I’d say that rather than a lack of humanity, perhaps it was an abundance.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine that you are alone walking down a isolated street in an unfamiliar city. Suddenly you find your way blocked by three strangers, one of whom demands your money. What do you do?

The average person is in a position of unequal power and the differential represents the degree to which you have options. In this specific case, turning over your wallet may be the best choice.

But if you’re an Olympic sprinter, you might calculate your chance of outrunning the thugs is excellent, turn and bolt. If the thugs had known that beforehand, they might have either shifted tactics (two in front of, one behind) or simply have waited for more suitable prey.

Conflict always occurs within the context of relative power and the human capacity to rise above our best nature, or submerge into our worst. When anyone, police or criminal or civilian, is armed with some form of tactical advantage, it changes the way they react when confronted with conflict.

As to the aforementioned situation, say you are not an Olympic runner. Instead, you are an overweight middle aged person with a licensed concealed carry weapon and a lot of training in self defense tactics. Here, unbeknownst to the thugs, the power differential is very different. You have more power than they know, thus more options. Your first move is to simply toss them your wallet hoping that will be the end of it. But if the thugs decide it might be satisfying to submerge into their darker side and beat or kill you, running isn’t a reasonable option so you produce your weapon. Now, the power differential has shifted to favor you. Each step in the dance is like moving a piece on a chessboard. The end is always either resignation or checkmate.


Police, by definition walk around with a significant amount of tactical force. Thus, the power differential is overwhelming in their favor. But without constant training and reinforcement on tactics and techniques that inherent power differential can corrupt in moments leading to events like this.

Ask yourself this, in what world would any rational person make a conscious choice to do something like this? Given body cams, street cameras, etc. every one of them would have known that they would be easily held accountable. Why would they choose to participate in something that would inevitably lead to such horrible outcomes both personally and to the victim?

As long as society has to put such power in the hands of humans to offset criminal activity , it will be responsible for the training and oversight necessary to mitigate against the corruption such power inherently contains. Unfortunately, measures that “defund” police cannot have the desired effect since training and oversight are usually the first things to get cut when organizations are under financial strain.