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znModeratorFormer NFL quarterbacks and experts explain what makes Rams’ Matthew Stafford great
By SAM FARMER
In preparing this week for a Q&A with new Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford, I talked to some of the people who know him and his position best.
These people did not comment in the Q&A, a Los Angeles Times exclusive — it was with Stafford alone — but their observations and insights are worth noting.
Thought it would be interesting to open the notebook and reveal some of the things they shared.
Documented are quotes from five former NFL quarterbacks: Rich Gannon, Troy Aikman, Archie Manning, as well as onetime Stafford backups Dan Orlovsky and Drew Stanton. Also quoted is Adam Dedeaux, Stafford’s throwing coach.
Rich Gannon
“I don’t think he gets enough credit for his arm talent. I mean he makes some ridiculous throws, especially out-breaking routes, ball’s outside the number from the far hash. He throws the deep ball really well, he’s very accurate. Can change the launch point, he’s got pretty good pocket presence. He can fly, he can reset, he can shuffle. He can extend plays, maybe not to the extent that you see from like a [Patrick] Mahomes or [Aaron] Rodgers with that explosiveness, but he’s certainly better than average when it comes to that.
“I think part of it with him, and I don’t want to be too critical of the Lions, but you go back and look at the times he’s been sacked in his career, like each season. It’s like in a 35, 40 range every year, you know what I mean? And that takes its toll, so the protection always hasn’t been good. The offensive line has been very inconsistent. They tried to address it in recent years, they go out and get
Ragnow, and they try and get a tackle a couple years ago. I mean they’re trying. But then who was the running back, and then who are the receivers? They went out and got a tight end. But I think Stafford has done more with less. And then at defense, it’s been never like they’ve had a dominant defense on that side of the ball. So it’s like you got to go out and score 30 points to be competitive each week.
“I look at his toughness and durability, that’s the other thing. I think he went through a stretch where it’s six or seven seasons where he played every game [eight, actually]. He’s a tough guy, doesn’t miss starts. He’ll sit in the pocket with a tough jaw, very accurate.
“And the knock on him is, when you look at what happened in Detroit, he just didn’t win. In our business, we get judged based on the wins and losses, and unfortunately for him, there’s been more losses than wins in his career. And so there’s a certain negativity that comes with that, but anyone who really looks and evaluates the position. … When I saw the Rams make that move, I’m like, they just got better, like a lot better.”
On the combination of Stafford and Rams coach Sean McVay:
“Matthew’s got someone that he can grow with, someone that’s going to help him, someone who’s going to put together a really good game plan, someone who’s going to support him with a good running game. They’re a good screen team. They get the ball out quick. I think it’s an offense that’ll fit his skill set. I think he’s going to have more weapons, more firepower, he’s going to have a better offensive line.
“You look at Sean and you look at Matthew. … I see some similarities to when I went to Oakland with Jon Gruden. I was at a point where I had bounced around a little bit and no one ever really. … I mean it’s different; he was the No. 1 draft pick and I kind of had to find my way. But he’s going to a situation where he’s a got a young head coach who’s a really good play caller, very innovative, really involved in coaching that position. And that’s where Jon was with me, and we just hit it off. We never looked back.
“I think Matthew is going to buy in and be all invested and be there and be that leader. It’s not going to take Matthew Stafford a season to take ownership of that team. The minute he walks in the building, that’s going to happen.”
On a fresh start for Stafford and the Rams:
“So I think it’s a really good situation. I think it’s a win-win situation for the Rams, I think it’s a win for Matthew. I think it was time for a change. At some point you get beaten down so long in a city where it’s almost like playing in Cleveland all those years or playing in Detroit and in Jacksonville, where he just … it’s hard to win eight games.
“And it’s hard to be competitive. Then you look at that division and you got the Vikings and you’ve got the Packers, and the Packers went from [Brett] Favre to Rodgers. If you’re Matthew Stafford, that’s who you’re competing against every couple weeks. And you got some good defenses in that division: Chicago and Minnesota. So I give the guy a lot of credit for surviving and for overcoming what was not an easy situation.”
Troy Aikman
On the first time he’d heard of Stafford:
“When he was going into his senior year at Highland Park, I happened to be at Starbucks here in Highland Park Village right where I live and where he grew up. Someone said to me, ‘Hey, have you seen Matthew Stafford? Have you seen him play?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t. Who’s Matthew Stafford?’ I had just kind of moved down to this area, and they said, ‘Well, he’s the No. 1 quarterback and the No. 1 recruit out of high school. He’s a senior at Highland Park.’ And I said, ‘Really? I haven’t heard of him. I need to let UCLA know.’ And they said, ‘Oh, he’s already committed to Georgia.’ I said, “Georgia?’ and thought, ‘Wow.’ ”
On a meal with him before the draft:
“I was having dinner and I asked him, ‘So how do you feel about going to Detroit? I mean, if Detroit takes you with the No. 1 pick, which in all likelihood, that’s what’s going to happen, how do you feel about that?’ It’s always something I’ve remembered because he really wanted to go to Detroit. It wasn’t one of those things where he was thinking, ‘I mean, not ideal, but they have the No. 1 pick.’ I know they’ve had their problems because they weren’t very good and they hadn’t been very good, and it’d been such a long time. But he was just totally locked in that he wanted to go to Detroit and really create, I don’t want to say a legacy, but he wanted to be a big reason as to why that franchise got good again.
