04/08/15 – Raeford Davis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
So, I don't know if you've seen the footage, but it's all over the internet.
Guy named Walter Scott shot in the back, murdered in the back by a cop from Charleston, South Carolina, and on the phone, well, the headline at the New York Times is, South Carolina officer is charged with murder in black man's death.
Maybe the fact that he's charged is the most newsworthy thing here, but we got Rayford Davis on the line.
He used to be an officer in South Carolina, and he's now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
That's LEAP online, I think, leap.org.
Welcome back to the show, Rayford.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thank you.
Yes, I'm a member of LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
I'm speaking for myself today as a fellow police officer from the same department as Officer Michael Slager.
How long has it been since you were there?
I was there from 2002 until 2007.
I worked that very same area.
As a matter of fact, I chased down a couple of bad guys through that very same wood line cut that you see the video.
I have my biopic from the police department, my uniform, an American flag, just like the one they're showing of him.
I wouldn't be surprised if he has my old badge number.
It could have been you, but you never shot anybody in the back to death in that same grassy area while you were chasing them?
Why not?
Well, I came really close.
I did.
It very easily could have been me killing someone in a similar manner.
All right.
Well, so, well, tell us that story, then, closest to the game.
Yeah, I'll tell you one.
I responded.
We had shots fired, somebody shooting in an apartment complex, and I saw the car approaching.
A kid jumped out, black kid.
We met eye to eye.
He jumped out of the car.
Ran through an old used trailer mobile home sales lot, and he was running through the woods, and he reached in down into his pants, and I'm watching him like, oh, crap.
He's going to pull a gun.
I know it, and I stopped for a second.
I drew my gun.
I pointed it right at him as he was running.
He pulled that pistol out of his hand and reached back with his elbow, and I could tell he, you know, I took all the slack out of the trigger.
I was gritting my teeth.
I was like, oh, my God, I'm going to have to shoot this kid, and at the last moment, you could tell he decided not to turn around and square up with me, and he tossed the gun into the woods.
He ran a good bit more, ended up catching him.
It took forever to find that gun.
I knew he threw it.
I even put it out on the radio.
He's got a, what do you call it, 10-32?
He's got a 10-32, and, you know, so it freaked everybody else out, and they come flying.
You know, and I would have ended up shooting the kid in the back, and, hey, if we hadn't have found the gun, I would have been in a very similar position.
All right.
Well, now, but, well, yeah, maybe, except this guy's caught on video planting the stun gun that he said the kid ran off with.
Yeah, yeah, right, and in no way am I trying to justify that.
Yeah, well, I mean, but this gets right to the question, though, is, you know, at what point, I mean, you held your fire all the way until he still, he has a gun in his hand.
You know he's got a gun in his hand.
You still haven't shot him yet, and when you see him throw it instead of aiming it at you, you didn't shoot him, so it sounds like, you know, that's the standard, right?
You don't shoot unless you have to.
Why don't you shoot if you think you have an opportunity to kill somebody and probably get away with it, which seems to be the standard by which this guy was going?
You're absolutely right.
You know, here's what I think.
Maybe people get an idea of what he was not thinking, but when you train with a taser, you're taught that if you're disarmed and the subject attempts to use the taser on you, that that could be considered justification for use of deadly force.
And so I think that's what he tried to poorly apply is that he considered the guy hitting the taser away as, oh, he's trying to take it and use it on me, so not I can use deadly force, but I should, and it just all fell apart right there, and he never got out of that decision loop and followed through, even though it took him a long time, which is a few seconds.
Yeah, I mean, and he's not even, he's just standing there like he's taking target practice, the cop is.
Yeah, he used good form, right?
I wish they would train you a little more on when you should shoot someone instead of using a proper stance.
This is your fear-based, militarized training in your war on drugs and spades.
All right, well, so, now you were there in 2002, you said is when you started.
We had a war on drugs in at least the beginnings of a terror war then.
