Slaughter Central: The United States as a Mass-Killing Machine

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

14 April 21

 

y the time you read this piece, it will already be out of date. The reason’s simple enough. No matter what mayhem I describe, with so much all-American weaponry in this world of ours, there’s no way to keep up. Often, despite the headlines that go with mass killings here, there’s almost no way even to know.

On this planet of ours, America is the emperor of weaponry, even if in ways we normally tend not to put together. There’s really no question about it. The all-American powers-that-be and the arms makers that go with them dream up, produce, and sell weaponry, domestically and internationally, in an unmatched fashion. You’ll undoubtedly be shocked, shocked to learn that the top five arms makers on the planet — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics — are all located in the United States.

Put another way, we’re a killer nation, a mass-murder machine, slaughter central. And as we’ve known since the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, there could be far worse to come. After all, in the overheated dreams of both those weapons makers and Pentagon planners, slaughter-to-be has long been imagined on a planetary scale, right down to the latest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) being created by Northrop Grumman at the cost of at least $100 billion. Each of those future arms of ultimate destruction is slated to be “the length of a bowling lane” and the nuclear charge that it carries will be at least 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That missile will someday be capable of traveling 6,000 miles and killing hundreds of thousands of people each. (And the Air Force is planning to order 600 of them.)

By the end of this decade, that new ICBM is slated to join an unequaled American nuclear arsenal of — at this moment — 3,800 warheads. And with that in mind, let’s back up a moment.

Have Gun — Will Travel

Before we head abroad or think more about weaponry fit to destroy the planet (or at least human life on it), let’s just start right here at home. After all, we live in a country whose citizens are armed to their all-too-labile fingertips with more guns of every advanced sort than might once have been imaginable. The figures are stunning. Even before the pandemic hit and gun purchases soared to record levels — about 23 million of them (a 64% increase over 2019 sales) — American civilians were reported to possess almost 400 million firearms. That adds up to about 40% of all such weaponry in the hands of civilians globally, or more than the next 25 countries combined.

And if that doesn’t stagger you, note that the versions of those weapons in public hands are becoming ever more militarized and powerful, ever more AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, not .22s. And keep in mind as well that, over the years, the death toll from those weapons in this country has grown staggeringly large. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote recently, “More Americans have died from guns just since 1975, including suicides, murders and accidents (more than 1.5 million), than in all the wars in United States history, dating back to the Revolutionary War (about 1.4 million).”

In my childhood, one of my favorite TV programs was called Have Gun — Will Travel. Its central character was a highly romanticized armed mercenary in the Old West and its theme song — still lodged in my head (where so much else is unlodging these days) — began:

“Have gun will travel is the card of a man.

A knight without armor in a savage land.

His fast gun for hire heeds the calling wind.

A soldier of fortune is the man called Paladin.”

Staggering numbers of Americans are now ever grimmer versions of Paladin. Thanks to a largely unregulated gun industry, they’re armed like no other citizenry on the planet, not even — in a distant second place — the civilians of Yemen, a country torn by endless war. That TV show’s title could now be slapped on our whole culture, whether we’re talking about our modern-day Paladins traveling to a set of Atlanta spas; a chain grocery store in Boulder, Colorado; a real-estate office in Orange, California; a convenience store near Baltimore; or a home in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

Remember how the National Rifle Association has always defended the right of Americans to own weapons at least in part by citing this country’s hunting tradition? Well, these days, startling numbers of Americans, armed to the teeth, have joined that hunting crew. Their game of choice isn’t deer or even wolves and grizzly bears, but that ultimate prey, other human beings — and all too often themselves. (In 2020, not only did a record nearly 20,000 Americans die from gun violence, but another 24,000 used guns to commit suicide.)

As the rate of Covid-19 vaccination began to rise to remarkable levels in this country and ever more public places reopened, the first mass public killings (defined as four or more deaths in a public place) of the pandemic period — in Atlanta and Boulder — hit the news big-time. The thought, however, that the American urge to use weapons in a murderous fashion had in any way lessened or been laid to rest, even briefly, thanks to Covid-19, proved a fantasy of the first order.

