Maybe twenty years ago, a man who had nowhere to go was sleeping on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. He had duct-taped a knife to his hand.<\/p>\n
My memory\u2019s vague on this, but I think he had some trouble with his hands, which was why he used the tape to keep the knife handy. I know why he had a knife: he was living on the street and trying to keep himself safe.<\/p>\n
Park police officers came along and woke him up, probably not gently. He jumped up, likely disoriented, knife in hand. He didn\u2019t attack anybody, but he waved the knife.<\/p>\n
The cops yelled, \u201cDrop the knife,\u201d but of course, he couldn\u2019t drop it.<\/p>\n
So one of them shot him. Killed him. Killed him for nothing more than sleeping in a public place and being prepared to protect himself.<\/p>\n
I imagine the cop who shot him was scared that the man might attack him or someone else. I doubt this was a case of a cop killing someone just for the hell of it; it sounded more like the case of a cop who didn\u2019t know what else to do.<\/p>\n
The cop had a gun. He\u2019d been trained in the use of a gun. He really didn\u2019t know how to respond with anything but a gun.<\/p>\n
Remember the old adage about how to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail?<\/p>\n
To a cop with a gun, everything looks like an excuse to shoot somebody.<\/p>\n
(I wish I thought that last sentence was an exaggeration.)<\/p>\n
The reason I remember so much about this story is not because it was unique. It wasn\u2019t unusual even then. I read such stories, get outraged, and then let them slip into the vagaries of memory.<\/p>\n
But I remember this one because my Aikido teacher in D.C., the master instructor Mitsugi Saotome, was outraged by what happened. <\/p>\n
We were having a seminar that weekend and he spend an entire two-hour session teaching us ways to disarm someone with a knife without getting hurt or harming that person.<\/p>\n
Most of the lessons involved using the jo, the short staff, a useful weapon that allows you to keep some distance from the other person.<\/p>\n
The physical training was interspersed with lectures on how the police should be trained to handle people and explanations of how Japanese police might deal with such a situation.<\/p>\n
Which is to say, the lesson was not about technique, but about the reality that there are many ways to handle someone who is having a crisis and could do something dangerous besides killing them.<\/p>\n
Despite all the money we spend on police \u2014 and here in Oakland it is more than half our city budget \u2014 the police have been trained so badly that all they know how to do is bully people who aren\u2019t cops and kill anybody who makes them mad or scares them.<\/p>\n
Elie Mystal had a great article in The Nation <\/i><\/a>this week on the travesty of recognizing the families of those killed by police in outrageous circumstances. As usual, his article included many quotable lines of outrage, but here\u2019s the sentence that really stood out for me:<\/p>\n The institution of policing must be rebuilt from the ground up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That\u2019s the crux of the matter.<\/p>\n How to do that properly is a subject for a book \u2014 probably many books \u2014 not a blog post. And I\u2019m no expert. But I have one useful suggestion: Require those who want to be cops to train in Aikido. I don\u2019t mean just pick up a few techniques, though there are a number of physical techniques that are useful.<\/p>\n I mean train long enough to start grasping the deeper concepts, to get to the ideas about resolving conflicts without harming anyone, to approach a crisis thinking \u201chow can I make this better?<\/p>\n We don\u2019t need people who want to be bad asses as cops. We need people who want to resolve situations and take care of others.<\/p>\n If you\u2019d like to look at some other useful material on our out-of-control police in the United States, I recommend subscribing to Alec Karakatsanis\u2019s Copaganda Substack<\/a>. He focuses on news reporting about police, but that\u2019s a good view into the whole picture.<\/p>\n