Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old accused of murdering two people during the violent protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, had an altercation with the police earlier in the night – an extremely friendly one.
In footage of about 15 minutes before the shooting put together by the Visual Investigations team of the New York Times, you can see Rittenhouse driving into an armored police car and chatting with officers. A police officer jumps out of the hatch of one car and throws bottles at Rittenhouse employees, members of an armed militia. “We appreciate you, we really do,” the officer says before driving off.
The young-looking Rittenhouse is under the legal age for firearm possession and had an assault rifle, which appears to be a misdemeanor under Wisconsin law. Instead of stopping him and asking for proof of age, the police give him water and an attaboy. And when he tried to surrender after the shootings, the police went right to him, even if circumstances told her that Rittenhouse had shot people.
How can we understand this behavior? Why do the Kenosha police seem perfectly fine with armed militiamen patrolling the streets – behavior that, just minutes later, ended in two people being killed? Wouldn’t police want to be the only ones with guns?
A recent paper by sociologist Jennifer Carlson of the University of Arizona offers some insight into police behavior. She conducted dozens of hours of guns interviews with 79 police chiefs in three states – Michigan, California and Arizona – to try to better understand the way police view armed citizens.
Carlson found that police leaders tended to view armed citizens as allies, perhaps even informal deputies – provided they fit a set of race-coded descriptors.
“Police officers articulated a position of gun populism based on a suspicion of racial respectability,” Carlson writes. “‘Good guys with guns’ were branded as responsible in ways that reflected middle class white respectability.”
This helps us understand what happened in Wisconsin as not a mistake in the code of American police, but a function. There is a reason protesters against anti-police violence have met with appearances, while armed anti-lockdown protesters can threaten the Michigan Capitol without threat.
Police – who are very white, heavily masculine and overwhelmingly conservative politicians – see guns as a plague when they are in the wrong hands. But the “wrong hands” are often black and brown. As respectable seemingly white people arm themselves, police welcome their intervention – even, or perhaps especially, in an exciting situation where the potential for escalation to violence is really high.
This is not a new phenomenon; there is a long history of deeply racist gun policy in America. In 1967, a group of Black Panthers carried guns in a demonstration outside the State House in California; shortly thereafter, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a bill banning open transportation of loaded firearms.
Carlson’s study illustrates how this racial gun policy works at the level of streets such as the State House. Officers have an important insight into how they choose to respond to different situations; this judgment is often used in a racist and violent way. The way in which police seem to be encouraging Rittenhouse’s vigilantism is a microcosm of some of the most fundamental problems facing American police.
The “gun populism” of American police
In her investigation, Carlson distinguishes between two types of attitudes that police have against civilian possession of firearms.
The first, “gun militarism”, sees armed individuals as a threat to blue lives. “It promotes a state monopoly on legitimate violence, in which police both protected and extended their own access to firearms while polished and bounded weapons access among the racial, urban populations focused on the war on crime, ‘she writes.
At other times, the police officers they interviewed embraced “gun populism”: the idea that “instead of a threat to stability (as under gun militarism), armed citizens could be presented as generative for social order.” Gun populism is an “embrace of ‘the people’ and a deep suspicion of elites, especially elite legislators who aim to regulate access to weapons in the United States.” In essence, it is the National Rifle Association’s view on gun rights.
These two frames may be contradictory. How can you both believe that widespread possession of weapons poses a threat to your officers and oppose regulations that it has to restrict?
Typically, officers circumvented this dilemma by referring to legal and illegal use of firearms. The chiefs supported the throwing of the book at armed criminals, in the belief that anyone who uses a pistol on behalf of a crime should receive serious imprisonment. But gun ownership itself should be allowed and perhaps even encouraged.
But here’s the thing: When talking about criminals with weapons, the racial character of the language was unmistakable. The criminals they cared about were described as “urban terrorists”, “gangbangers”, and “illegal immigrants”; their descriptions of respectable gun owners had a very different racial valence.
“I do not worry about the people who just want an assault weapon for hell, or a military guy who had an M16 and wants one, because it reminds him of his old gun,” said one of the California Police Department. “I worry about the gangster who brings in guns and then it gets into the hands of people who hate America.”
This division, between minority-coded bad boys and presumably white good boys, led leaders to a generally positive view of civilian gun owners who did not fit their criminal stereotypes. In Michigan, which borders Wisconsin and has similar gun laws, police officers embraced a vision of gun populism that civilian gun owners saw as their allies.
“Michigan chiefs insisted that even the best-equipped police officers could not protect all victims and therefore chose to extend some privileges to private citizens as part of their overall crime-fighting mission,” Carlson writes. “They understood the capacity among citizens for private legitimized violence in addition to publicly legitimized violence.”
A remark by one Michigan police chief who works in a majority-white neighborhood crystallized sentiment.
“I believe that citizens should be able to protect themselves. We can not protect them – we just can not. It’s impossible, ‘said the chef. “The government can not save people from danger. That’s just ridiculous. That people might be allowed to defend themselves. ”
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However, as with all forms of right-wing populism, the real action lies in the definition of ‘the people’. Certain types of people are often seen as legitimate judges, as people who presumably deserve the benefit of the doubt when carrying weapons.
Others do not. And that’s where things get dicey.
How “gun populism” helps us understand the police response in Wisconsin
In November 2014, Cleveland police officers shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was Black, out of range. The police, who had described Rice as “maybe 20” on the radio, claimed they were scared for their lives because he had a “black revolver”. It was actually a toy gun.
The contrast between the treatment of Rice and Rittenhouse could not be clearer. Rice scanned to the police as a threat, despite a child with a toy gun. Rittenhouse, a teenager with a real gun, did not.
Now Cleveland and Kenosha are different places with different police owners; there are many reasons why the end of these two stories was not the same. But there’s enough reason to believe that the mental shortcuts and stereotypes officers have about what types of people are threatened with guns really influence the way they treat people – whether they are standard on ‘gun militarism’ or ‘gun populism’ in the way they treat an armed citizen.
The reasons are rooted in basic human psychology. Police officers work long hours a hard job, called to handle responsibilities, ranging from mental health intervention to resolving spousal disputes. While on shift, they are constantly apprehensive and look for the next threat as a potential arrest.
Stress gets themselves off the job; PTSD and marital strife are often problems. It’s a kind of negative feedback loop: The job makes them anxious and nervous, which damages their mental health and personal relationships, which increases their overall level of stress and makes the job even more stressful.
According to Phillip Atiba Goff, a psychologist at John Jay College and the CEO of the think tank Center for Policing Equity, it is difficult to overstate how much more likely people are to be racist under these circumstances. When you put people under stress, he said, they tend to make snap judgments that are rooted in their basic instincts. For police officers, raised in a racist society and socialized in a violent work environment, that racist behavior makes everything but inevitable.
“The mission and practice of policing is inconsistent with what we know about how people can keep people from acting on the kinds of implicit prejudices and mental shortcuts,” he says. ‘You can design a job where it is not how it works. We did not choose to do that for police. “
American police have a distinctive culture and ideology: a set of attitudes and prejudices that shape the way they treat citizens. “Gun populism” is one part of that ideology. And in Kenosha, it seems to be influencing their decision-making – apparently leading to encouraging a minor gun owner to go into a dangerous situation, with predictable and tragic results.
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