The Infernal Triangle: The Spectacle of Policing

On February 25, an active-duty airman named Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., while yelling, “Free Palestine.” I’ll leave it to others to analyze the politics. I want to focus on something else that emerged from that most harrowing event: what first responders did on the scene before anyone even knew what was going on.

The first first responder, according to a witness, either a security guard or a cop, asked the man before him who was on fire, “May I help you, sir?” Then he ordered him to the ground.

The second first responder—a Secret Service agent, it turns out—then approached “with a gun drawn on the man after he collapses, still consumed by flames.” A picture of that moment emerged. It looks like he thought he was keeping a murderer from fleeing the scene of the crime.

It was the third responder who tried to actually put out the fire. As he did, he cried something that ought to live on in popular lore for the way it concentrates attention on just how sick our weapons-addicted society has become—like when a University of Florida student cried, “Don’t tase me, bro,” when six officers assaulted him for asking an embarrassing question of a politician in 2007.

He told the guy aiming the pistol, “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers!”

By the time enough of those arrived, it was too late. Bushnell died in the hospital.

People whose job it is to preserve public safety always have many tools at their disposal in any given situation. Choosing the most appropriate one is their job. The best tool might be a stern warning, or soothing words to talk someone down from doing something rash. It might be well-armed reinforcements with a battering ram, a psychiatric social worker, or in this case, a fire extinguisher. February 25 was a frightening token of how habitually our officers of public safety get that choice wrong, when anything but guns are required.

A little over a decade ago, investigative journalist Radley Balko wrote the best book about how this happened and why. He called it Rise of the Warrior Cop. He published an updated version in 2021 with a chapter on developments since it first appeared. That chapter is called “The Police, Unleashed.”

“The big issue,” he told me the other day via email, “is fear. We’re constantly telling cops that every call could be their last. We vastly exaggerate the threats they face. Police academies inundate cadets with videos of ambushes after traffic stops, even though such attacks are vanishingly rare. You have these ‘bulletproof warrior’ classes and the sheepdog mentality that tells cops they should be killing more people more often.”

I’ve recently been studying one of the most extraordinary consequences of all of that: a horrifying weapon that some of society’s worst nihilists have invented. It is also one of the most complex weapons humans have ever invented, even though firing it off is the easiest thing to do in the world. The explosive compound at its heart is our institutionalized fear of one another, the same fear that makes cops reach for guns instead of fire extinguishers. And all it takes to set it off is to squeeze a hair trigger: Just call 911.

AS PART OF MY BROADER PROJECT of documenting the role of right-wing violence in the U.S., I commanded Google to send me daily emails compiling the use of the word “swatting” in the news. Swatting, you probably know, means claiming a phony emergency is taking place at the address of someone the swatter wants to harass. I decided to start following the phenomenon after someone phoned in a claim on Christmas Day that Special Counsel Jack Smith had shot his wife.

I learned something unexpected: This is not really a growing tactic of MAGA intimidation. When used politically, in fact, it’s one of those rare phenomena for which the overused cliché “extremists on both sides” is actually appropriate. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) has recently been swatted; so has GOP House Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN). Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has been swatted eight times, if you trust her testimony—which on this subject if on nothing else, actually sounds quite believable.

This all is something to take very seriously. When police descended upon Nikki Haley’s home in December, cops drew guns on her elderly parents. People have died from swatting.

And one thing I learned from my Google alert is that some politicians, at least, are taking it seriously, introducing a slew of bills in both Congress and state legislatures to render punishment swift, sure, and uniform for a crime that has often fallen through the legal cracks. Republican politicians are these bills’ authors. Democrats are MIA on the issue.

Perhaps that owes to Democrats’ habitual timidity when it comes to doing much of anything about anything. Also, conversely, to a classic hallmark of Republican politicians: They’re always happy to find something new to scare people about, and to propose more punishment as the solution.

But it also implicates another hallmark of Republican politics. You know how they’re always seeking to appropriate money for some dread disease once someone close to them contracts it, even if they’re content to let the rest of the health care system rot? A similar narcissism is at work in their newfound attention to the swatting problem. It has been going on for some time now. It’s only the increase in attacks on politicians that is novel. The most frequent offenders, however, are kids targeting their high schools, and even their elementary schools, in places as diverse as rural central Georgia; bucolic Nassau County suburbs; bedroom communities surrounding Washington, D.C.; and in one extraordinary but not unheard-of incident, 30 simultaneous calls across Iowa in one day.

This represents something no Republican ever seems to want to deal with, ever: a deep-seated, society-wide social problem—a problem with the same root as officers pulling guns instead of fire extinguishers when confronted with burning human beings. The swatting stories you’re increasingly reading in the news, driven by self-absorbed Republican politicians warding off an admittedly vexatious irritation, misses the real story: the decades-long gestation of an infrastructure of fear, led by Republicans but abetted by Democrats, that has made unleashing warlike mayhem upon innocents so easy that even a child can do it.

THE SWAT TEAM WAS LARGELY the creation of a single man, a fantastically racist, legendarily weapons-besotted cop from Los Angeles named Daryl Gates. Shaken by the 1965 racial uprising in Watts, he received the blessing from his boss, Chief William Parker—popularizer of the motto that cops are “the thin blue line between chaos and civilization”—to create units armed as if for war. They were originally called, internally, the “shake, rattle, and roll boys” (“Roust anything strange that moves on the streets,” was their charge); then D Platoon; then finally “SWAT,” which originally stood for “Special Weapons Attack Team.” Cops can’t be seen as “attacking,” Gates was told. So the acronym became “Special Weapons and Tactics.”

