The Atlantic: Asking America’s Police Officers to Explain Abusive Cops

The Atlantic: Asking America’s Police Officers to Explain Abusive Cops by Conor Friedersdorf:

Revisiting the story of a man arrested at his job for “trespassing”—and the cops who paid no price for wrongly detaining him dozens of times.

The radio show This American Life recently broadcast a number of stories on policing. They’re collected in the episodes “Cops See It Differently,” Part One and Part Two.

The episodes illuminate why police and their critics often see the same events very differently. For example, one anecdote concerns a man in the back of a police car who told his arresting officers that he was having trouble breathing. They ignored him. He died. Many who watched the video saw callous cops who placed no value on a human being’s life. But police officers who watched the same tape saw two cops who thought that their seemingly healthy arrestee was faking, as so many people fabricate medical conditions to avoid being taken to jail.

These differences in perspective are useful to understand, even if one believes that a given incident is clearly the fault of the police or the person they’re arresting.

In that spirit, I’d like to focus on “Inconvenience Store,” the This American Life segment where the behavior of the police officers struck me as most difficult to comprehend. I’ll relay what happened to a man named Earl Sampson in Miami Gardens, Florida, and invite any willing police officers to write in with their thoughts.