“I’m sorry that happened to you, Sigrid. I sincerely am. But it was an ambiguous situation. You had to act. Maybe Roy did too. As you said, it was almost the same.”
Sigrid really had wanted Burim to halt. To stop. To come to his senses. To see her as someone there to help him. His girlfriend, Adrijana, had been the one that tipped off the police about the gang. She was born in Serbia and adopted in Norway, having been an orphan from the war. Her Norwegian was native and her countenance was that of a young woman from the wealthier part of town—the west end.
Why would a girl like that, a modern girl, a stylish and educated and trusting girl who walked into her police station to help save a lost child, be involved with a young man whom Sigrid would have to shoot like a rabid dog? It didn’t make sense. But there he’d been, running toward her with a knife. The analysis and backstory told her that she was not in danger. These were just suppositions, though. Ideas of the mind. Hopes about human nature, hopes about relationships and the kind of people who love, about female judgment and dating bad boys—all of that came from later in evolution. That wasn’t the part of her brain that was firing in that moment. She wasn’t building conceptual models and running regressions on probability. She wasn’t thinking with her cerebral cortex; this was her limbic system kicking in—fight or flight. Eat or be eaten. She had been looking at a man with a knife charging toward her with the inertia of a bear. How could she have been expected to ignore that? She shot him. The nine-millimeter round was not entirely effective, because it had limited stopping power. So she shot him again and this time in the center of the heart.
She has wondered, though: Am I simply exonerating myself by saying that I didn’t have the time or resources to think of something better? Could I have stood aside and let him run past, allowing the back-up units to later surround him after he was winded and possibly more self-possessed, and feeling less irrational?
And what about Roy? If Jeffrey had had a real gun, a leg shot would not have ended the confrontation. The need to make a decision had been immediate. Wasn’t it fair for Irv to make the case that the police officer was doing his best?
Yes. It would have been fair. Irv was right.
If.
If the very same officer were to ignore the laughter of the other children, and the presence of the woman in the kitchen window casually washing dishes, and the relaxed expression on her face as she watched her son frolic on her property with his friends, and the youthfulness of Jeffrey’s movements and body language, and the time between the emergency phone call and the actual confrontation—almost fifteen minutes—during which time nothing bad had happened when that same officer arrived.
If you ignore everything observable that would have contradicted Roy’s presumptions, then of course it would have been fair to say he had only been doing his best. Are we really saying that officers should not be held accountable to situational assessment? To specificity? To actual reality?
Ambiguous?
“No, Irv,” Sigrid says as the waitress takes a hamburger to a patron who receives it without pleasure. “My situation was ambiguous because Burim was charging toward me with a knife and didn’t respond to my calls to halt. There was no time delay and there was nothing else I could have used as a cue. But for Roy, it was entirely different. You know . . . I’ve heard people talk about institutionalized racism before. It’s one of those terms that floats around these days. But they always talk about it like it’s a psychological condition or a ghost in the police machinery. I never really understood what people meant. But in the past month I have stared at that idea, from a Norwegian perspective, in terms of what happened between me and Burim, and now I’m looking at what happened with Roy and Jeffrey. And I think I’ve come to understand something. This is what I think it means: It means that your policies, your doctrine, your training, your classroom education, your academic credit system, your textbooks, your case studies, your decision-making tools, your final exams, your grand jury procedures, your measures of success for promotions, the qualities you celebrate . . . all the tools that institutions use to create professionals and direct their actions . . . all shift the risk of violence during ambiguous encounters onto the citizens, but it’s the moral duty of the state—the social contract itself—to better manage and better shoulder that risk. Because in a democracy, Irv, the citizen cannot live in fear of the state and its shortcomings. It is simply not acceptable. There has to be a relentless commitment to self-improvement. The case of Jeffrey Simmons was not ambiguous because everything that told the officer that he wasn’t in danger was ignored or interpreted through the fact that Jeffrey was black. It was the officer—not Jeffrey—who should have read the situation differently. It was the officer who should have been trained and required to make that situation unambiguous through careful measures to protect everyone involved, and especially the people he was sworn to serve and protect. And you should know that.”
The corn muffin and bagel arrive.
The corn muffin’s mushroom head has been lopped off and the two sections fried in butter on the grill and then semi-reassembled on the plate, to be served with two additional pats of butter wrapped in golden paper that glisten with ice crystals. The bagel has been slathered in cream cheese and heaped with thirty dollars’ worth of salmon for a charge of $4.95 plus mystery-tax. The woman returns with fresh coffee to the depleted cups and says, “Anything