At a time when so many public places like schools were closed or their use limited indeed, if you took as your measuring point not mass public killings but mass shootings (defined as four or more people wounded or killed), the pandemic year of 2020 proved to be a record 12 months of armed chaos. In fact, such mass shootings actually surged by 47%. As USA Today recounted, “In 2020, the United States reported 611 mass shooting events that resulted in 513 deaths and 2,543 injuries. In 2019, there were 417 mass shootings with 465 deaths and 1,707 injured.” In addition, in that same year, according to projections based on FBI data, there were 4,000 to 5,000 more gun murders than usual, mainly in inner-city communities of color.

In the first 73 days of Joe Biden’s presidency, there were five mass shootings and more than 10,000 gun-violence deaths. In the Covid-19 era, this has been the model the world’s “most exceptional” nation (as American politicians of both parties used to love to call this country) has set for the rest of the planet. Put another way, so far in 2020 and 2021, there have been two pandemics in America, Covid-19 and guns.

And though the weaponization of our citizenry and the carnage that’s gone with it certainly gets attention — President Biden only recently called it “an international embarrassment” — here’s the strange thing: when reporting on such a binge of killings and the weapons industry that stokes it, few here think to include the deaths and other injuries for which the American military has been responsible via its “forever wars” of this century outside our own borders. Nor do they consider the massive U.S. weapons deliveries and sales to other countries that often enough lead to the same. In other words, a full picture of all-American carnage has — to use an apt phrase — remained missing in action.

Cornering the Arms Market

In fact, internationally, things are hardly less mind-boggling when it comes to this country and weaponry. As with its armed citizenry, when it comes to arming other countries, Washington is without peer. It’s the weapons dealer of choice across much of the world. Yes, the U.S. gun industry that makes all those rifles for this country also sells plenty of them abroad and, in the Trump years, such sales were only made easier to complete (as was the selling of U.S. unmanned aerial drones to “less stable governments”). When it comes to semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15 or even grenades and flamethrowers, this country’s arms makers no longer even need State Department licenses, just far easier-to-get Commerce Department ones, to complete such sales, even to particularly abusive nations. As a result, to take one example, semi-automatic pistol exports abroad rose 148% in 2020.

But what I’m particularly thinking about here are the big-ticket items that those five leading weapons makers of the military-industrial complex eternally produce. On the subject of the sale of jet fighters like the F-16 and F-35, tanks and other armored vehicles, submarines (as well as anti-submarine weaponry), and devastating bombs and missiles, among other things, we leave our “near-peer” competitors as well as our weapons-making allies in the dust. Washington is the largest supplier to 20 of the 40 major arms importers on the planet.

When it comes to delivering the weapons of war, the U.S. leads all its competitors in a historic fashion, especially in the war-torn and devastated Middle East. There, between 2015 and 2019, it gobbled up nearly half of the arms market. Unsurprisingly, Saudi Arabia was its largest customer, which, of course, only further stoked the brutal civil war in Yemen, where U.S. weapons are responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians. As Pentagon expert William Hartung wrote of those years, U.S. arms deliveries to the region added up to “nearly three times the arms Russia supplied to MENA [the Middle East and North Africa], five times what France contributed, 10 times what the United Kingdom exported, and 16 times China’s contribution.” (And often enough, as in Iraq and Yemen, some of those weapons end up falling into the hands of those the U.S. opposes.)

In fact, in 2020, this country’s arms sales abroad rose a further 2.8% to $178 billion. The U.S. now supplies no fewer than 96 countries with weaponry and controls 37% of the global arms market (with, for example, Lockheed Martin alone taking in $47.2 billion in such sales in 2018, followed by the four other giant U.S. weapons makers and, in sixth place, the British defense firm BAE).

This remains the definition of mayhem-to-come, the international version of that spike in domestic arms sales and the killings that went with it. After all, in these years, deaths due to American arms in countries like Afghanistan and Yemen have grown strikingly. And to take just one more example, arms, ammunition, and equipment sold to or given to the brutal regime of Rodrigo Duterte for the Philippine military and constabulary have typically led to deaths (especially in its “war on drugs”) that no one’s counting up.

