Following a verbal confrontation that lasted three hours, Boyd chose to cooperate with the Albuquerque Police Department (which, since 2010, has shot thirty-six people, twenty-three of whom were killed). Boyd gathered his things and walked toward the police officers in a non-threatening manner. A police officer lobbed a flashbang and a German Shepherd attacked Boyd. Boyd pulled out two knives, and then turned his back to the officers. The officers let loose a barrage of gunfire.
Boyd was hit and immediately collapsed. Officers commanded he drop the knives, and Boyd softly called out, “Please don’t hurt me anymore. I can’t move.” The officers fired three bean bag shots into the motionless Boyd, and then unloosed the German Shephard again, which bit into Boyd's leg. Finally the officers cuffed Boyd, who was no longer showing signs of consciousness. Boyd died in the hospital the next day. Albuquerque Police Chief Gordon Eden initially justified the murder, claiming Boyd was a "direct threat" to the officers.
As critical as I am of the Albuquerque Police Department, I strongly doubt any of the officers consciously desired that Boyd be killed. Rather, I'm guessing the officers had in mind a rough but relatively harmless "takedown." Whatever their intended outcome, what's apparent to me is that the officers were not at all eager to abandon the script and deal with Boyd without a complicated military maneuver and discharge of weapons. Despite Boyd's calm gesture of surrender, the police showed no signs that they'd consider adjusting to new developments (Boyd's surrender), responding instead with a blitzkrieg of aggression: a flashbang, attack dog, and gunfire. They were going to get their military maneuver in no matter what.
While I don't pretend to be an expert on psychological dynamics of a lethal police response, a few things can be inferred if not observed:
1. The officers probably knew, by the third hour, that Boyd had assaulted an officer in the past.
2. The officers observed that Boyd was homeless, possibly suffering from mental problems, and was not a functioning, tax-paying citizen.
3. The officers had just engaged in three hours of frustrating discussion with Boyd.
4. The officers had clearly been militarized: they were outfitted with helmets, assault rifles, and flashbangs, and their maneuvers were not those of your typical county sheriff's department, but a squad of quasi-soldiers.
The officers' military training probably not only made them less capable of sensibly dealing with a possibly-insane person, but prepared them and got them excited for complex military maneuvers that they'd spent countless hours training for. Again, I don't think Boyd's death was the desired outcome; if the flashbang/attack dog maneuver had worked as planned, Boyd would have been on the ground and no live rounds would have been fired. But Boyd was killed because he deviated from the script, and because the officers' failed to recognize that a man with mental issues might not act in the way a normal person would. In sum, the cops likely knew Boyd had a violent past; they acknowledged that he was a less-than-human, police-assaulting scumbag; and when Boyd took out his knives and stood his ground, an officer recognized that this was his one chance to permissibly kill another human being, which is probably something of an initiation rite in some police departments. But this decision was made in the heat of the moment, in a split second, without the aid of deliberate thought. What may have seemed permissible in the moment, seems profoundly rash and stupid in the footage. Because of all these factors – the less-than-humanness of Boyd, the frustration, the military training, a culture that lauds assertive violence – a shot was fired and a man was unnecessarily killed.
It's hard to miss the absurdity of the situation: at least six heavily armed officers surrounded a homeless man who did little more than illegally camp on a hillside. Yet it's not the homeless man that seems terrified; it's the officers. Even after Boyd had been more or less killed and was lying on the dirt face-down, the officers are still so terrified of approaching Boyd that they proceed to shoot Boyd with beanbags and let loose the German Shepherd to savagely chomp on Boyd's right leg. Even as Boyd is being cuffed (and showing no signs of life at this point), the officers' guns are still trained on Boyd's head. It's as if the officers are worried that Boyd might spring to life at any moment and gracefully incapacitate a half-dozen men with lightning-fast martial arts. The two officers who fearfully inspect Boyd's transparent tarp (that covered little more than a rat's nest of clothing and bedding materials) do so as if they expect to be blown up any second by an artfully-placed landmine. They're acting as if they're in a movie.
Most pathetic of all is the casual use of military lingo: "negative effect," "on my right," "move it up!" It's apparent that these are not men, but little boys playing dress-up as soldiers. Any man knows that when putting on camo, a kilt, a football jersey, or any cultural symbol of "macho-ness," we tend to feel like we're a little manlier, like our muscles got a little bigger, like our dick got a little longer. And so it is with these officers in their military costumes. It wasn't just the gun that killed Boyd; it was the costume; it was the charade of a dim-witted police force play-acting as commandos; it was the desire to finally kill something so they could validate their manhoods. A local county sheriff's department would have sent a social worker, or a soft-spoken cop to deal with Boyd; not a whole platoon of police-soldiers who are eager to test out all the high-powered toys the federal government left under the police department's Christmas tree. I wouldn't have been shocked if they'd sent a helicopter to hover over the scene.
Boyd was shot not because he was a threat (how is a man holding a pair of four-inch knives twenty feet away from a whole squad of officers a threat?), but because the officers had grown up in a culture and worked in an atmosphere that fetishized weapons, assertiveness, and violence. Richard Slotkin, author of Gunfighter Nation, says in a Bill Moyers interview that, "[Americans] internalize a model of heroic behavior from the media that purvey the myths that shape your society." In other words, these officers reacted in accord with the expectations of our violent national mythology. John Wayne or Daniel Boone wouldn't dare reason with Boyd; no, that isn't how a "real man" reacts; rather, you got to stop thinking, smoke 'um out, and light 'um up.
Psychological underpinnings of the tragedy aside, what we have here is a man who's been killed for doing nothing wrong. Boyd "trespassed." He slept on the side of a hill in a public area. What might the officers' response have been in a country like Scotland or Norway, where there's nothing wrong with doing something as simple as sleeping on a hillside?
Wow, that is absolutely horrifying. So many police departments are trying to become militarized units.
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