“He went there for all the right reasons. He gave it everything he had. And I’m disappointed for him that with all the success that he did enjoy personally, that the team didn’t enjoy more success around him, because I know it was really important to him.”
Does scar tissue build up after all that losing?:
“Yeah. I certainly lost my share in Dallas on the front end and the back end, but I didn’t go through it for an extremely long stretch like he has. I can only imagine how difficult it would become as you get older, to be optimistic and positive going into each season. And so I would say yes.
“This will be a different experience for him. I mean, I think there has been years where there have been expectations for Detroit, but by and large, there hasn’t been. By and large, the Lions have not been a factor in our league. I mean, it’s just what it is. And there’s been a lot of coaching changes as we know, and it hasn’t gone as well as Matthew would like, or that anyone would like. And that’s why there has been so much turnover.
“Now you’re going to an organization that it’s not about being a winning football team, it’s about winning a Super Bowl. This will be the first time Matthew’s felt that. I mean, he hasn’t been on a team that’s gone into the season expecting to be in the Super Bowl or to be a contender in the Super Bowl. He won’t cower to that.”
On his expectations for Stafford and the Rams this season:
“I know Matthew well. I love the guy. I think he’s terrific. And I think he’s going to play his best football this year. I really do. I think for him to get to work with Sean McVay and that offense, I really expect Matthew to have his best season of his career. Wouldn’t shock me at all if he’s the MVP of the league.
“But with that being said, there are expectations … and he knows it. And that’s what he wants. I mean, that’s what he’s been dreaming of. That’s what he’s wanted the whole time he’s been in Detroit: he’s wanted to be on a contender. And at the end of the day, that’s how you make your mark. And so I’m excited for him and this opportunity that he has.”
Adam Dedeaux
“In my conversations with him, there’s no doubt that he is an intellect. I think he enjoys being challenged in that way and challenged with thought process, and he never makes anything seem too difficult when it comes to that stuff. I think he has a way of simplifying things. I think that’s his Texas brain, being very bright, but being able to look at things and just seeing it in its simplest form. I don’t think he gets overwhelmed easily.
“He’s able to break things down pretty quickly. He’s had multiple coordinators over the years. I’ve watched him take on new challenges of, we changed this footwork a couple of years ago before the ’19 season, and that was a fun challenge for him. And it was like, within a day or two, he was already making it look comfortable as if he had been doing it forever, and that’s not normal. Sometimes, it takes guys longer, but he’s able to be like, ‘All right. Feel it. Got it. I understand it. Give me the why’s, and I’m in.’ ”
Dan Orlovsky
“Matthew has this ability in every single room that he enters, every situation that he’s in, he’s completely aware that he’s the guy, he is the man in that room, that airplane, that hotel. But then he’s got this great ability to be just a guy, one of the crew. That’s a very unique perspective to have, the ability to be two people at once.”
Drew Stanton
“He has this quiet confidence about him, that he doesn’t need to tell people how good he is, he doesn’t need to tweet out anything, he doesn’t need to be on Instagram, he doesn’t need to do any of that. He’s very confident and comfortable in his own skin and people sometimes misconstrue that confidence and comfort as being complacent or too laid back or not a leader or all these things. And I think strategically he is so good.
“That’s one thing that I’ve always tried to take away from people and watch people how they operate are like, okay, you only lead if people follow you. In the truest definition, the most important part about leadership is ‘followship.’ If nobody’s following you, you’re not a leader even if you think you are. You can beat your chest all you want, but people follow Matthew into the fire.”
On how Stafford compares to another No. 1 pick, Carson Palmer, backed up by Stanton in Arizona:
“He is very much like Carson. You know Carson. Carson doesn’t care what other people say about him. He’s going to operate how he operates. There’s a little bit different dynamic and components, but they are guys that you want leading your organization because they’re leading from within. They’ll step out front, they take the blame when they need to, they’re not going to give you any soundbites that you’re going to be sitting up there writing about doing anything. There’s a sense of professionalism that goes along with both of them, without a doubt.”
Archie Manning
On Manning Passing Academy:
People ask me about the college quarterbacks I bring in. They’re coaching mostly, but they work out. They’re not throwing against coverage, they’re just throw it to receivers, throw it around. To me, Matthew had the most impressive arm of anybody we’ve ever had.
