On November 23, 2012, Michael Dunn, a 47-year-old software developer, shot and killed 17-year-old high school student Jordan Davis at a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida. An argument between Dunn and Davis over loud rap music sparked the shooting.1 Dunn claimed he shot Davis because Dunn feared for his safety, but the incident and subsequent trial became a referendum on more than just Florida’s controversial stand-your-ground law. Protests stemming from the Black Lives Matter movement called for justice. Media coverage explored public perceptions of rap music, white privilege, and implicit racial bias.
The shooting and its aftermath are explored in the 2015 HBO award-winning documentary 3½ Minutes, 10 Bullets (directed by Marc Silver), a reference to the time between when Dunn pulled into the parking spot next to the vehicle Davis was in, and how many bullets he fired from his Taurus PT 99 AF. In 2016, the team behind the documentary reached-out to the School of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice at Metropolitan State University, part of the Minnesota State system, about incorporating the film into implicit bias training for law enforcement, in line with an emerging trend in “documentary criminology” and professors using film to teach criminological concepts.2 In Minnesota, professional peace officer training and education is administered through colleges and universities by statute, therefore, Metropolitan State University (Metro State) was seen as the ideal place to trial this idea.
The Context
At the time, Metro State was providing local consultation to the Minneapolis pilot of the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice (National Initiative).3 The National Initiative was a project to improve relationships and increase trust between communities and the criminal justice system. In Minneapolis, they needed improving. In November 2015, Jamar Clark died from a gunshot wound to the head after an encounter with two Minneapolis police officers. Nine months later, in June 2016, Philando Castile was fatally shot seven times by a St. Anthony police officer during a routine traffic stop in a Minneapolis suburb. Clark and Castile were both young black men. Their deaths prompted a public outcry and large-scale protests, especially when no charges against the officers in the Clark case were filed and the officer who shot Castile was acquitted at trial.
The National Initiative highlights three training areas that hold great promise for concrete, rapid progress in improving relationships between minority communities and the criminal justice system: implicit bias, procedural justice, and racial reconciliation. Also known as implicit social cognition, implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect people’s understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner.4 Procedural justice is the idea that if community members perceive that they are being treated fairly relative to others and police are seen as respectful and courteous, making decisions based on the facts of a given situation and explaining these decisions clearly, then law enforcement will be viewed as being more legitimate by the public.5 Racial reconciliation recognizes the real U.S. history of abusive law enforcement practices toward minority communities, beginning with slavery, Jim Crow, and other legal oppression of minorities, along with more recent problems such as high levels of intrusive police tactics like arrest and stop-and-frisk and disrespectful behavior by some police. The reconciliation process typically includes frank acknowledgements, and sometimes apologies, from law enforcement about how traditional enforcement has been both ineffective and damaging and an assurance that they intend to do better.
Therefore, the question was, could Metro State deliver a curriculum that used 3½ Minutes, 10 Bullets to teach these three concepts? The answer was yes.
The Process
In March 2017, the film was shown at Metropolitan State University to nine active peace officers from agencies in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, who represented a wide-ranging mix of rank, age, gender, and years in service. The issues presented in the film collided with local public issues; therefore, a tense learning environment was expected. Tension drives people into their “bunkers” and encourages only “in-group” conversations about difficult subjects like implicit and explicit biases, racism, and problematic history. For this program, an environment free of the restraints tension often yields was needed. The first segment of the class was guided by viewing the film and a mix of lecture and class discourse. The majority of the two-day session, however, was grounded in the restorative circle process.
Once the officers began their journey of listening and suspending judgement, they found themselves holding their own implicit and explicit biases.
The restorative circle requires participants to sit in a circle and follow the expectations of listening, staying grounded, speaking one’s truth, and considering all voices as equal in the discourse.6 The group examined their collective and individual values and how everyone struggles with these values, thus the conversation became personal and self-reflective. Once the officers began their journey of listening and suspending judgement, they found themselves holding their own implicit and explicit biases. They owned their past and present perspectives as they struggled with their understanding of the impact of racism and how it had claimed the life of Jordan Davis and so many more people of color in the United States. With the participants’ informed consent, this process was captured by the authors.
Implicit Bias and Procedural Justice
Watching the film, the argument over rap music that led to Davis’ death was a rich text for learning around implicit racial bias. One officer remarked, “He [Dunn] didn’t see the kids themselves—he saw the stereotype. It’s how he sees every other black kid.”7 This statement deeply moved a fellow peace officer in the training session, a mother to mixed-race children:
I have brown kids, I’ve had to change my perspectives. It’s horrible. The things they’ve had to go through. People need to respond to people as [human],—be decent humans. I worry about what my kids have to go through every day. It’s painful knowing that my kids have already had to go through so much in their life.