And yet, even combined with the dead here at home, all of this weapons-based slaughter hardly adds up to a full record when it comes to the U.S. as a global mass-killing machine.

Far, Far from Home

After all, this country has a historic 800 or so military bases around the world and nearly 200,000 military personnel stationed abroad (about 60,000 in the Middle East alone). It has a drone-assassination program that extends from Afghanistan across the Greater Middle East to Africa, a series of “forever wars” and associated conflicts fought over that same expanse, and a Navy with major aircraft carrier task forces patrolling the high seas. In other words, in this century, it’s been responsible for largely uncounted but remarkable numbers of dead and wounded human beings. Or put another way, it’s been a mass-shooting machine abroad.

Unlike in the United States, however, there’s little way to offer figures on those dead. To take one example, Brown University’s invaluable Costs of War Project has estimated that, from the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to late 2019, 801,000 people, perhaps 40% of them civilians, were killed in Washington’s war on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. Of course, not all of those by any means were killed by the U.S. military. In fact, some were even American soldiers and contractors. Still, the figures are obviously sizeable. (To take but one very focused example, from December 2001 to December 2013 at TomDispatch, I was counting up civilian wedding parties taken down by U.S. air power in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen. I came up with eight well-documented ones with a death toll of nearly 300, including brides, grooms, musicians, and revelers.)

Similarly, last December, Neta Crawford of the Costs of War Project released a report on the rising number of Afghan civilians who had died from U.S. air strikes in the Trump years. She found that in 2019, for instance, “airstrikes killed 700 civilians — more civilians than in any other year since the beginning of the war.” Overall, the documented civilian dead from American air strikes in the war years is in the many thousands, the wounded higher yet. (And, of course, those figures don’t include the dead from Afghan air strikes with U.S.-supplied aircraft.) And mind you, that’s just civilians mistaken for Taliban or other enemy forces.

Similarly, thousands more civilians were killed by American air strikes across the rest of the Greater Middle East and northern Africa. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which followed U.S. drone strikes for years, estimated that, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, by 2019 such attacks had killed “between 8,500 and 12,000 people, including as many as 1,700 civilians — 400 of whom were children.”

And that, of course, is just to begin to count the dead in America’s conflicts of this era. Or thought of another way, in this century, the U.S. military has been a kind of global Paladin. Its motto could obviously be “have gun, will travel” and its forces and those allied to it (and often supplied with American arms) have certainly killed staggering numbers of people in conflicts that have devastated communities across a significant part of the planet, while displacing an estimated 37 million people.

Now, return to those Americans gunned down in this country and think of all of this as a single weaponized, well-woven fabric, a single American gun culture that spans the globe, as well as a three-part killing machine of the first order. Much as mass shootings and public killings can sometimes dominate the news here, a full sense of the damage done by the weaponization of our culture seldom comes into focus. When it does, the United States looks like slaughter central.

Or as that song from Have Gun — Will Travel ended:

Paladin, Paladin,

Where do you roam?

Paladin, Paladin,

Far, far from home.

Far, far from home — and close, close to home — indeed.

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Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com. He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture.  A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

What the Supreme Court Got Wrong About Homicides Committed by Cops

By Ian Millhiser, Vox

13 April 21

Rogue officers like Derek Chauvin probably won’t be deterred by good law, but excessively vague law encourages bad behavior.

n Wednesday, more than one week into the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd, Chauvin’s lawyer read an excerpt from the department’s manual governing the use of force.

“The ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force,” the manual stated, “must be judged from the perspective of the reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.”

Minneapolis revised its manual after Floyd’s death to place clearer and tighter constraints on officers engaged in the use of force. But the vague rule laid out in the version of the manual that was in effect during Floyd’s fatal encounter with Chauvin is fairly typical of the guidance provided to officers in the field.