“Yep. I thought so. I mean, he just, he can really sling it. JaMarcus Russell threw some, well he kind of stood out. It looked like a Jugs machine when he’d throw a deep ball, coming out of there.
“We have a little quarterback challenge every year where they’re throwing it at targets and throwing some deep stuff. We get some rain during a camp where they usually had lightning, so I have to get them off the field. Well it’s raining like crazy before the quarterback challenge, but it wasn’t lightning, and they all said, that’s when Mahomes was there. It was a good class up, and they said, ‘Oh, Mr. Manning, let’s go. It’s raining, it’s not lightning’ So it was, `OK, go.’
“And Josh Allen threw to the deep, a wet ball, better than anybody I’ve ever seen. Threw a wet ball 75 yards. But anyway, Matthew was the most impressive. He’s a great kid.”
znModeratorRetired cop put in chokehold takes police case to high court
https://news.yahoo.com/veteran-retired-cop-takes-case-150325391.html
WASHINGTON (AP) — Something went wrong at the security checkpoint at the VA hospital in El Paso, Texas, on a winter’s day in 2016.
A 70-year-old man arriving for dental work was put in a chokehold and thrown to the ground by federal police officers in an altercation that was caught on camera.
The man, Jose Oliva, left needing surgery on his shoulder and also required treatment for his throat, eardrum and hand, on which he wore a gold watch he received when he retired after 25 years in federal law enforcement.
But when Oliva, who identifies himself as Mexican American, tried to sue the three officers who were involved, a federal appeals court ruled he was out of luck. He’s asking the Supreme Court to revive his lawsuit and the justices could say what they’re going to do as early as Monday.
The case puts before the justices the issue of suing law enforcement officers who used chokeholds and possibly excessive force at a time of national reckoning over police tactics and treatment of people of color.
“I just think when I’m alone, letting my mind wander, how could this have happened to me, who served a year in the combat zone and then the rest of my life in law enforcement? How could this happen to me?” Oliva said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.
Now 76, Oliva said he still has trouble swallowing and his shoulder still hurts five years after the incident.
There is no sound to accompany the images from the day, but Oliva appears to be waiting in line to go through security and at no time physically resists the officers.
He said the trouble began when an officer asked him for his identification, which he indicated he already had put in a bin that was about to be scanned.
The officers and Oliva dispute precisely what was said. But at one point, Officer Mario Nivar approached Oliva with handcuffs at the ready. As soon as Oliva reached the metal detector, Navir grabbed him, applied a chokehold and wrestled Oliva to the ground. Oliva said he heard a popping sound as his shoulder was wrenched behind his back.
Oliva was charged with disorderly conduct, but the government later dropped the charge.
Nivar was assisted by two other officers, Mario Garcia and Hector Barahona. James Jopling, Nivar’s lawyer, declined to make his client available for an interview or to respond to questions himself.
But lawyers for the other men described Oliva as obstinate in refusing to comply with repeated requests for identification and said the officers acted appropriately.
“Because at that point, he’s a potential threat. You don’t know what he is or what he’s carrying. His obstinate refusal is a concern to everyone. A 70-year-old man can handle a .45 pistol just as well as an 18 year old,” said Louis Lopez, Barahona’s lawyer.
Gabriel Perez, representing Garcia, said the video lacks context, in part because there is no sound.
“He’s a veteran obviously, but he’s entering a public place, a federal installation. Signs state you have to present ID before you are admitted. He’s requested to provide identification. He refused,” Perez said.
U.S. District Judge Frank Montalvo ruled that the lawsuit could go forward, noting that officers do not contend that Oliva resisted arrest.
“This is critical as an officer who grapples and chokes a suspect who is not actively resisting violated clearly established law,” Montalvo wrote.
Fifty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that, in limited circumstances, people could sue federal officers for violations of their constitutional rights. Seven federal courts of appeals have held that officers can be sued for rights violations in the course of standard law enforcement operations.
But the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Texas, reversed Montalvo’s ruling. A three-judge panel held that the right to sue basically is limited to the same situation the Supreme Court ruled on in 1971, when federal agents entered a home without a warrant, then manacled and strip-searched a suspect.
Appeals court judge Don Willett was not on the three-judge panel that decided Oliva’s case, but in a concurring opinion in another 5th Circuit case that dismissed a lawsuit on similar grounds, Willett called the attack on Oliva “unprovoked” and worried that Oliva and others like him find themselves without any legal recourse.
″Are all courthouse doors—both state and federal—slammed shut?” he asked. Willett said he was compelled by previous 5th Circuit rulings to agree the other lawsuit should be dismissed.
In urging the Supreme Court to take the case, Oliva’s lawyers with the libertarian Institute for Justice quoted Willett that under the law in the 5th Circuit, which also encompasses Louisiana and Mississippi, federal officials “operate in something resembling a Constitution-free zone.”
