Catholic moral
theologian—and former police officer—Tobias Winright offers his insight on when
the use of lethal force by police in the line of duty is justified.
The shooting of Walter Scott by South Carolina police
officer Michael Slager is just the latest in an ongoing string of police
shootings that have dominated headlines in recent months. The death of Michael
Brown in Ferguson last year and subsequent incidents around the country have
cast doubts among many in the public about the use of police force.
Tobias Winright has been outspoken about ethical concerns in
policing, but Winright approaches the issue from a different perspective than
other moral theologians. Winright was raised in a police family, with both his
mother and stepfather serving in the line of duty, and Winright himself wore a
badge while working his way through college. Now the Hubert Mäder Endowed Chair of Health Care Ethics at
Saint Louis University’s Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics, Winright
has become an authoritative voice on the problems resulting from the transition
in recent decades in the United States from a community-oriented model of
policing to a more militarized approach.
U.S. Catholic spoke
with Winright about his background in policing and his thoughts on the use of
police force in the Walter Scott shooting and other recent cases. (Our full
interview with Winright on changes in policing appears in the April
2015 issue of U.S. Catholic.)
How exactly did you
get involved in policing?
My mother got a job with a local city police department in
Florida in 1980, a few years after Angie Dickinson played a policewoman on TV.
She started in patrol, transferred to the sheriff’s department doing the same,
and later became a detective, working in the crimes against children unit
before going into homicide. She was also a hostage negotiator. During that time
she married someone from the sheriff’s department, who was a sergeant, worked
in patrol, and flew one of the department’s helicopters.
I'm the oldest of four boys and I always wanted to go
university. I'm the first and only person in my immediate family who went to
college at all. When I graduated from high school, I started at Saint
Petersburg Junior College (now Saint Petersburg College) and I applied to
police departments in order to work my way through school. In 1984 I got hired
by the same department where my mom and stepfather worked.
After earning my associate’s degree, I subsequently transferred
to University of South Florida in Saint Petersburg, and I worked full time
mostly during the midnight shift. I was a corrections officer in the maximum
security jail there. I could do a little bit of reading during downtime, and I
did that for a little bit over four years. I resigned not long after graduating
and then went to Duke Divinity School to study for a master’s degree in
theology.
Did the work you were
doing influence your studies?
I studied political science as an undergraduate, and I was
interested in international relations, but also found myself fascinated by the
writings of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. I was thinking about law
school, and part of me considered ordained ministry, but I became more and more
interested in ethics and questions about the use of force.
When I wore a badge, I asked myself, would I really shoot
someone to kill him if I had to? I'm a cradle Catholic, and in addition to
considering law school, I toyed with the possibility of ordained ministry. So,
I started thinking about what Jesus would do. And that question really occupied
me, which is one of the reasons I focused on it during graduate school at Duke
and then at Notre Dame, where I could study theological ethics, bringing all of
these areas of interest together for me.
How should police deal
with a situation where they need to use force?
It goes back to that community policing model. You have an
offender, but your job as an officer is not to punish that person. The rest of
the criminal justice system (courts, prisons) are responsible for that. The
police are supposed to apprehend him, but hopefully you're going to do it in a
way that's going to not inhibit or interfere with the prospect of that person’s
restoration to the community at some point.
Obviously, if lethal force is necessary—and I think it might be
under very limited conditions, when somebody's life is really, seriously at
risk—you can't restore that person. That's a very last resort, and killing
someone is obviously irreversible. The use of force is supposed to be
proportionate to the gravity of the alleged offense, so deadly force is now
justified only under circumstances where it is in “defense of life”—that is, to
protect the life of the officer or of another person from a grave and imminent
threat posed by a suspect. It seems to me that some of the incidents where
lethal force has been used recently by police may not be congruent with these
criteria.
What are your thoughts
on the shooting of Walter Scott in South Carolina?
The shooting of Walter Scott by Michael Slager, a North
Charleston, South Carolina police officer, appears very problematic to me
morally and, perhaps, legally. Ever since the Supreme Court’s 1985 decision in Tennessee v. Garner, police use of
lethal force has been restricted to where “it is necessary to prevent…escape
and the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a
significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or
others.”
Prior to that, police could use deadly force to shoot at any
fleeing felon, because once upon a time that category of “felon” referred to
fewer grave offences than today, but many of which were capital crimes,
punishable by death anyway. That has changed. The life of even an offender who
commits grand theft auto weighs more, proportionately, than the property
stolen. A preemptive “execution” of that offender by the police officer is
disproportionate to the gravity of the crime the offender committed. So now
lethal force by police has been narrowed significantly, where it is almost at
where the Catholic teaching on deadly force (self-defense, death penalty, just
war) is referred to in recent teaching, like the Catechism, as “legitimate
defense of persons and societies” (2263).
