Compare and contrast the following recent police encounters. In the first, a man who was reportedly behaving in a hostile and erratic manner rams his SUV into a police car before they have a chance to pull him over. He leads a second police car on a chase before ramming into a third police vehicle. He backs up the SUV and rams it a second time before being blocked in by the car behind him. The man continues to fight the police as they attempt to get him out of the SUV and is eventually tasered and arrested.
In the second case, a woman in a minivan with five kids on board as passengers are pulled over for going 71 in a 55 mph zone. She argues with the police over the ticket and drives off but is pulled over again shortly after. A police officer tries to pull the kids out of the van before being rushed by the driver’s 14 year son who is tasered. The officer begins smashing the van’s windows with his baton as backup arrives. The woman attempts to flee again and an officer fires three shots at her van. She leads the police on a chase before surrendering in front of a hotel.
There’s a number of different factors behind the approaches taken by the police in the two cases, but one can’t help but wonder if race and class may have played a part in the way the respective drivers were treated. The first case took place in Oregon and the driver was Dave Dahl, a white man and founder of a local bread company. The police knew who he was because they received a call from someone believing he was off his medication and suffering from a mental breakdown. Whether Oregon police are better trained and/or afraid of getting sued, they demonstrated that police can effectively stop potentially dangerous reckless drivers without resorting to guns.
In the second case the driver was Oriana Ferrell, a black woman from Memphis on vacation with her kids. Though she didn’t deal with the situation in the wisest manner, she was not trying to ram the police and the police officers were also at fault for escalating the situation. Because she was stopped in an isolated area and was no doubt aware of the reality of institutional racism, she may have felt a need to flee for the safety of her family. Such fear appears to have been justified by documented police actions such as shooting at her van full of kids.
Dash-cam footage of the incident:
Poor training and systemic corruption may also have been a factor. Just ten days after Ferrell and her family’s near-death experience, a New Mexico police officer shot and killed a woman after a high speed pursuit.
You can more about the contrasting police encounters here:
After the Crash 