As Sgt. Jody Stiger, a member of the Los Angeles Police Department called by prosecutors in the Chauvin trial, testified, most police departments derive their policies governing the use of force from Graham v. Connor. Graham is a 1989 Supreme Court case that, in the words of scholars Osagie Obasogie and Zachary Newman, “established the modern constitutional landscape for police excessive force claims.”

The language Chauvin’s lawyer read from the police manual was lifted, word for word, from the Court’s decision in Graham.

Authored by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, one of the primary proponents of a tough-on-crime approach that often animated the Court’s decisions during his tenure, the Graham opinion warns that police accused of using excessive force often have to make difficult decisions in highly stressful situations. In determining whether an officer acted reasonably, Rehnquist wrote for his Court, “the calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments — in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving — about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.”

Perhaps even more significantly, Graham left cops with little guidance on just what limits the Constitution places on use of force by police. As then-University of Virginia law professor William Stuntz wrote six years after Graham was handed down, “one searches in vain for any body of case law that gives” Graham’s vague reasonableness standard “some content.”

Yet, while some academics did criticize Graham’s approach early on, many prominent commentators outside of the academy only recently have started to think of Graham as a major wrong turn by the Supreme Court. Though three justices joined a partial dissent by Justice Harry Blackmun that criticized some parts of Rehnquist’s decision, all nine justices agreed with most of Rehnquist’s reasoning. That includes Justice Thurgood Marshall, the legendary civil rights lawyer.

But with the benefit of hindsight — and with the benefit of empirical evidence showing that clear legal rules lead to better policing — Graham now looks like a serious error by the Court. As Rachel Harmon, a law professor at the University of Virginia and author of The Law of the Police, told me in an email, “Graham offers a standard focused on judging the use of force after it has happened,” and it “offers very little guidance to officers and departments about how to use force.”

It does little, in other words, to advise police on how they can avoid conduct that might needlessly injure or kill a criminal suspect.

It’s unlikely that clearer rules would have saved George Floyd’s life. As Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo testified at Chauvin’s trial, Chauvin “absolutely” violated department policy when he knelt on Floyd’s neck after Floyd was already subdued and handcuffed.

But clear rules can ensure that cops tossed into a dangerous and uncertain situation can fall back on those rules, rather than making a potentially deadly decision with only their fear to guide them. As law professors Brandon Garrett and Seth Stoughton wrote in a 2017 article, Graham’s “‘split-second’ approach presents obvious problems from the perspective of law enforcement supervisors, who cannot provide meaningful guidance about or oversight of how officers react in the moment in an objectively reasonable way.”

Graham was correct about one thing. Officers do sometimes find themselves in “tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving” encounters where they have to make quick decisions about how to use force. But if we want these officers to make the right decision in these fraught moments, police departments need to provide them with clear guidance on how they should react.

And the Supreme Court’s vague “reasonableness” standard does nothing of the sort.

How clear rules can save lives

On a fall night in 1974, Officer Elton Hymon arrived at the scene of an alleged home break-in. He soon found Edward Garner, an eighth-grade boy weighing about 110 pounds, in the backyard of the home. Hymon later admitted that he was “reasonably sure” that Garner was unarmed. Yet, as Garner attempted to climb a fence at the edge of the yard, Hymon shot him in the back of the head and killed him.

Police later found a stolen purse and $10 in Garner’s possession.

The stunning thing about Garner’s death, which formed the basis of the Supreme Court’s decision in Tennessee v. Garner (1985), is that Officer Hymon had every reason to believe that he acted lawfully when he killed an unarmed 15-year-old boy who’d committed a fairly minor act of theft.

A Tennessee state law provided that, after an officer notifies a suspect of their intention to arrest the suspect, if “he either flee or forcibly resist, the officer may use all the necessary means to effect the arrest.” In other words, state law clearly permitted police to use deadly force against fleeing felony suspects.

Nor was Tennessee particularly unusual in this regard. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor noted in her dissenting opinion in Garner, in 1985 “nearly half the States” still followed a “venerable common law rule authorizing the use of deadly force if necessary to apprehend a fleeing felon.” As a 1736 treatise described that common law rule, “it is no felony” for a law enforcement officer to slay a suspect who “shall either resist or fly before they are apprehended.”