Walter Scott was fleeing from Officer Slager. It does not look
like he was posing a “significant threat of death or serious physical injury to
the officer or others.” However, just before he attempted to flee, he allegedly
struggled with Officer Slager and took the taser that the officer tried
(unsuccessfully) to use against him. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the Garner ruling was still a bit unclear about
whether a police officer might be allowed to use lethal force in order to stop
a suspect who had posed a serious threat during the offense committed, but
perhaps no longer does so while fleeing.
The thinking here is that if a suspect posed such a threat this
time, he is likely to do so again in the future, so shooting him is therefore
justified to prevent that from happening. This will probably be what Slager
will claim. Even though Scott was unarmed, he allegedly wrestled the taser from
Slager and thereby posed a serious threat to him, meaning he might do so again
if he gets away. That Slager apparently went back to pick up the taser and then
dropped it near Scott’s body casts a lot of doubt on his account, though.
Police are not supposed to tamper with a crime scene like that. Still, I think
this area of ambiguity in the Garner decision needs to be addressed. For me,
the threat that Scott might pose in the future, even if it is more than only possible,
is still speculative; whereas shooting him in the back several times and
thereby killing him seems certain. On which side shall we as a society, ifGarner is revisited, rather err?
Are police are trained
to shoot to kill?
The police are taught to shoot “center mass.” Why? In the Des
Moines Police Academy where I taught ethics while I was a reserve police
officer—and this wasn't even me teaching, it was another academy
instructor—recruits are taught that one’s intent is not to kill. His or her
intent is to stop the other person from killing the police officer or someone
else. What's the most likely way of doing that? Aiming for the center part of
the suspect.
Why not aim for the
leg to stop them without killing them?
Shooting is difficult. I never had to use lethal force, but even
in training it's hard. Your adrenaline is up. It's not like in movies or TV. I
could never, unless I was totally lucky, shoot a gun out of somebody's hand or
shoot them in the leg or the foot. With a pistol, that's almost impossible.
Police aim for the suspect’s center area to increase the
likelihood of actually hitting the person and stopping them from killing
somebody else. Shooting at a leg is more likely to miss, and it might not stop
the suspect. It also increases the likelihood of hitting somebody else, sort of
like “collateral damage.” Most police departments don't even allow for warning
shots anymore because of our denser populations—what goes up comes down, and
you might hit an innocent bystander somewhere.
It's sort of like what Thomas Aquinas said with regard to
personal self‑defense. The intent is not to kill; it's to stop the person. The
primary effect is stopping the person from killing you or someone else, but the
secondary effect is that they die. That's not your intent, even though it is
foreseen. If you could stop them in any other way, you would, but this was the
only way to do so. In the Catholic moral tradition, this framework is known as
the principle of double effect.
That's actually how police are taught. That's different than the
approach of soldiers at Fort Benning, where I once trained when I was in ROTC
as an undergraduate, or troops carrying a bayonet and yelling, “Kill, kill,
kill!” I don't know a police department that's doing that. They’d better not be.
For a sniper, the only way to stop somebody might be to do a
head shot, but they’ve got their scope. The vast majority of police on the
streets don't carry a rifle with a scope. That's why they're taught not to kill
but to shoot center. I don't even like the phrase "center mass."
You're dealing with a human being, not an object.
Recent news stories
like the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the death of Eric Garner in
New York have raised serious questions about the relationship between race and
police force. Do you think race plays a part in how police are using force?
I've seen references to studies that indicate these shootings
occur more to people of color than to white people. I know people dispute that,
too, and talk about black‑on‑black crime. There're a lot of elements to this
that can muddy the waters, but I don't think that there's any denying that the
sense among those of color is that something is wrong.
When these cases occurred in Ferguson and then New York, the
communities obviously felt something was wrong, that there’s a sense of
injustice that’s been percolating there. Not just with policing, I think, but
that is the most manifest, visible symptom of it. These incidents have really
forced us to not be in denial about it but to face it and to address it.
Addressing policing is only one part of it.
How can police begin
to address the systemic issues involving race?
Police in these communities should themselves come from the
community. There was a story in the St. Louis news that one of the police
departments near Ferguson had a mini-academy for high school kids. The number
of kids this year tripled from last year, mostly children of color. That’s what
the department was encouraging.
These
children might want to become a part of a program where they can ride along
with an officer and learn what policing is like. Some departments even have a
cadet program. Maybe the local community college could say, "You get a
tuition break or a cut, reduction, if you do well in school and, you’ll be a part
of this cadet program." Start giving avenues for these departments to
become more representative of the communities that they're policing. That will
help a lot.
