought I heard the faint sound of gunfire but convinced myself someone was just setting off firecrackers.
We stood across the street from the headquarters, where a single squad car was parked in an otherwise empty parking lot. About a dozen cops in full riot gear stood in front of the car, impassively taking in the scene. Down the block someone started lighting a cop car on fire, and the crowd surged in that direction to watch. Most of the police looked on as well, sensing, it seemed to me, that the odds were not going to be in their favor if they ventured into the streets.
I started down the street to get a closer look at the commotion around the car that was being set on fire (a process that actually takes a while, as I’ve learned) when I heard a pop pop pop. Firecrackers, I thought again, but then I saw the crowd running full tilt toward me, and then I heard the sound again and actually saw the fire coming out of the muzzle of a handgun about forty feet away.
Mayhem and chaos reigned. Onlookers ran in every direction and fell to the ground for cover. We crouched behind the news van positioned at the scene for our live shot (that wasn’t going to happen), and I looked across the street. The cops in full riot gear had taken cover behind their lone cruiser. Crouched on the far side of the vehicle, some were peeking up over the hood and scanning for the shooter. They looked like an army squad in a war zone. And they looked legitimately terrified.