Garner, which abandoned that common law rule in a 6-3 decision, represents a “high-water mark” in the Court’s decisions governing use of force by police, according to Garrett and Stoughton. Unlike future decisions like Graham, Garner laid down a fairly clear rule that police could follow when determining whether to use deadly force against a fleeing suspect.

Where the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others, it is not constitutionally unreasonable to prevent escape by using deadly force. Thus, if the suspect threatens the officer with a weapon or there is probable cause to believe that he has committed a crime involving the infliction or threatened infliction of serious physical harm, deadly force may be used if necessary to prevent escape, and if, where feasible, some warning has been given.

Under Garner, in other words, police would no longer use their own judgment to decide whether to fire on a fleeing suspect. The Court told police when they could use deadly force — if the suspect “poses a threat of serious physical harm,” if they “threaten[] the officer with a weapon,” or when the suspect “committed a crime involving the infliction or threatened infliction of serious physical harm” — and thus informed police that they could not use deadly force against other fleeing suspects.

The impact of Garner on police behavior was swift and dramatic. According to a 1994 study by criminologist Abraham Tennenbaum, homicides committed by police dropped about 16 percent in the nation as a whole after Garner was decided. In states that previously followed the unconstitutional common law rule, “the reduction was approximately twenty-four percent (23.80%).”

A more recent appeals court decision bolsters the proposition that clear legal rules are effective in reducing police violence.

In Estate of Armstrong v. Village of Pinehurst (2016), the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit heard an allegation that police used excessive force when they repeatedly used a taser to subdue a mentally ill man, who died during his encounter with the police. Though the Fourth Circuit ruled in favor of the cops, on the theory that the officers were protected under a doctrine known as “qualified immunity,” the court also laid down several limits on the use of tasers by police.

“A police officer may only use serious injurious force, like a taser, when an objectively reasonable officer would conclude that the circumstances present a risk of immediate danger that could be mitigated by the use of force,” Judge Stephanie Thacker wrote for her court. She added that “‘physical resistance’ is not synonymous with ‘risk of immediate danger.’”

The Fourth Circuit oversees federal litigation in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, and a 2017 report by Reuters found that eight major cities in those states adopted stricter policies governing the use of tasers by police in the immediate wake of the Armstrong decision. These policies proved very successful in reducing the use of tasers.

In Baltimore, police used Tasers 47 percent fewer times last year than in 2015, according to records reviewed by Reuters. Deployments fell 65 percent in Virginia Beach; 60 percent in Greensboro, North Carolina; 55 percent in Charleston, South Carolina; and 52 percent in Huntington, West Virginia. Norfolk, Virginia, saw deployments plunge 95 percent.

As Professor Harmon told me, cases like Garner and Armstrong demonstrate that “when courts provide clearer guidance, it can make a difference.” Regarding the Armstrong case, Harmon told me that she “would want to know more about what officers used instead of tasers before throwing a victory parade, but it does illustrate the power of the law, when courts actually provide specific and meaningful guidance to the police.”

The Supreme Court moved away from giving clear guidance to police after Garner

The facts of Graham v. Connor are as shocking as the facts are in Garner, even though they did not result in anyone’s death.

Dethorne Graham was a Black man and a diabetic living in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1984, when he felt the beginning of an insulin reaction. Because such a reaction is treated with sugar, Graham asked a friend to drive him to a convenience store so he could buy some orange juice. But when they arrived at the store, there was a long line. Fearing he would not be able to buy the juice fast enough, Graham immediately left and asked his friend to take him to a friend’s house instead.

A police officer witnessed Graham’s very brief visit to the store and deemed it suspicious, because the cop pulled Graham and his friend over and would not let the two men go even after Graham’s friend explained Graham’s medical condition to the cop.

