Alabama Police Officers on firing line over beating after high speed chase

CNN's story is here. Much of the press in addition to CNN's coverage all seems to be about how police officers went over the line and beat a suspect who was unconscious at the time. Not surprisingly, this kind of story is common, and almost always the press treats it the same way: Shocked horror that police officers could be so callous and cruel in their actions to a citizen.

Yet, something always seems to be missing from the coverage. And I don't mean the opposite reaction, which is usually "the suspect had it coming because he/she should not have been resisting police like that" or something similar. And then the accusations go back and forth as both sides try to leverage some kind of higher moral ground over the other. No, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something different that is missing.

And that's variable context. What I mean is other variables that aren't being considered in the bigger picture so that the issue doesn't always have to fall into the common camps of disagreement over a story like this one. I mean, it's a common issue, and it happens all of the time. Yet, the arguments wage almost on autopilot, as if the details aren't necessary. The argument is all that is required.

That's where I disagree. If we backtrack to a couple of other incidents, like an obscure one in Clay County of Missouri where a Kearney deputy was caught on camera beating a DUI suspect who led the deputy on a high speed chase. Does this incident sound familiar? It should if you just observed the Birmingham one that prompted this article.

Well, let's go back to a famous one, which is the Rodney King beating. We should all remember that incident where Rodney King was chased by a husband and wife Highway Patrol team that led to a brutal beating that was only discovered because a bystander happened to catch it all on film. This led to a huge riot after the exoneration of the officers by a jury of their peers. This also led to the infamous exclaim by Rodney King during the riot when he questioned, "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along?"

The reason I mention these incidents is not to rehash the whole idea of police brutality or suspect culpability but to point out the common variable in all of these circumstances. One variable seems to be a DUI factor, although the latest case in Birmingham is more of a drug involvement case rather than DUI involvement. This leaves one very important variable that is rarely discussed and that's the concept of excitation transfer theory.

Excitation transfer theory is one of those simple to understand communication/psychology concepts that occurs when someone has sustained some type of emotional impetus that remains in the person's body long enough to transfer over to the next emotional state the person finds himself/herself in. In the cases of a car chase, the excitation is the chase itself, where adrenalin rises, causing the person to become excited and agitated. Then when the suspect is caught, the excitation is still there, so it gets transferred to other actions, and quite often those other actions happen to emerge as a continuous beating.

A person in an emotionally detached manner would arrive at the apprehension state with faculties at full, yet an excited person would arrive ready to utilize this extra adrenalin that has been building up for actual use. And therefore, the beating occurs.

What is important here is that we in science already understand the condition a police officer is in at this point of the altercation, yet we never seem to do anything about it. A couple of years ago, the Chicago Police Department announced they were going to put tighter limits on police car chases. Unfortunately, public opinion has practically ended that from happening because it makes a police agency look weak if it announces it is going to let criminals go free rather than chase them.

The problem is that we have a no win situation because police officers are tasked with the obligation of getting the job done, but in order to do so, we put them into a situation that requires they subject themselves to an influence that leaves them vulnerable to natural passions. So what is the answer to this problem?

Well, better training is always used as the throw away response, but it is actually a viable answer. If police officers can be trained to recognize this excitation impulse within themselves, perhaps they might curtail it before it becomes an actual problem in the field. It might also help other officers recognize it in their fellow officers to keep them from making critical mistakes that might jeopardize careers and threaten the lives of citizens.

Other alternatives are those that Chicago was starting to recognize. They realized that there was a problem occurring, and it was more than just how police responded. Quite often, these car chases lead to accidents and death of officers, suspects and innocent civilians. None of those are ever to be desired by a police agency that is working in the best interests of everyone involved.

What does need to be done is an elimination of the usual suspects response that we always seem to get. There are more problems than the common responses, and unfortunately as long as these types of incidents yield only stereotypical responses, the problem will never go away, and we will continue to have to deal with the ramifications over and over again.

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