A Blow for Law and Order

My friend, Brian Thiem, is a retired Oakland cop. These days, he writes crime fiction. The Mud Flats Murder Club, his new book, came out last week. His publisher is the same company who released The Devil’s Kitchen, my debut novel. Since we’re roughly on the same publication schedule with our works-in-progress, we email frequently, a support group of two.

            Normally, the email exchange consists of fantasies about seeing Thielman alongside Thiem on the Edgar’s stage or in a bookstore. Brad Thor may have to slide down a few inches to make room. I think of our emails as typical author porn fantasies.

            Last week, our conversation went in a different direction. In my day job, I had read an affidavit where the police officer wrote that because of the actions of the defendant, the officer deployed a “balance displacement technique.”

            The phrase stopped me cold. I had a couple of thoughts.

            First, I might refer to all my future editing as a “vocabulary displacement technique.”

            Secondly, something prevented the officer from simply saying, “I tripped her.”

            I reached out to Retired Officer Thiem for his reaction. He proposed that the author must be old school. Reports used to be written in third person, giving them an excessively formal tone.

Old School: “The reporting officer arrived on scene, exited his patrol vehicle, and observed…”

New School: “I arrived at the scene and saw…”

The New School teaches first person narratives written in plain English.

As a former training officer, he recommended that the guy be sent back to the academy for some remedial report writing.

Then, Brian advanced an alternative hypothesis. We may be seeing a tactical use of jargon and obfuscation to avoid criticism, Brian suggested. An officer writing that he tripped someone sounds like the officer deployed a combat skill stolen from a fourth-grade class. Writing that “I executed a leg sweep to initiate a controlled fall,” or a “balance displacement technique” both appear to be procedures of a law enforcement professional.

Another piece of jargon I frequently see is “distractionary strikes.” The phrase usually shows up in police reports as “I struck the defendant in the face with my fist as a distractionary strike.”

As I understand it, the term was originally devised to describe a strike or push to divert the suspect’s attention and allow the officer sufficient time and space to move to another technique for executing the arrest. The officer, for instance, pushed the suspect back, allowing a moment to pull handcuffs and grasp an arm.

The usage, however, has broadened. Officers assign the nomenclature of diversion or distraction to justify the action of throwing a punch.

As first an assistant district attorney and then a magistrate, I sit in a sanitized office after an event and make judgments. I freely admit to not being on scene in the moment. I recognize that policing operates in a dangerous environment, and I want officers in the field to be safe. But the language of distraction, I think, interferes with a broader discussion about non-lethal force. I frequently see the phrase deployed first without any discussion of why a distraction was called for. Eliminating the phrase, might enable a better a better societal conversation on the topic of arrest violence.

I floated the idea by Brian. As an experienced officer, he agreed with both the concept of the distractionary strike and, perhaps, the need to remove the phrase from the police vocabulary.

I could paraphrase his comments on the topic, but Brian’s a writer. I’ll let him do speak for himself.

As a sergeant and lieutenant, I reviewed many reports written by officers to explain/justify their use of force. In my experience, the vast majority of these uses of force were justified, but they often needed to be explained more clearly in their reports.

            For instance, an officer approaches the driver’s door on a vehicle stop. He asks for the driver’s license and registration, and the driver says he has no license or other ID. In most states, that is cause for a physical arrest. Once the officer arrests the driver and places him in the back of his car, the officer may then take additional steps to identify him and write him a citation. The proper procedure is to secure the driver while doing so. The officer orders the man to exit his car, but the officer sees the man reaching under his seat. Not knowing what the man is reaching for, the officer may distract him by striking him in the face with his closed left fist, then step back, and draw his gun.

To lay people, this might seem like excessive force, but if the officer explains he feared the driver was reaching for a weapon instead of obeying his order, and he struck him to distract him from his actions, as a supervisor, I would feel the action was justified.

Of course, it would help if there was a knife or gun on the floor under the seat, but to expect an officer not to react until he saw a weapon would be unreasonable for the safety of the officer.

It’s possible, I think, to see this issue from two points of view. As citizens, considering both enables us to be better informed. As crime writers, seeing the world through another’s eyes helps us convey a realistic scene to readers.

Until next time.