One officer of color could personally relate:
This makes me think about how I’ve been teaching my African American son how to survive in this world. Manners. Respect. I’ve told my son not to listen to rap music too loud at the park. It’s an added precaution. Is this giving up part of his culture?
In the film, when Dunn was accused of calling rap music, “thug music,” one officer proposed that “Thug is the new N-word,” which led to a discussion around specific racial stereotypes associated with rap music. To add depth to this discussion, the authors incorporated the work of criminologist and rap music scholar Charis Kubrin, specifically her TED talk on the “threatening nature of rap music.”8 Further, this topic was placed into broader historical context, from slavery to mass incarceration, drawing on the work of civil rights advocate and scholar Michelle Alexander and author and cultural commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates.9
The group also discussed what Dunn could have done differently in his encounter with Davis, through the lens of procedural justice. Some officers found this difficult because Dunn was a regular civilian and they felt that a police officer in Dunn’s situation would behave differently:
The uniform of what we do stands for something. And this is something we drop the ball on. When we tell you, “Stop, do this” that needs to be done. If people comply, then it allows us to slow down the situation and have time to have a better outcome. But if you say “Stop, do this” and they say, “fuck you,” that’s going to send the situation in a different direction. No matter what happens, and we need to be transparent about what’s happening in the community, ultimately, we are the authority figure. We have a lot of power. And there are times that we have to say “Stop” and draw a line in the sand. And to me, the golden ticket is mastering this.
Reimagining the Davis shooting as a traffic stop, however, one officer said:
I think you see the really good cops when they say right away, “I’m stopping you and here’s why,” but when I’m stopping a car because… I think the suspects might be inside, you need to wait until the situation is de-escalated first. There’s a magic moment when you are between “they’re going to comply, oh good” and “oh shit, they’re not complying.” If they listen to me first, comply, and once I get you off the ground and I figure out you’re not the guys, I’ll explain to you why I did what I did. There’s an area where we need backing on that… there are those cops that are “get your hands up,” that is where we are our worst enemy on things. As opposed to us saying, “I understand, just keep your hands up please.” Professionalism. That is where we need to police ourselves, and I’m 100 percent on board with you on that.
It is important to note that one officer said, “People seem to think de-escalating is a new thing. It’s not. However, some people are much better at de-escalation than others. We know some people that are better than others. There are people that I tell don’t come to my scene.” There was recognition, therefore, that even some police officers would mishandle the situation. There was also discussion, though, of the complexity of public-police encounters and how decisions in some scenarios must be made quickly, without time for de-escalation.
Other officers saw similarities between Dunn’s actions and the actions of people they had encountered in their professional lives, namely “How quick humans are to resort to violence, [to] pull their gun.” One officer asked, “What made this man think it was his business to intervene with the music? Why was he so compelled to make everyone else’s business his own?” a question he said he had asked violent people many times over his policing career. The cops in the room also called out the “techniques of neutralization,”10 Dunn employed to justify his actions, something they were all too familiar with in practice:
When he (Dunn) was caught, he tried to backpedal—justify his actions… justify his behavior. “I went over to them, I was very polite – excuse me, fine gentlemen, would you mind turning that loud music down?”. Do you really think that’s how he talked? No, but in his mind, in his statement of how things went down, this is what he’s convinced himself has happened.
The fact that 3½ Minutes, 10 Bullets did not depict an officer-involved shooting was an advantage. As one officer explained, it allowed them to engage with the issues without feeling defensive or that this was “yet another attack on cops.” However, one officer expressed the film was “frustrating to watch” because cases like Dunn’s “may have contributed to the environment going on now, with the protests.” This connection was, in truth, intentional. The message was that the public’s grievances didn’t begin with recent officer-involved shootings—there was a broader context.
Racial Reconciliation
A plethora of discussion has focused on the potential existence of a so-called “Ferguson Effect,” after the 2014 fatal police-shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. De-policing emerged among officers due to concerns about being subjected to negative media scrutiny for racial profiling or excessive use of force; in turn, increasing crime rates.11 The officers at the film showing reflected on this heightened “culture of protest,” noting that it has caused many officers to second-guess their decision-making, and not always in a positive way:
In my six short years, I feel like things have drastically changed. My cognitive reaction to things—I’m afraid, on edge. Now I’m constantly having to think about, we’ve lost trust in our decisions. We have to decide what is the right thing: what will the public/media think of this? It honestly doesn’t matter what is right or wrong.
De-policing emerged among officers due to concerns about being subjected to negative media scrutiny for racial profiling or excessive use of force; in turn, increasing crime rates.
The group agreed that “push back” and “increased scrutiny of law enforcement services, from the public and admin” was especially hard on younger officers; however, older officers also felt the effects of having a “very negative target on [their] backs,” which could influence their actions and opinion of the job.
