About 1,000 people are killed each year by police in America. Sometimes this lethal force is justified, other times it is not. One unassailable justification for such force would be if a suspect was running toward an officer while screaming and brandishing a large knife over his head.
This is what happened on Sept. 13 in Lancaster, Pa., when an officer responded to a domestic violence call and was met by a clearly unwell Ricardo Munoz. In a horrifying still image from the officer’s body camera, Munoz appears to let out a primal scream as he lunges at the officer with knife in hand before being shot and killed seconds later.
To any reasonable person this would be an open-and-shut case. The video proves that there are no doubts as to whether the officer acted appropriately in using deadly force. What would the alternative have been? Should the officer, whose life was very much under threat, have dropped his weapon and tried to wrestle Munoz to the ground? Munoz had a history of aggravated assault and was a threat to his community. Last year, he was charged with stabbing four neighbors, including a 16-year-old boy. When police arrived on that scene, the suspect was holding a knife to his own throat.
Predictably, the public hysteria and moral panic that followed Munoz’s death made no sense politically or morally. Violent protesters smashed the windows of the police station and the post office, vandalized police cruisers and pelted police officers with bricks and glass bottles.
But distinctions have to be made. It’s certainly possible that racial bias accounts for some of the police killings that happen each year, but this was not one of them. If you charge a police officer with a knife, you are likely to die, regardless of the color of your skin. To use this shooting as evidence of the same injustice, for example, as an unarmed Antwon Rose II getting shot in the back while running away is plainly disingenuous.
This is an entirely different situation and it cannot, in good faith, be added to the litany of Black victims who have fallen, unjustly, at the hands of law enforcement. That the Lancaster rioters tried to collapse this distinction proves that they were simply waiting for anything that resembled police misconduct to practice their anarchy. We as a nation now have to expect that every police killing of a nonwhite suspect, regardless of the details, will now be met with arson, rioting and vandalism.
The crux of this issue is not the officer’s self-defense; it is how someone so dangerous to himself and society was both out on bail and not on his meds. Why should this officer be punished for what very well may have been a suicide by cop? Munoz was supposed to go on trial for his 2019 stabbings the day after he was killed.
It’s been argued that police officers do not have the mental-health training to deal with such individuals, but would we rather send a social worker to deal with the knife-wielding Munoz? What about the bloody scene that Munoz perpetrated last year? Would a social worker have been able to detain this very dangerous suspect?
This is all a reminder that police have an almost impossible job. With upward of 60 million encounters with civilians per year, and about 10 million corresponding arrests, police are asked to do a great deal more than they are trained to do. That’s all the more reason to support them and provide them with more training and resources, not less.
Outside the police station in Lancaster, the rioters, without thought or context, chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” and “No justice, no peace.” But justice in this particular case would mean that this police officer does not lose his job.
First Published: September 20, 2020, 4:00 a.m.
