As America continues its debate over police reform, The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson made an astute observation: “Something is weirdly absent from the general discussion about police violence in America: the weapon most commonly used to inflict it.”
The topic of controlling police’s use of guns is sidestepped in both the House Democrats’ and the Senate Republicans’ police reform bills from last month. Nor have firearms made much of an appearance in most discussions about police brutality. It’s true that George Floyd’s death, which sparked this national reckoning, did not involve the use of a gun. But more than 1,000 deaths at the hands of police in the past year did.
The Second Amendment enshrined the right for citizens to bear arms. Is it possible to have a national conversation on police reform that involves police keeping the peace without a gun?
I picked up the phone recently and called Captain Howard Rahtz, an acclaimed author and former Cincinnati police captain. His most recent book — “Shots Fired: Gun Violence in the United States” — digs into our nation’s struggle with firearms.
I asked Captain Rahtz about the prospect of unarmed officers in the United States, noting the policing practices of other countries.
Capt. Rahtz’s response? America is different.
“The difference between many countries and the United States is the volume of guns available,” he said. “In America, guns are much more a part of the culture than they are in Europe. So, while it may work in other places, I don’t know that you’re going to find a very big percentage of police officers in America willing to go on duty without a firearm.”
Rahtz has a point. In London, 90% of officers don’t carry guns. Police in Finland and Norway must seek permission before firing. In Norway, a country of 5 million, police shot and killed only two people total in the 12 years between 2002 and 2014.
It’s a different story in America. The U.S. is head-and-shoulders above any other country in terms of gun ownership. It makes up 4% of the world population but owns 46% of civilian firearms. We have enough guns for every man, woman and child — plus some 60 million to spare.
Congress doesn’t have power to disarm the public, nor would it be gaining many fans if it did. Since regulations on gun ownership vary state by state, there’s no clear-cut nationwide policy on who or under what circumstances one can purchase or carry a firearm.
A 2018 study from researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard University found that the relationship between gun ownership and police violence is “pretty strong” — that “when people live in places where guns are more prevalent, the police officers are more likely to shoot and kill them.” Police shootings were 3.6 times more common, per capita, in the 10 states with the highest gun ownership rates than in the five states with the lowest, they found.
It’s a vicious cycle. As Thompson, the Atlantic writer referenced earlier, wrote, “Gun prevalence increases civilian violence and officer shootings, which makes cops more concerned about getting killed, which in turn leads officers to bedeck themselves in quasi-military gear, escalate conflicts that don’t deserve escalation, and, too often, shoot and kill.”
Gun violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and any effort to address police use of firearms likely needs to be preceded by reducing the public’s ability to access them.
Gun violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and any effort to address police use of firearms likely needs to be preceded by reducing the public’s ability to access them. Potential solutions already exist: banning weapons of war, instituting buyback programs, locking down on universal background checks.
Hand-in-hand with confronting our nation’s gun epidemic is reconsidering the role guns play in policing. Demilitarizing police is a start. Utilizing unarmed law enforcement to address nonviolent situations, like traffic violations, may help.
But taking guns away from police would only be possible if the nation’s obsession with firearms is subdued. The two are not mutually exclusive issues, nor can they be — and Utah isn’t exempt. We’ve seen both brutal sides of the coin in recent months. The Salt Lake County District Attorney ruled last week that officers were justified in the shooting of Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal, a 22-year-old who carried a gun while fleeing from police who were responding to a call regarding two armed robberies.
Palacios-Carbajal made repeated efforts to pick up the gun he dropped, prompting Gill to rule that officers reasonably believed “he was going to turn and shoot.” Officers discharged 34 shots at him following his failure to comply with 17 calls to drop his weapon. Palacios never fired his weapon.
Less than a week after Palacios-Carbajal’s death, Ogden police officer Nathan Lyday was shot through a closed door and killed while responding to a domestic violence call. The 24-year-old never saw his assailant or had a chance to respond. He had spent only 15 months working with the department.
As we continue our nationwide reckoning in how we police, we should also make way for a conversation about guns — beyond just our police departments. Guns are here to stay. How we manage their deadly use is a civilian and police conversation.
Email: sbenson@deseretnews.com