Oliva, who retired from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2010, said he has a high regard for police officers because he was one of them.
But he said his experience at the VA hospital five years ago “brings to mind more and more the recent attacks on people who have been killed, George Floyd, Eric Garner and the others. The job does not entail assaulting people.”
znModeratorJohn Wolford went through the same grueling workout that Ben Affleck used to bulk up before playing Batman. https://t.co/fs4JucOI5o
— Rams Wire (@TheRamsWire) May 21, 2021
znModeratorLindsey Thiry@LindseyThiry
The Rams preseason schedule has been finalized:
Aug. 14: vs. Chargers @ SoFi
Aug. 21: vs. Raiders @ SoFi
Aug. 28: at BroncosznModeratorfrom Can Matthew Stafford ignite Rams? Will Seahawks keep Russell Wilson happy?
The major questions that will define the NFC West in 2021
The NFC West can state its case as football’s toughest division, as all four teams have a golden opportunity to reach the postseason. While no NFC West team advanced past the divisional round of the playoffs in 2020, the division beat up each other through a grueling regular season — and housed two of the last three Super Bowl representatives in the NFC.
Leave it to the NFC West to get even better into 2021. The Los Angeles Rams acquired Matthew Stafford in the offseason, catapulting them to Super Bowl contenders in the conference, while the Seattle Seahawks were able to keep Russell Wilson on the roster. The San Francisco 49ers have a talented roster back after injuries derailed their chances to repeat as NFC champions and the Arizona Cardinals loaded up in free agency to take the next step from a .500 team to a playoff regular.
Whatever team wins the NFC West is anyone’s guess, which makes the division race all the more intriguing in this 17-game season. There are plenty of questions that need to be solved in the NFC West, and we’ll do our best to answer them.
Los Angeles Rams: Can Matthew Stafford make this an elite offense again?
Since Sean McVay took over as the Rams’ head coach, the Rams are ranked fourth in the league in points scored and fifth in the league in point differential. Los Angeles was also third in the league in total yards during that stretch. In McVay’s first two years, the Rams scored the most points in the league and had the third-most yards.
Over the last two years, the Rams have been slightly above average offensively (depending on the category). The Rams are just 15th in scoring and sixth in total yards, but they are sixth in passing yards and 18th in rushing yards. That’s not the innovative offense McVay is known for or why he’s known as an offensive guru around the league.
McVay believed the problem lied within Jared Goff, who the Rams traded to the Lions — along with two first-round picks — in order to acquire Matthew Stafford. The Rams have the quarterback with the most passing yards through a player’s first 165 games (45,109) in NFL history and tied for the seventh-most touchdowns (282) in that stretch. Stafford is a significant upgrade over Goff and the Rams are pairing him with Cooper Kupp, Robert Woods, DeSean Jackson, and Van Jefferson at wide receiver — along with Tyler Higbee at tight end. The Rams also saw the emergence of Cam Akers at running back last season, forming a 1-2 punch at running back with Darrell Henderson.
It’s no secret the Rams are all-in on making the Super Bowl, but their offense needs to be close to the level of their defense for that to happen. Los Angeles is banking on Stafford (and the offensive line to remain healthy) in order to take them over the top.
znModeratorIs Les Snead the co-author of this piece? https://t.co/G6E2WgW1lU
— SeattleRams (@seattlerams_nfl) May 21, 2021
znModeratorHad to grab this and post from yesterday’s pre game. Marlins Manager Don Mattingly on all of the no-hitters being thrown. Candid. pic.twitter.com/TFo8Um04pf
— Craig Mish (@CraigMish) May 21, 2021
znModerator"Let's send them home." 👋@YouTubeTV Mic'd up: @AaronDonald97 in his two-sack performance! pic.twitter.com/6CW1Pmrmmx
— Los Angeles Rams (@RamsNFL) January 15, 2021
znModeratorWho has the best defense in the NFL? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/MlZbsza7lV
— PFF (@PFF) May 21, 2021
May 21, 2021 at 12:26 pm in reply to: Kurt Warner on Rams offense, defense, & on Aaron the Donald #130038znModeratorznModeratorTodd Gurley’s rookie season 🔥 @TG3II (2015) pic.twitter.com/1Fpd3qUNBQ
— NFL Throwback (@nflthrowback) May 20, 2021
znModeratorRams scout: Rookie Earnest Brown IV 'could really carve out a role this year' https://t.co/DkwLRx8yVu
— Rams Wire (@TheRamsWire) May 20, 2021
znModeratorStafford 🎯 @CooperKupp pic.twitter.com/pnR5jyDpwE
— Los Angeles Rams (@RamsNFL) May 20, 2021
znModeratorSign on Tim Tebow’s lawn: Itd be a real shame if some one where to find out about every thing that happened with Percy Harvin, Aaron hernandez, and Riley Cooper in college
Urban Meyer unrelatedly: Hey Tim would you like a job?