Did you see the time that you were in there, things got more and more militarized, the cops became more and more like soldiers, or how do you fit in that time frame of your experience there?
I don't think much has changed.
You know, the neighborhoods I worked in right there, they've had problems since I was a kid in the 80s.
Police officers have been working those neighborhoods and being aggressive in their traffic stops and trying to fight crime in a proactive manner, and this is the risk you run by following that type of policy.
And so...
So, it's the same, it hasn't changed, and it was that way when I was there.
Yeah, but see, I think this is kind of different than, well, the training is so bad.
I mean, believe me, I think it's a problem when you dress these guys up in all this combat gear that they get to play in like they're Navy SEALs, and that's pretty bad and all that.
But what we're really talking about is these guys are a bunch of thugs, and they're killers just like they were in the 80s, and just like they were in the 90s, and just like they were in the aughts, and now they are in the teens.
They kill people when they think they have a chance to do it and get away with it, they take their shot.
Just like this guy did.
He wasn't in distress.
He just stood there, propping up one hand with the other, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, until he got the heart shot.
For, I mean, it seemed to me, just from watching, the most reasonable explanation is because he wanted to, not because of any kind of training loop or anything, it was his chance to kill a guy.
Yeah.
Well, you think about that when you're a kid and you play Cowboys and Indians, and do you want a chance to kill somebody?
No.
It's a little more nebulous than that.
You want to serve and test yourself.
I want to put myself in a dangerous position and come out as the cowboy in the white hat and face down the bad guys.
That's kind of what you believe in.
That's why people join the military in the same way as law enforcement.
You have that type of mindset.
That's kind of what I had.
You don't want to harm anyone unintentionally, but you put yourself in that position.
Well, you know, that's the thing, though.
There's a stat that came out the other day where the cops in America have killed more people in 2015 than the British cops killed in the entire 20th century.
Wow.
Yeah, I think there's something going on there where somehow these guys are able to protect life and property and get in a test of their manhood and come out okay without killing people day in and day out like it happens in this country.
I know the populations are different, but still, this isn't a difference of per capita, right?
Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right.
My big issue is as a law enforcement officer, you have to really fundamentally question what you are doing when you get out with someone and stop them.
You're depriving them of their liberty.
You're putting yourself in a position where you're going to use violence against them.
You better make sure that they have actually committed some type of real crime that is actually harmed someone else.
If this guy had taken a hatchet to a daycare center, then we'd be having a different conversation.
Hey, can you do one more segment with us, Rayford, or do you got to go?
I'd be glad to.
Thank you.
Okay, great.
Hang tight right there.
We'll be right back, y'all.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Rayford Davis.
He's a former cop from North Charleston, South Carolina, and now he's a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, just speaking for himself on today's show.
We're talking about the epidemic of police murders across this country, and more specifically, this story in the New York Times breaking from last night about this guy, Walter Scott, who was actually even being charged with murder because ...
No, the cop who killed him is, because of how blatant the murder is.
They couldn't even spend this as a voluntary manslaughter or anything else.
It's so blatant, you can look at the video probably all over the place now.
Michael T. Slager is the name of the officer that murdered him.
That gets to my next question right there.
That seems to me to be the biggest part of this story.
As we talked about, there are hundreds of people killed by cops already this year, and they almost always get away with it.
The most newsworthy part of this is that a cop is being held accountable, and of course, it's directly attributable to the fact that this video exists.
Without it, he would have skated.
He was already quite successful in the police union and the lawyers and everybody were quite successful in getting his narrative out about how this guy left him no choice but to gun him down.
It's only because this very brave citizen stood there and filmed it with their phone and were able to get that footage out in a way it couldn't be buried that this has even happened.
That seems to be, other than the personal responsibility and the choices of the gunman in this case, that seems to me to be the second biggest culprit here is the sovereign immunity or the qualified immunity, in real terms, the impunity that the cops know that they have when it comes to this kind of thing.
