The danger of having asymmetrical meetings

There are symmetrical meetings when the inter ests, experiences, expecta tions and assumptions of the participants are similar and there are asymmetrical meetings when they are not.

Yesterday I had lunch and drank a lot of beer at Plainfield Station with a dear and longstanding old friend of mine.

Although his career in the military and mine in academia could hardly be more different, the meeting was a symmetrical one. As we have not seen each other for some time we enjoyed our hours together.

Life is full of meetings such as these. For the most part they are navigated with tact and courtesy and respect, because the contact is between equals; the meeting is symmetric.

Meetings are less easy to navigate when they are asymmetric. I suppose the most traumatic asymmetric meeting for most ordinary citizens is when they are confronted by a police officer, uniformed and well-armed. Ordinary citizens and police officers often have widely different expectations, experiences and make different assumptions; one may be hypernervous the other highly sensitive. Such asymme- try can lead to deeply harmful results.

Such as this week in Memphis.

It is hard to look back over the events of this week and avoid hearing about the death of Tyre Nichols after a beating by five policemen in Tennessee. I have not seen the videotaped record of the beating because even the idea of such behavior of one human being toward another sickens me. I am more than willing to let others see it and pass judgement, and if that judgement is sufficiently uniform, and it is, that’s good enough for me. I struggle to understand the context of this event that would lead to such violent behavior by five policemen, not one of whom cried Stop! Enough! I cannot find context. Five other responders are perhaps culpable and are under suspension,

I am generally supportive of policing and policemen because, in the words of the Gilbert and Sullivan song, “A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.” Police work is difficult on many fronts and in general policemen do a good job. But not here in Memphis. This is madness.

I suppose most people at some moment(s) in their lives have had a business meeting with a policeman who is going about his business of law enforcement; I certainly have. None were pleasant, perhaps not so much in fear of the policeman but by being aware of one’s own culpability. On the other hand, if the scale of danger is 1 to 10, where 10 is death, my police encounters score less than 0.001.

The reason I score the intensity of my police contact so low is because the context of my encounters, like Mr. Nichols’, are all traffic stops. However, I survived and he did not. What do you suppose was different? It’s perhaps worth mentioning that for a policeman there is no such thing as a “routine” traffic stop; each comes with potential danger. But, having said that, what could Mr. Nichols possibly have done to justify the extreme actions of those policemen and others on the scene?

The confrontation between a citizen and a policeman is not one of equals. My Dad was a mildmannered man but, in such a situation he could contribute to the escalation because he had a castiron sense of fairness and resented his minority position in such an uneven meeting. On the other hand, he always counselled me, if such situations should arise, to be calm, docile, cooperative and obedient, despite being so bad at that himself.

Apoliceman at work is prepared for battle. He is accoutered as for war, in badge and uniform and body armor and multiple weaponry and from a culture of “us vs the bad man” and enforcement and risk and perhaps entitlement and macho training. Now, in our own American culture of violence and firearms, we cannot put officers on the street without those tools to guide them and to use when the appropriate situation arises. Unfortunately, it’s too easy to turn to the baton, Taser or pistol at the slightest perceived danger whether real or not. Being a policeman is a difficult and demanding job that many officers do well and a few do badly. The latter make the national press but the many thousands of successful police interventions receive scant recognition.

There is absolutely no excuse or justification or rational for what happened to Mr. Nichols in any sensible scenario, and the officers and others involved clearly deserve all that is coming their way; I can only imagine that experienced police officers across the country feel the same way and who, while understanding the pressures of the job, cannot imagine themselves so violently assaulting a fellow human being, as far as we can tell, without provocation.

However, both parties to a confrontation have to work to avoid actions and practices that provoke violence. In connection with COVID, I have recently been told so often how to behave, that I am quite receptive to such advice. Can the CDC (or another body) come up with a simple statement of behavior, advising citizens and policemen alike how to behave, that will make a traffic stop always a survivable event?

How hard can that be? I know: much harder than drinking beer at Plainfield Station.

Reach Michael Lewis at waleslewis792@gmail.com.