— PFTCommenter (@PFTCommenter) May 20, 2021
znModeratorESPN’s Mike Clay released his annual stat projections for the upcoming season. He has Stafford throwing 25 TD passes, Akers topping 1,000 yards rushing and Donald reaching 10 sacks again https://t.co/ZvSyZVdjsW
— Cameron DaSilva (@camdasilva) May 20, 2021
znModeratorWith the departure of Gerald Everett, 2nd year Tight End Brycen Hopkins will be looking to seize his opportunity to make an impact! Hopkins averaged 15 yards per catch during his college career at Purdue! pic.twitter.com/b18HRGA6nB
— RAMS ON FILM (@RamsOnFilm) May 20, 2021
znModeratorSeattle's offense is LETHAL 🔪 pic.twitter.com/rZIRKs4QL1
— PFF (@PFF) May 20, 2021
znModeratorRobert Woods and Cooper Kupp ranked among 32 best WRs in NFL https://t.co/n8cKKJq1Kw
— Rams Wire (@TheRamsWire) May 20, 2021
—
[see the link above in the tweet] ie, from that:
Pro Football Focus ranked the top 32 receivers in football heading into the 2021 season and both Woods and Kupp made the cut – in consecutive spots, too.
Woods was 29th, with Kupp one place behind him at No. 30.
Here’s what PFF wrote about Woods, who has improved dramatically since going from the Bills to the Rams.
Woods has recorded a higher receiving grade in each of his four campaigns with the Rams than in any of his seasons with the Bills. He ranks among the 15 highest-graded wide receivers since 2017 while also slotting into the top five in both yards after the catch per reception (5.6) and percentage of catchable targets caught (92.8%).
And here was PFF’s take on Kupp, who “isn’t higher on this list because of his ability, or lack thereof, to effectively win on his own from the outside.” As primarily a slot receiver, that’s not exactly a hot take.
Kupp has consistently been one of the NFL’s most productive slot receivers since he was drafted out of Eastern Washington in 2017. His 2.12 yards per route run from the slot over the past four years is the fourth-highest mark among wide receivers. He also ranks second in broken tackles forced after the catch from the slot (27) and is tied for first in yards after the catch per reception on those same reps (6.0).
znModeratorIt’s a cover-up.
Reporter: “Are you absolutely certain that none of your members were in any communication with any of the people who stormed Capitol Hill?”@GOPLeader: *Exits* pic.twitter.com/4OMX6ofugU
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) May 20, 2021
znModeratorStory of #Palestine for those who pretend they know it all .
“Stand on the right side of history “ pic.twitter.com/JOiaEXeiPl
— Rabee’a Abrar ربیعہ (@rubiaabrar) May 20, 2021
May 20, 2021 at 3:42 pm in reply to: Rams picks w/ Rams Videos–interviews, players react to being drafted, etc. #130020znModeratorMany have already stated it, but it's genuinely wild how much Tutu Atwell and Todd Gurley look alike. I think it's the mouth, specifically when he talks lmaohttps://t.co/hzzHho5do7
— Sosa K (@QBsMVP) May 20, 2021
znModerator[Detroit quarterbacks coach] Mark Brunell thinks the 2021 Lions could pull a 1996 Jaguars-like surprise
Lions quarterbacks coach Mark Brunell is aware that no one thinks his team is going to be any good this year. And he’s OK with that, because he’s been on another team that greatly exceeded its low expectations.
That team was the 1996 Jaguars, an expansion team in only its second year of existence that made it to the AFC Championship Game.
“I was part of a team that very few people gave us a chance to do anything,” Brunell said, via the Detroit News. “Going into 1996, the expectations were really low. All we heard was, ‘Maybe get to .500, maybe win five or six games, a lot of inexperience, a lot of lack of talent’ and this and that. We actually started out that season and the first 11 games we were 4-7, and then we turned it around.
“My point in saying all that is we were a team that people didn’t give much of a chance to do anything. It kind of sounds familiar doesn’t it? My point is that it can happen. We believe it’s going to happen, and there’s something about being part of a football team where everyone outside the building says that you can’t and the message inside the building is, ‘You know what? Forget about what you’re hearing or what people are saying. You have to believe that you can.’ Certainly this is going to be a group that is going to believe that we can, that we can do some good things early, regardless of what’s being said out there, outside of the Detroit Lions.”