That they will be given such a benefit of the doubt that anyone that they come into a lethal conflict with like this will be condemned, will be presumed guilty, and that they just don't have any reason to fear the inside of a prison cell no matter who they kill.
That's why this one is so shocking, more than just how clear the footage is, too.
I guess that's a big part of it, but the fact that, wow, charged with murder.
I saw on Fox News this morning, the expert said, this is unprecedented.
I wonder whether you think, I guess, first of all, if you agree with me, that's a big part of the problem here.
Then, I guess, secondly, maybe you think that this is changing.
Is this an example of a change finally coming?
That whole sovereign immunity, your morality doesn't change when you put your badge on and how you can be immune from laws that would make you a criminal if you were not a police officer.
It's like, what do they call it, a moral hazard.
It makes you put yourself in dangerous positions.
Let me stand up for my leadership at that department.
Even when I was there, they were very aggressive towards being fair with officers who broke the law.
Man, I saw a whole bunch of them get charged with things.
They tried very hard not to play favorites and also were very concerned about the relationship with the minority communities and worked very hard to do that.
Of course, we'd have incidents like this that set you back a long way.
I want to give props to them for that.
That sovereign immunity is just to put you in these terrible positions that you normally would not be in.
That economic phrase, moral hazard, that means like a bank being promised that they'll be bailed out no matter how bad of business decisions that they make or anything like that.
Bob Murphy explained where they pass seatbelt laws, people start driving more dangerously.
There's always that trade-off, that perverse incentive that gets built into how people operate.
Let me ask you this.
This is something that I only ever actually hear this when I hear someone defining the supposed difference between a law enforcement officer and a soldier.
That is that a soldier's job is to destroy enemies and a cop's job is to protect the rights of the bad guy, of the suspect.
You're wanted for 10 counts of murder.
My job is making sure that you get transported to the local jail cell safely so that you can stand trial and have a chance to confront your accusers and the rest of it.
When that is the premise, assuming that that's the premise, that cops are ever even taught that at all, then it would seem to go hand in hand with that, that they're supposed to always use the minimum amount of force all the way up on the sliding scale and only use deadly force, never to enforce their will, but only to protect theirs or other innocent life.
Really, in an immediate and proportional sense, the same way that any other human has the right to use a weapon in lethal self-defense or in defense of another person in immediate and proportional self-defense, right?
Law enforcement pays lip service to that, but you're right.
Not only is there militarized in equipment, but also a militarized mindset.
Two important things.
You're almost treated like when you're on a stop that you're storming the beach at Normandy and you move forward.
Don't stop.
There's the enemy.
Don't back down.
Also, just follow orders.
You've got your orders.
Go that way and don't stop.
That is inappropriate for law enforcement.
That has creeped in and this is the result.
Yeah.
I even ...
I'm sorry for repeating myself, audience, but I heard this one the other day where I was reading in Facebook comments where people were complaining about one of these guys getting shot and the cop was saying, hey, look.
It's just like Iraq out there.
Then other people were saying like, hey, man, all due respect, but no, it's not either.
I don't care what happened to you when you were in the infantry over there in the bush years, but this is our hometown, man, and we're not Iraqis as though that would really give them a right to go around doing what they do, but in context you understand.
He had to be told this by his victims in the civilian population.
Apparently his commanders never got around to saying, welcome home.
Now you can put about 90% of your martial skills on the shelf.
You don't need them here.
Yes.
I also want to talk PTSD between ... relation between military and police officers.
When you harm someone like this, even when it's legally justified, a lot of these non-crime laws that you enforce, you cause moral injury to yourself by harming people.
Even if you don't understand what you're doing, particularly like enforcing drug laws, that type of thing, you harm yourself and not dealing with that will cause damage to your moral fiber a lot like when we don't recognize a military that fights wrongful wars.
I see what you mean.
Just helping the bankers kick the old ladies out of their house all day and enforcing ... putting people in jail for owing on old fines and these kinds of things.
