When I was studying philosophy in college a professor I respected said that if you’re not upsetting at least a few people, you’re not discussing the right topics or exposing your real honest views. Having not been yelled at in a while, I think it would be a growth exercise to talk about this youtube video that popped up on my feed: [ BODYCAM: PIPE BOMB blows up during routine traffic stop. ] It’s 12 minutes long and you can probably speed it up a bit but need to watch the whole thing.
A quick content warning: The title is accurate. No one is seriously injured and there’s no blood or injuries shown on screen so I think this video is probably safe for most people, but if you’re not comfortable with policing, traffic stops, or near-death experiences, skip the watch and perhaps this blog post too.
I am not a simple caricature of a political position. I’m a real person with beliefs that overlap in complex ways. I have a background in emergency response - for over 20 years as a rescue specialist and volunteer EMT I’ve worked with police. I’ve met great ones and I’ve met terrible ones; genuinely wonderful and moral ones as well as racist ones. I have peripheral experience with policing but I am not a officer, I don’t truly understand policing from experience, and my last ‘street’ EMS gigs were in years that began with a 19. I was also raised by conservative parents from the midwest, during the Reagan years, to have a healthy respect for the freedoms our country promises and the need to defend those freedoms against government overreach.
I am pro-police reform, to an extent. I believe modern policing has many problems to fix. Some of these are because the police are asked to do way too much and aren’t trained for all those roles. I also know that some officers themselves can be biased, unfair and criminal but the system will protect them anyway, making it really tough for the good officers to weed out the bad or burnt-out ones.
I am fairly libertarian. I believe that if you’re minding your own business and not hurting anyone, people shouldn’t bother you and that includes the state. Things like owning a gun, responsibly carrying a concealed one, and consuming marijuana shouldn’t be things that the state can bother you for in the first place. Because ‘libertarian’ is also a political party with specific positions on many things I might not agree with, I will clarify here that I mean libertarian as a general life outlook, not as an alignment with a particular party or any of the positions that party holds.
I am personally familiar with emergency response. I have experienced decision-making in a pinch, without all the facts available, and the need to make calls that keep yourself and others safe. I understand that there are evil people doing evil things and that emergency responders of all stripes, police included, for the most part just want to be the good people doing good things - and that doing this right every time is extremely difficult, and honest mistakes will be made.
It begins with a traffic stop and by 01:30 in the video, the suspect is already openly lying to the officer, who can smell drugs in the car and who already knows that there is a gun on the seat next to the suspect. Despite these things, he allows the suspect to sit in the truck next to his gun and doesn’t take it away.
At 5:22 after searching the suspect, the officer asks “Can you stand in front of the truck?”. Despite this, the suspect doesn’t initially do as asked and stands near the bed of the truck, inside which any number of weapons could be hidden. The officer turns his back on the suspect to search the truck before again asking him to go to the front of the truck.
At 06:55 the officer finds a meth pipe with residue in the same compartment of the truck as the rest of the drugs. The suspect is once again given the opportunity to explain and ‘come clean’ about other things, after being caught in his 5th lie or so in the last 5 minutes. The officer then continues to search the car.
At 08:30, the officer picks up a pipe with caps on either end, wrapped in tape. Hindsight is 20/20 and we likely are primed to recognize this as a pipe bomb because the title of the YouTube video we’re watching in the comfort of our homes says it’s one. Who knows what the officer was thinking in the field? Per an officer I know, “Meth-heads are known to have lots of garbage and crap in their cars, the officer was likely not thinking about IEDs at the moment.” Still, it’s hard not to notice that the pipe bomb looks like the front of an EMS training brochure titled “How to recognize an IED”.
Responder reaction: This is likely a reflection of how police in the field don’t get enough training. While Fire and EMS practitioners are subject to regular, thorough training and retraining to meet minimum standards of competency, a lot of police departments aren’t. Continuing education is short and may be limited to firearms re-training. Among the policing reform efforts I’d be down for, actually increasing training budgets should be on the table.
Personal reaction: Spending ever increasing amounts of money on policing isn’t going to reduce the number of meth addicts driving around causing chaos - putting budget into social services might! Those increased training budgets above can be balanced by ending pointless policing efforts such as marijuana prohibition, freeing up a lot of officer time and resources and potentially saving some budget for those social services we need.
At 08:46 the device explodes in the officer’s face, producing white smoke and a small shockwave. The officer quickly retreats back to his vehicle, allowing the suspect to remain unrestrained at the vehicle.
For the next 20 seconds, the officer seems to run aimlessly back and forth while coughing and allowing the suspect free action to do whatever he wants in the cab of the truck, where at least one bomb and a gun are known to be.
At 09:55, more than a minute after the IED explodes, the officer finally handcuffs the suspect. Although he is having difficulty breathing, the officer does not seem to have called for EMS for himself. He turns the scene over to another officer, who has finally arrived, and the video ends with the first officer coughing and attempting to flush out his eyes and mouth.
Responder perspective: This officer seemed to be trying to get killed, and provided about a half-dozen opportunities for the suspect to do so. It’s a miracle that he survived this encounter and in the future, he should be much quicker to disarm and control suspects in similar situations, even at the expense of erring too much on the side of detaining innocent people and making them uncomfortable. A hundred people may be inconvenienced a bit by the cuffs, but it only takes that one pipe bomb to end your career and life, and possibly those of bystanders too!
Personal perspective: The officer was right to begin treating this guy with respect and not being a hardass right off the bat about some empty baggies and a weed roach, but began getting a little too deferential after the suspect kept lying to his face. Whether we should overlook the drugs or not depends on where you draw the line on prohibition, but the pipe bomb in the truck is definitely a line that’s been crossed. At any rate, it seems likely that the officer let his guard down due to this man’s affable demeanor, and the man may have ended up in cuffs much sooner if he’d refused the vehicle search or questioned the nature of the traffic stop. People should not be treated worse by police for asserting their rights.
Whether the officer should be this deferential to all suspects, or should have had this man in cuffs from about the 4 minute mark, the main consideration is consistency. People shouldn’t be treated differently during traffic stops based on how likable or affable they come across, or whether or not they’re asserting their rights to the annoyance of the officer.
Unfortunately, these two pieces of me often argue with one another and there’s no easy “What the officer should have done” answer that I think I can give. If you watched the video, what’s your takeaway?