It would be very surprising if the Lions made the playoffs at all, let alone the conference championship game. Brunell thinks he’s with a team that is going to surprise people.
znModeratorJohn Wolford switches to jersey number 13, Kurt Warner gives his full endorsement. https://t.co/uvwxwxFjWv
— Rams Wire (@TheRamsWire) May 20, 2021
znModeratorSweet 16 for Andrew Whitworth. Big Whit returns for his 16th season in 2021! pic.twitter.com/RRCTGdsf2f
— RAMS ON FILM (@RamsOnFilm) May 20, 2021
znModeratorMay 20, 2021 at 12:18 am in reply to: Kurt Warner on Rams offense, defense, & on Aaron the Donald #130011znModeratorznModeratorA professor became a police officer — and learned what’s really broken about policing
“What’s broken in policing is what’s broken in American society.”It’s hard to understand the culture of policing in America from the outside.
There’s an informal code among police officers, “the blue wall of silence,” that encourages them not to talk to outsiders. There have been good attempts to study the police — who they are, what they believe in, what makes them tick — but if you really want to know how they see the world and their role in it, you almost have to become one.
And that’s exactly what Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University, did in 2015. Brooks has spent much of her career in the national security world, focusing on human rights and the expanding role of the military in government, but she decided to become a sworn reserve police officer with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department. After graduating from the police academy, Brooks worked part time as a patrol officer from 2016 to 2020 and eventually wrote a book about her experiences called Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City.
I reached out to Brooks in the aftermath of the Derek Chauvin trial to talk about what she learned about policing, how a militaristic mindset spurs police to exaggerate threats and over-deploy violence, and whether the project made her more or less sympathetic to law enforcement.
This conversation doesn’t shy away from the ugly realities of policing in America, but it is an attempt at nuance. As Brooks acknowledges, the police have an extraordinarily difficult job and they’re often asked to do things they can’t — and shouldn’t — do. But there are problems within law enforcement culture that produce racist and violent outcomes, and we discuss what those are and how they might be solved.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
SEAN ILLING
Did you have any assumptions about law enforcement that were shattered once you became a police officer?ROSA BROOKS
I wouldn’t say I had assumptions that were shattered. Some of that is because I’ve done a lot of work on how humans come to do horrific things and justify it to themselves. One big takeaway from all that research is that there aren’t a lot of clear villains in the world. There are people who do awful things and they tend to be people just like us. They tend to just have been in a situation in which they had some justifying narrative for why they’re doing these awful things.So I didn’t expect to find any monsters when I became a cop, and I didn’t. I met people who I didn’t think should be in policing, and I met wonderful people who are really struggling to work through what it means to be a good cop and to grapple with the critiques about racism and violence. I guess you can say that I expected things to be complicated, I expected it to be a world full of people stumbling around trying to do their jobs and feel okay about it, and that’s basically what I found.
SEAN ILLING
What surprised you?ROSA BROOKS
How difficult it really is to be a cop. It was incredibly humbling. I thought, “I’ve got all these fancy degrees. I’ve been around the world. Here’s a thing that any 25-year-old community college graduate seems to do just fine.”Boy, I realized in a hurry how hard it really is. And it reinforced my belief that we need to reimagine public safety. We pile too many roles onto cops. We expect them to be social workers and medics and mediators and mentors and warriors and counselors, and no one can be all of those things.
SEAN ILLING
You got to know a lot of police officers. What do they think about their job and how they’re perceived by the public right now?ROSA BROOKS
I think it’s been a tough time and a tough time especially for my friends who are African American cops really trying to do good in the world within a system shaped by centuries of racism. A lot of thoughtful officers are asking if they can actually do good inside the system, or if they need to leave be an agent of change on the outside.I see two profound truths that are in tension with one another. One is that policing in America perpetuates extremely unjust socioeconomic divisions, particularly along the lines of race, and policing in America is stunningly violent compared to policing in most other countries. That’s a profound truth.
But there’s another profound truth, which is that the overwhelming majority of police officers will never even point their weapon at another human being during their entire career, much less shoot someone.
In DC, at least, the average cop only arrests someone about once a month. They spend most of their time responding to calls. You’re taking sick people to the hospital. You’re doing CPR on people who overdose. You’re trying to find a kid who’s missing. You’re trying to help protect a victim of domestic violence or comforting a robbery victim. This is a profound truth, too: A lot of cops spend a lot of their time responding to people’s requests for help. Many cops never use excessive force, and they’re courteous and kind and thoughtful, but all of that good doesn’t cancel out the abuses or the structural problems.
It’s hard to talk about this in our polarized discourse. You’re either locked into “Police are heroes and fuck you if you think otherwise” or it’s “Cops are brutal racist pigs and they exist to kill Black people.” These are both wrong.
SEAN ILLING
What do you think is actually broken about the culture of law enforcement?ROSA BROOKS
There’s a lot wrong, but it’s also hard to make generalizations since we don’t have a national police force. We’ve got 18,000 different law enforcement agencies, most of which don’t talk to each other. So it’s hard to make generalizations.But I think it’s safe to say that the majority of police academies in this country still operate on kind of a military boot camp model. And that’s how the majority of police departments are organized. A lot of the debates about police militarization focus on the superficial things like the gear they wear or the surplus military equipment they use. But it’s the organizational aspects and the training that have a much more profound effect on police behavior.