Special weapons and tactics were all the rage in those days among police forces in riot-torn cities across the U.S. In a classic 1968 book, Garry Wills catalogued them. They included a gun powerful enough to separate a head from a body, and a vehicle designed for crashing through thick Vietnam jungles, which Chrysler sold to local constabularies with a sizzle reel depicting it “walking over a ’53 Chevy.” Wills wrote, “The government is still trying to decide whether the Stoner gun should be adopted in Vietnam. The Detroit police have decided.” They ordered a hundred.

In 1974, a furious gun battle with Patty Hearst’s Symbionese Liberation Army, broadcast live, made Gates’s SWAT team a TV star. Ordinary Americans—those not in the line of fire—apparently loved the performance. The next year, ABC debuted the police drama S.W.A.T. in prime time. This writer has an early memory of begging his parents to be allowed to stay up late enough to watch it. Spin-offs included lunch boxes, a board game, and, Balko reports, “die-cast miniatures of the S.W.A.T.-mobile.”

SWAT teams proliferated like kudzu—not least because the federal government subsidized them. The first federal law helping local police access military equipment was signed, naturally, by Ronald Reagan. But Balko reports that cities also used Bill Clinton’s signature policing initiative, the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program, to bulk up not community-oriented policing but the SWAT teams.

The 1990 National Defense Authorization Act included a provision that would come to be known as the “1033 program,” to let cities buy surplus military equipment on the cheap, a practice that exploded after 9/11. Tiny towns with a few dozen cops started snapping up gear like nine-ton BearCats, basically an armored tank on wheels. That was sold by its manufacturer with a sizzle reel as well: Over AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck,” cops “dressed in camouflage toted assault weapons, piled in and out of the Bearcat … then attached a battering ram to the front of the vehicle, which they then used to punch a hole in the front door of a house, into which they injected canisters of tear gas.”

And though Wikipedia only dates “swatting,” the verb, to 2008, swatting the practice drove the plot of the very first episode of S.W.A.T.—when a miscreant called in a report of a fictional domestic dispute, so cops could be in position for a cop-hating sniper to mow them down. That was why America needed SWAT teams, apparently.

Except they didn’t, really. The most shocking part of Balko’s book is all the instances in which SWAT raids failed, or backfired, while the boring conventional method—knocking on a suspect’s door—often succeeds just fine. Balko ends each chapter with statistics. By 1975, America had 500 SWAT teams. By 2008, there were almost that many raids by the SWAT team in lowly Toledo, Ohio, alone.

You come away with the unmistakable sense that what has driven this growth most is the sheer pleasure of the thing. Also, that, when hammers are everywhere, everything looks like a nail: The “law of the instrument” is the philosophical term of art. And so, when confronted with a man on fire, the first thing the warrior cop reaches for is a gun.

Or, to take another example, a taser. “Your lead actually reminds me of this case,” Balko responded when I told him my plans for this essay, linking to the tale of another man about to attempt suicide by self-immolation, in Arlington, Texas. He was holding a gas can. The smell of petroleum was in the air. What did a cop do next?

Bro, he tased him, igniting the man, who burned to death, and incinerating the house.

SO WHAT IS to be done?

When it comes to individual officers like armed clowns who could have saved a life with a fire extinguisher but did not, one obvious answer is to pull back the absurd policy that armed agents of the state are entitled to “qualified immunity” to protect them from the consequences of their mistakes. That’s what the Fifth Circuit ruled in the Arlington case, in a decision upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

When it comes to swatting, one obvious point to start with is that it is at bottom a crime of spectacle—and that anything that de-spectacularizes policing would attenuate the socially addictive thrill of kids getting to watch flak-jacketed men with M16s clamber out of riot tanks to descend on their school cafeteria on pizza day.

That, of course, is a tough ask. It’s a structural shift. But most of the answers to the underlying problem are. Balko suggested to me that police forces could begin “valorizing not shooting people. Drum it into cops that it takes a lot more courage to hold your fire and wait to see if maybe the gun that ten-year-old kid is holding is a toy.”

Which implicates another structural problem: police unions. “A few years ago, the LAPD announced a new award for cops who defuse a potentially dangerous situation without lethal force,” Balko told me. “The union went apeshit, and said that just the act of giving such an award would put cops’ lives in danger.”

Balko is about to publish an exposé of the way many police are trained to counter a literally invented medical condition, “excited delirium,” which supposedly produces superhuman strength and tolerance for pain. “The Minneapolis training material on ED,” he told me, “included a training slide with a photo of the Hulk.”

Maybe systems to cross-check addresses with a database of possible targets could help. More research is necessary. Boring, wonky, technocratic research. You know, the kind of thing Republicans, for whom the only answer to any social problem is more punishment, are constitutionally incapable of honoring.

It is, however, the kind of thing Democrats, at their best, do quite well—that is, when they’re not slavishly chasing after the Republicans’ panicky political cues. Maybe some of them are at work on it. If so, it hasn’t made it into my Google alert yet.