After every fatal shooting of an unarmed civilian, all actors in the drama follow a familiar script. The police officer in question says he was scared for his life, and public opinion coalesces around either believing him or considering him a liar and a murderer who shot his victim in cold blood. Sometimes a video emerges that supports the latter conclusion: a man fleeing on foot is shot in the back; a young man striding away is hit as an officer unloads a clip of bullets.
In the overwhelming majority of cases, however, no such video exists. And without visual evidence, prosecuting attorneys are inclined to trust the testimony of their colleagues in law enforcement. Grand juries, too, are reluctant to conclude that a cop was lying when he said he feared for his life. In 2008, for example, New York police detective Gescard Isnora testified to a grand jury that he had been “scared and nervous” before he shot eleven of the fifty bullets alongside his unit that killed unarmed New Yorker Sean Bell and wounded two of his friends.
But an officer can suffer fear and still act unjustly. Imagine a police officer in the laboratory, sitting before the psychological test I just mentioned. He is presented with images of men and women, young and old, some aiming a weapon, others cradling a doll, and in a split second he must decide whether to “shoot.” And imagine that this particular officer, not through conscious racism but through deep unconscious bias, finds himself only in fear of black citizens. In test after test, pictures of black postal workers and teenagers appear on his screen. He hits the “shoot” button over and over again, mistaking for weapons the envelopes and phones in their hands. He is not faking his fear; he is not being disingenuous. But something is deeply amiss.
What is the moral status of that fear? What is its legal status? In the case of a police officer, the practical effect of our collective conception of fear is its transcendent ability to exculpate. If a cop shoots someone because he is angry, he is a murderer. But if he shoots a suspect because he is afraid, he is innocent. Can the law second-guess that subconscious impulse, which the shooter cannot control any more than he can keep his leg from kicking out when a doctor strikes a hammer against his knee?
I KNOW THAT IMPULSE well because I experienced it for much of my life. During my childhood and adolescence, I walked the streets of New York shrouded in white fear, always sensing danger lurking at the corners. The sketchy teenagers up to some kind of hustle in the park. The shouts of revelers and assailants in the night as I went to bed.
I grew up in the Bronx. Not the South Bronx that famously burned while the Yankees played the Dodgers in game two of the 1977 World Series, but a working-class neighborhood in the Northwest Bronx called Norwood. We moved to the leafy, quiet, relatively affluent neighborhood of Riverdale when I was eleven, but then I began a daily commute into “the city,” as we always called it, right as New York was setting crime records. The public magnet school I attended from seventh to twelfth grade was on the northernmost edge of the Upper East Side, adjacent to East Harlem. East Ninety-sixth Street made up the border. I knew every square foot and its potential danger. Or I should say, I thought I did. My biases and irrational neuroses colored everything about the physical experience of New York in the early 1990s. My own psychological makeup then was wired for anxiety, constantly hyperaware of my own self and its vulnerabilities as it moves through space. So for me, growing up in New York at the time of both peak violent crime and peak public panic about the same was a bit like taking a kid scared of roller coasters and raising him in an amusement park.
I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that at some level, the thought of crime penetrated every single moment I spent walking the streets of New York. I’d scan the sidewalk for teenage boys who looked like they might be trouble. Often they were black or brown, but not always. There were many white hooligans to avoid as well. I’d cross the street. Then walk into a store, then another store. Then cross back and keep my head down. I’d avoid eye contact or, just at the moment where I sensed danger, ask an old lady for the time.
I learned a very particular gaze, eyes slightly downcast, so as not to make accidental eye contact and initiate hostility (“What the fuck you looking at?”), yet raised and open enough to constantly monitor possible threats in the periphery. I would tense myself for certain blocks. One friend lived on the Upper West Side on a block frequented by dealers (we opened the door to his house once to find a man passed out next to a crack pipe), and I’d need to work myself up into a lather of courage to stride purposefully down that block to his house. Particularly at night.
On the day in April 1992 when a Simi Valley jury found the police officers who beat Rodney King not guilty, the administrators of the school I attended panicked. They imagined that riots would break out in New York, so they let school out early and instructed students and teachers to go home and not linger on the streets. I was a thirteen-year-old eighth grader. A bunch of us went to the apartment of a friend who lived across the street. A little while after we got there, our friend’s older brother came into the apartment with some upperclassmen, one of whom had just been punched in the face. The purple bruise around his eye seemed like a clear message: This involves you too.