SEAN ILLING
How so?ROSA BROOKS
One of the things that I talk a lot about in my book is the degree to which so much of police culture and police training builds off this myth of policing as terribly dangerous all the time. Anybody could kill you at any time. There’s no such thing as a routine call. Any situation could turn lethal in a millisecond.That is both true and completely misleading.
It’s true in the sense that anybody could kill you at any time. I mean, somebody could kill you at any time, too. Somebody could burst in your door right now and kill you. It could happen. It probably won’t, and you’re not going to organize your life around the possibilities that that will happen because it’s sufficiently implausible.
When I ask cops, “Take a guess how many police officers are killed on the job each year, not in accidents but intentionally killed,” I usually get answers like, “1,000” or “500.” It’s just under 50. That’s tragic and terrible for those people and their families, but it’s statistically not nearly as dangerous as police officers tend to think it is. But that perception of constant threat, which is inculcated by the training and the culture, really has a very profound impact on how officers relate to people — and in some cases make officers trigger happy.
The other thing we can’t lose sight of is that what’s broken in policing is what’s broken in American society. Policing does not exist in a vacuum. We live in a society that is structurally racist. We live in a society that is structurally classist. And our criminal justice system in general and policing in particular, they all bear the same scars that our whole society has. How do we get rid of racism in policing? Well, we need to get rid of racism in society because you’re not going to be able to take this one piece of it and separate it out.
SEAN ILLING
This idea that we can train police officers like warriors, that we can arm them like soldiers, and then expect them to not internalize a militaristic ideology and approach their job like an occupying force seems terribly misguided.ROSA BROOKS
The justification that police who defend paramilitary training give — and there are some good, thoughtful human beings who do defend it — is something like, “Look, if you’re a police officer, you are going to be asked to run toward the gunfire when everybody is running away. People are going to scream at you. They’re going to spit at you. They’re going to insult you. You need to be able to keep your cool in all of those situations.”So the defenders will say that the academy is stress-testing for this. If you can’t keep your cool when an instructor is screaming insults at you and ordering you to get down and do pushups, then how are you going to keep your cool when you’re on the street and 50 people are standing around in a circle when you’re doing something perfectly legitimate and lawful and spitting at you and calling you names? This is how we make sure you can keep your cool then.
I get that argument in the abstract, but I don’t think it tends to work terribly well. I worry that many recruits take away the opposite lesson. The lesson that they take away from the police academy is that it’s okay for powerful people to yell at people with less power. It’s okay for people with power to demand and expect instant obedience rather than questions from those with less power, and it’s okay to punish disobedience with physical pain. Those are not lessons that we should want police officers to be carrying with them in their interactions with the community.
SEAN ILLING
I take all those points and don’t disagree, but I’m also trying to imagine — really imagine — what it’s like to be a police officer in a country with more guns than people. Overstating the threat is not helpful, and yet the threat is real and being a police officer in the US is not the same thing as being one in the UK or Portugal or wherever.ROSA BROOKS
I think it’s part of that sense of constant threat, and it’s something that you hear all the time from cops. If you say something like, “Look, most patrol officers in the UK aren’t armed,” they’ll say, “Yeah, but neither is the rest of the population.” So, yeah, when I say the threats are exaggerated, it’s not to say that there are no threats.A week before I started at the police academy, a young woman in a neighboring jurisdiction was shot and killed. She was on her first day out of the academy, her first day patrolling. She went with her partners to a domestic violence call. They get to the house, and they start walking toward it, and a guy opens the front door and starts shooting at them. She was killed, and a couple of the other officers ended up in the hospital seriously injured. That can happen.
None of us are very good — Americans in particular — at assessing risk and probability. Psychologists and cognitive psychologists have done lots of work on how recency and vividness can affect our perception and make us think that because we learned of something vivid and awful that happened recently, we tend to greatly overestimate the frequency. Yes, the threat is real. There is a much more serious threat of violence toward police officers in this country than in countries where there are fewer guns in civilian hands. But, no, it’s not nearly as bad as most police officers think it is.
SEAN ILLING
I think we all want to see lethal force used as minimally as possible. The question for me is, how much risk should we ask police officer to take? Should we ask them to disarm someone with a knife in their hands? Should we ask them to go hand-to-hand with someone who’s resisting when they’re wearing a live gun on their hip? I’m not sure where to draw the line, but there has to be a line.ROSA BROOKS
Cops are trained to disarm people. They’re trained in defensive tactics. They’re trained to respond when someone is being aggressive toward them. They’re trained to wade into fights and try to drag people away from each other. So we should expect cops to take certain levels of risk — that’s part of the job.At the same time, there are situations where I think people are too quick to label a police shooting as murder when, in fact, the officer was justified in using force. Most of us don’t tend to question, for instance, when a mass shooter is eventually killed by the police. We’re like, “Yeah.” There are other situations that aren’t that dramatic where I think the use of force is legally and morally justifiable.