This climate of fear was affecting officer morale and mental health, said the group, but there was recognition, in light of the events and minority communities affected by high levels of violence and serious crime portrayed in 3½ Minutes, 10 Bullets, that young people of color experience the same emotions:
This constant need to be on edge—how do I defend myself? Who is all here? Where is the exit? That’s the same thing we are seeing in the inner-city youth. They cannot sit with their back to the door.
There is a level of hypervigilance. The inner-city kid feels like a target. It becomes habitual—like with cops, like with military. It’s stressful.
Every officer said they felt “increased hostility” from the public, to the extent that there was a perception now that “All police are considered pigs, racists, murderers. Faceless.” Another officer said, “We accept the physical threats of the job, but this is different.” And the fear was that the situation would last for generations unless there was some reconciliation between police and community:
What we’re also running into on the street, is people of color sometimes telling their kids, “Don’t talk to the pigs.” A mom will pull her young child away from a friendly conversation—they don’t trust us. We’re trying to build trust with these kids and the mom says, “Nope, we don’t talk to the police.”
Somewhat surprisingly given this appraisal of the state of community-police relations, however, was the consensus that internal police pressure on officers was worse than external public pressure. Further, the current deficit in community trust was seen as a byproduct of past policing priorities and administrative instructions that front-line officers did not necessarily agree with:
As a new officer, at the top of my mind, was I have to have this many arrests, I have to write this many tickets… because that’s how they [the administration] evaluate you as an officer… But once you get past that and mature, you realize that the job is about so much more than that … I would rather go out and deal with one call to the best of my ability and offer them the best services and respect and kindness and fairness and do the best I can for that situation and those people.
In the end, officers felt part of the problem was that policing had become poorly defined and that police could not be “all things to all people,” and that things are sometimes out of their control because they don’t have the right tools or resources, but as “fixers by nature,” they find themselves becoming “band-aids” in an effort to help. This theme is consistent with sociologist Alex Vitale’s recent book, The End of Policing.12
Conclusions and Implications
When combined with the rich restorative circle process and engaging class discourse, 3½ Minutes, 10 Bullets created an environment of healing, self-reflection, and learning for all involved. In a world where the media is at the forefront, using a documentary film as a means for inspiring honest conversation proved exceptionally effective. The journey of restoration and introspection for the nine officers was evident not only in the post-evaluation survey data, which indicated movement on attitudes and perceptions relevant to implicit bias, procedural justice, and reconciliation over baseline—but also in dialogue and reflection: “I did see the documentary six months ago. I have a different take away every time. The film doesn’t change, but you as a person do.”
When the participants were asked if the two-day pilot was a beneficial training for current and future law enforcement officers, the response was a unanimous yes, but they acknowledged that “telling personal stories is difficult.” The small group size, variation in a class format, and diversity of the officers created a safe environment of understanding and introspection. The themes presented in 3½ Minutes, 10 Bullets opened the door for meaningful, honest conversations, and it is hoped that others will be inspired to continue this work.
NOTES
1 Jasper Scherer, “Fla. ‘Loud Music’ Murder: Firing into Car Full of Teens Playing Rap Music Not ‘Self-Defense,’ Court Rules,” Washington Post, November 18, 2016.
2 Keith Hayward, “Documentary Criminology: A Cultural Criminological Introduction,” in Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology, eds. Michelle Brown and Eamonn Carrabine (London: Routledge, 2017), 135–150; Nicole Rafter and Michelle Brown, Criminology Goes to the Movies (New York: NYU Press, 2011).
3 National Initiative for Building Community Trust & Justice, “Mission.”
4 Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People (New York: Bantam, 2016).
5 Jason Sunshine and Tom Tyler, “The Role of Procedural Justice and Legitimacy in Shaping Public Support for Policing,” Law and Society Review 37, no. 3 (2003): 513–547.
6 Howard Zehr, The Little Book of Restorative Justice (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2003).
7 Direct quotes are from the post-screening discourse, Metropolitan State University, March 2017.
8 Charis Kubrin, “The Threatening Nature of… Rap Music?” TEDx Talks, YouTube video, 13:49, October 23, 2014.
9 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012); Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).
10 Gresham Sykes and David Matza, “Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency,” American Sociological Review 22, no.6 (December 1957): 664–673.
11 John, Shjarback et al., “De-policing and Crime in the Wake of Ferguson: Racialized Changes in the Quantity and Quality of Policing among Missouri Police Departments,” Journal of Criminal Justice 50 (May 2017): 42–52; Justin Nix and Justin Pickett, “Third-Person Perceptions, Hostile Media Effects, and Policing: Developing a Theoretical Framework for Assessing the Ferguson Effect,” Journal of Criminal Justice 51 (July 2017): 24–33.
12 Alex Vitale, The End of Policing (New York: Verso, 2018).
