Yesterday, Talk of the Sound reported, New Rochelle Police Draw Guns on Black Youths Over Snow Ball Fight NSFW. This took place in New Rochelle, NY — a town of about 80,000 people just north of New York City. In the video that I embedded below, a police officer seems to be detaining and searching two men who were having a snowball fight. But he does so at gunpoint. According to some sources, the police had been called because of a report of someone with a gun. It’s possible, but it sounds more likely to be a justification after the fact.

What I wonder is how this can possibly be correct procedure. The officer walks up to one man who is knelling on the ground. He is holding his pistol in one hand and searching the man with the other hand. If the man on the ground had been so inclined, he could have grabbed the officer’s weapon. Guns are not an especially good weapon up this close. And then, after searching the first man, he walks to the second — leaving him prone to the first man. If these had actually been dangerous men, the foul mouthed officer could have been taken down or even killed.

According to Talk of the Sound, this was not some inexperienced officer. They are not providing the name of him at this time, but they did report, “We will say that he is a Superior Officer (i.e., Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain)…” Of course, I’ve never particularly bought into the whole idea that our policing problems are due to a lack of experience and training. There are bigger problems — particularly the culture of police departments. One thing is very clear in this video: the officer is not there to serve. He’s there to bully everyone.

So I think that the officer knows this is not a case where dangerous men are running around with guns. If he did, he would have responded in a different way. He would have put his gun away and called the other officers in a bit closer. My best guess — from years of interacting with police officers — was that it was an exciting opportunity. Two young black men were having a snowball fight, so he brought his car to a sudden stop and jumped out of the car. When the young men didn’t immediately respond to him, he drew his gun. Or he drew his gun immediately. And later that night when he went home, he told his wife about what a dangerous job he has.

Another interesting thing in the video is that the officer repeatedly looks toward the camera. He actually seems a whole lot more concerned about it than he is about the lawless snowball fighters. And I suspect that it is the presence of the camera that caused the whole thing to be resolved so quickly and amicably. It’s possible by that point, the officer realized that he looked like a total jerk. But I’m not sure shame is something that many officers allow themselves to feel.

Ultimately, this is as good an example of the problem with our policing that you will find. Why was it necessary for the officer to draw his gun? It clearly wasn’t. But as I’ve written too much around here, police have convinced themselves that their jobs are really dangerous, when they are not. And as a result, police officers tend to be pussies who would rather kill innocent children than risk the slightest threat to themselves. In this case, everything worked out well. But pulling a gun is dangerous, and should be a last resort, not de rigueur.

Update 3 February 2015 9:40 am

The Daily News reported, Video Showing New Rochelle Police Officer Pulling Gun on Teens Not What It Seems: Cops. According to them, when they showed up, one person put something in his waistband and ran. The other officer chased him, but didn’t catch him. I’m not sure what to make of that. Regardless, why was it necessary to hold a gun on the people who did not run? Why was the officer yelling obscenities at the young men when they were already on the ground with their hands in the air? And why did the officer search them with his gun still drawn? I am more convinced than ever that this is a great example of a badly trained police officer with a chip on his shoulder.

It’s always fun to read Paul Krugman when he’s angry. And he was angry on Friday, I See Very Serious Dead People. He discussed a number of things, but I want to focus on one thing that he almost wrote about. One of his main complaints with the world of economic policy debate is the way that the very people who claim to be pushing “serious” policy ideas are the ones pushing useless and, very often, counterproductive policies. “I know that people who airily dismiss the austerity debate and all that and demand that we focus on the long run think they’re taking a brave stand; but you know, they aren’t.” That’s about right.

It often seems to me that talking about the “big picture” and the “long run” and “structural issues” are just a way to appear to be doing something, without actually doing anything. This problem is global, but it is especially typical of the United States. I noted this after 9/11. An obvious change would have been to put pilots in a separate compartment from the passengers. But that would have cost a lot of money. So instead, we got entry x-rays and bans on shampoo. But overall, it was just very clear that the government felt it more important to look like it was protecting us than it was to actually protect us.

With economic policy, the solutions to our problems are pretty simple. We went through this in the 1930s, and we know what works. But instead, we get the exact same policy prescriptions that failed back them. The most annoying of these is the idea that businesses aren’t hiring because American workers just don’t have the skills that employers want. This same thing was said in the late 1930s, but somehow, when the government started spending in expectation of World War II, those same workers were plenty skilled. And after the war, they continued to be. Funny that. Even funnier is the fact that so many establishment figures today recycle this same point without a hint of irony.

But I don’t think that they are ignorant. The purpose of claiming that the problem is a “skills gap” is that it doesn’t have a clear solution. The only thing that can really be done is to have the government pay for workers to go back to school and get those skills that businesses are supposedly so desperate for. And that means it is always at least a couple of years away. And when the last crop of students finds that they aren’t any more employable than they were before, no one cares. It isn’t like there are labor reporters everywhere disseminating the information.

Our economic problems are just a matter of doing what worked before: stimulus, which used to be the standard response to a recession, regardless of political party. This was true right up to the last Republican president. Our economy would be booming right now if Obama had grown the government the way that Reagan and the two Bushes grew it. But we couldn’t do that! So instead, much of the Washington punditry — including many so called liberals — call for mysterious, complicated, and slow policy. Needless to say, such pundits don’t have to worry about losing their jobs. So the pain they push on the rest of us and the years of bad times their policy preferences guarantee are no big deal.

Economic policy is not rocket science. When people claim that it is, all they are doing is arguing that we do nothing. It is kind of like global warming denial: we just don’t know enough; we need more study; there are no simple answers. It’s all nonsense. It’s all stalling. It’s just a way for the power elite to hang onto power.