But I also think the fact that officers have guns leads them to pull out the gun as a first resort and not as a last resort.
SEAN ILLING
Did the four years you spent on the force make you more or less sympathetic to police?ROSA BROOKS
Again, I went into it thinking the world doesn’t contain a whole lot of villains or heroes, so I wouldn’t say it made me more sympathetic or less sympathetic. I think it made the areas in which I’m sympathetic and unsympathetic have more granularity to them.I did come out of it thinking that the rhetoric that vilifies cops is wrongheaded and, in fact, self-undermining. Police officers have to be part of the conversation about how to change policing, and to the extent that the rhetoric we use just alienates cops and makes them feel defensive, it does a disservice to the cause of transforming policing.
I run a program at Georgetown, a fellowship program for young DC police officers, and we talk about all the hard issues. We talk about race. We talk about violence. We talk about, what is the role of police in a diverse, democratic society? Do we know? Is there a consensus on that? What is good policing? Do we know? Can we measure it?
Most people go into policing out of public spirit and idealistic reasons. A lot of them get that beaten out of them. But the people within policing who care about changing it do tend to have a much clearer sense of what will work, what will not work, why things are the way they are, and if you want to change something you have to understand it.
I also think that policing for many African Americans has been a route into the middle class. It’s a stable government job with a pension, good benefits, and so on. The more we just vilify cops, we are driving away some of the very people who could and should be some of the most effective advocates for change. The project of transforming policing should involve building bridges to the many, many people within policing who also feel like the system is broken and needs change. We need more of these conversations and we need them as soon as possible.
znModeratorVideo shows South Carolina deputies repeatedly tasing Black man before he dies in jail
https://news.yahoo.com/video-shows-south-carolina-deputies-001600368.html
Officials in South Carolina on Friday released hours of body-worn camera footage and details about the final hours of the life of Jamal Sutherland, a Black man who died in January after he was pepper-sprayed and electroshocked with a taser in his jail cell.
Sutherland, 31, was arrested on Jan. 4 after a “large scale fight” broke out at a psychiatric facility where he was receiving mental health treatment, according to a statement from North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey. He said the city police department did its job delivering Sutherland “safely” from the facility to the jail.
The next morning, Charleston County sheriff’s deputies attempted to remove Sutherland from his cell for a bond hearing.
In the video, two sheriff’s deputies are outside Sutherland’s jail cell and one deploys a taser, or stun gun, and appears to use it repeatedly as Sutherland cries out in pain and writhes on the floor.
A timeline of events published by WBCD, an NBC affiliate in Charleston, indicated pepper spray was also deployed. Sutherland was pronounced dead one hour and 15 minutes after the deputies first tried to remove him from his cell and after nearly an hour of resuscitation attempts.
The county coroner’s office said an autopsy showed the cause of death as “excited state with adverse pharmacotherapeutic effect during subdual process,” according to WBCD.
Charleston County Sheriff Kristin Graziano described the events of Jan. 5 as a “horrible tragedy” and said she “deferred to the family’s wishes to keep the video private until they were ready.”
“Our officers removed Mr. Sutherland from his cell that morning in order to ensure that he received a timely bond hearing, as required by law,” Graziano said in a statement. “Their efforts were complicated by the increasing effects that Mr. Sutherland was suffering as a result of mental illness. This unfortunate tragedy has revealed an opportunity to review existing policies.”
A lawyer for Sutherland’s family, Mark Peper, said on Friday, “People with mental health issues are entitled to the same exact civil rights as you and me and every other healthy, wealthy person in this world.”
Peper said Sutherland’s “last question on this earth” was “what is the meaning of this?”
“We will answer this question,” Peper said.
Fighting back tears, Amy Sutherland, Jamal’s mother, told the media Friday she was proud of her son.
“Mentally ill, still able to say, ‘Thank you, Jesus, take care of me,’” she said. “I want y’all to know Jamal was a great man. He had faults like everybody else, but he was a great man.
“I don’t want any violence in my city,” she continued. “I want us to view this tape and I want us to learn what we don’t want happening here.”
znModeratorAuthorities restrained them, shocked them with stun guns or blasted them with pepper spray. But when dozens of Black people died in custody, the autopsies blamed their genetic makeup, not the police. A @nytimes investigation from @jenvalentino and me. https://t.co/B8uRCpHfwM
— Michael LaForgia (@laforgia_) May 15, 2021
znModeratorCops holding other cops accountable. This is all the people want. https://t.co/QDl1FC9Aju
— Brett Kollmann (@BrettKollmann) December 23, 2020
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