At one point, while Graham was waiting for the officer to let him go, he got out of the car, ran around it twice, and then passed out on the curb. Erratic behavior can be a symptom of a diabetic emergency, but the police apparently took Graham’s behavior as a sign of something sinister. After more officers arrived on the scene, Graham was handcuffed and forced face-down onto the car’s hood. When Graham told the police to check his wallet for a decal indicating that he is diabetic, an officer told him to “shut up.”

They eventually let him go after they received a report that Graham hadn’t done anything wrong at the convenience store.

And yet, despite these disturbing facts, the Supreme Court’s decision emphasized that police must deal with “tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving” situations when they encounter someone like Dethorne Graham.

Graham didn’t say that there are no limits on police conduct. In addition to holding that police must behave as a “reasonable officer” would behave, the Court also listed several factors that lower courts could consider when an officer is accused of excessive force, “including the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.”

But these were simply factors that could be considered, not bright-line rules that gave clear guidance to police about what kind of conduct is permitted. And the Graham case itself suggests that these factors offer little protection for many victims of excessive force.

After all, Graham himself committed no crime. He posed no threat to anyone, and he neither resisted arrest nor attempted to flee. But the Supreme Court sent his case back down to a trial court for a second hearing, and Graham ultimately lost his case.

One possible explanation for the lopsided vote in the Graham case — again, much of the decision was unanimous — is that the Supreme Court hands down decisions that are intended to be read and applied by lawyers and judges, not by police officers.

Despite Graham’s admonition that judges should evaluate an officer’s conduct without “the 20/20 vision of hindsight,” courts are in the business of hindsight. Lawsuits, by their very nature, do not arise until after an alleged legal violation has occurred. So, when an officer is hauled into Court due to allegations of excessive force, Graham reminds judges that they will probably know more about the circumstances that led to that allegation than the officer reasonably could have known at the time.

Yet, while Graham’s holding may offer a useful reminder to judges, we also know that police departments use decisions like Graham to shape their own policies and training manuals. And the sort of open-ended legal standards that judges are accustomed to applying to individual cases do not provide adequate guidance to police officers. A vague standard may be useful for a judge with a law degree, years of legal experience, and months to study the facts of a particular case. But such standards are inadequate for a cop who, often for the first and only time in their career, is caught in a dangerous situation with their gun drawn.

Nevertheless, since Graham, the Court has only doubled down on its preference for vague, flexible standards over clear legal rules governing police. In Scott v. Harris (2007), for example, the Court ruled in favor of police officers who, during a high-speed chase, rammed a suspect’s car off the road and caused him serious injury.

Yet, rather than evaluating this case under the fairly clear rule laid out in Garner — Garner, after all, was a case about when police can use potentially deadly force against a fleeing suspect — Scott arguably abandoned Garner’s approach altogether. While the fleeing motorist’s “attempt to craft an easy-to-apply legal test in the Fourth Amendment context is admirable,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the Court, “in the end we must still slosh our way through the factbound morass of ‘reasonableness.’”

“Whether or not Scott’s actions constituted application of ‘deadly force,’” Scalia added, “all that matters is whether Scott’s actions were reasonable.”

As one federal judge wrote just a few months after Scott was decided, under the Scott decision, “there is no Garner bright-line test.” There is only a vague “reasonableness” test.

One major problem with this approach is that it gives virtually no guidance to police departments when they draft their own policies guiding the use of force, and it can lead individual officers to guess what kind of behavior is acceptable if they are in a situation that might require force. As Harmon, the UVA professor, writes, the Supreme Court’s current framework “does not answer adequately the most basic questions about police uses of force: when a police officer may use force against a citizen, how much force he may use, and what kinds of force are permissible.”

Again, it’s unlikely that a more rules-based approach, like the one the Court took in Garner, could have saved George Floyd’s life. Chauvin appears to have shown such extraordinary disregard for his department’s policies that even his own police chief testified against him at his murder trial.

But clear rules can and do save lives. According to Tennenbaum’s study of Garner, that decision “reduced the total number of police homicides by approximately sixty homicides a year.”

That’s 60 people a year who would have died if the Court hadn’t given clear guidance to police officers.