You start to internalize, I guess I am a son of a bitch and that's why I do this.
Here I thought I joined up to help people, but I'm helping the government at the expense of the people, but water under the bridge, now what am I going to do, quit and get a real job?
Now they internalize it and become the state themselves.
You do, and you're violating natural laws of others, life, liberty, and property.
That makes sense.
That causes moral harm to yourself.
The big deal, we criminalize vast amounts of non-violent behavior like drug use, gun ownership, child support, court orders, vehicle registration violations.
It creates countless unnecessary police interactions and more opportunity for someone, citizen or a cop, to be harmed.
There's rightly a fear of oppressive unjust arrest and a never-ending crucible of jail serving fine paying court appearing warrant issuing justice systems that serves no one but themselves.
Police officers have to be aware they're the ones that are going to face that moral burden.
They're the ones that are going to face prison when they enforce these laws.
They have to take that personal responsibility themselves and reflect on what they deem to enforce.
Just because your supervisor or the Supreme Court tells you it's okay, it might not be.
You're going to pay the price for it.
Right now they're on this rear guard action trying to ban videotaping them and this kind of thing when the change that's really killing them is the cell phone video camera and Twitter and Facebook where every local police abuse story becomes a national story and the network news doesn't get to decide.
The people's social media decides whether these are national news stories or not and so that's a lot of pressure on them where they never had to feel it before and so they're trying to criminalize documenting their crimes and this kind of thing.
So I wonder then, because I don't think that's going to hold, but I totally see the race angle on this, but I admit that I get a bit depressed when the main slogan is Black Lives Matter when you mentioned lip service before to them being our protectors instead of our overlords.
Any cop, any killer cop would say of course Black Lives Matter.
So that argument is one, but then the question is what are we going to do about it, right?
And so my best idea is state laws that say, and they're beginning along these lines in I think Wisconsin or Minnesota, I forget which, where hey, if there's a controversial cop killing then you have to bring in the DA from another county in the state.
You have to bring in a special prosecutor from some other jurisdiction in the state who does not have a dog and these guys hunt who can come in and I mean there's got to be some kind of, we're not talking about, I wouldn't recommend federalizing every one of these as a civil rights prosecution because that's a much higher bar in the first place and it means many fewer instances of even attempting accountability.
I wonder whether you think of that or what you think of that or what kind of policies you recommend or your organization recommend that people can get behind something solid of what to do about it now.
Yes, Black Lives Matter.
Now let's encode that in the law somehow where it sticks.
Yeah, removing sovereign immunity, period, and making a police officer liable and departments for their actions and not just, hey, we meant well and we kind of tried to follow the law even if we didn't, we're still good.
Yeah, but you still got the local DA and the local grand jury that just love these guys and know them so well and just that's such a perverse incentive right there, don't you think?
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm all for repealing sovereign immunity first, yesterday, as soon as we can.
Absolutely.
Well, we have a state law enforcement that investigates every incident like this, so I'm not sure.
It may have been the Illinois Charleston Police Department that charged him, but it was probably a sled.
We have an independent review of incidents like this in South Carolina already.
That's good.
Maybe that's a big part of this, why he's been charged.
You know, the murder charge, did he have malice?
I got to say he didn't.
I know you're not going to agree with that, but I don't think he fired his gun in malice.
You know what it is, it's that last fatal shot, he pauses to line it up a little bit more carefully and then blam through his heart, you know?
I don't know, man, that's pretty bad.
And then the way he frames him up by dropping the stun gun next to him, caught red-handed.
Yeah, I don't know about that.
That could be, hey, once he's done what he's done, his brain in decision-making was already clouded, and so after that, he probably doesn't even know what he was thinking or doing.
And you're kind of trained to lay the taser down like that next to a subject when you go to handcuff them.
So he may have just kind of been thinking in that.
Why would you be trained to drop your stun gun next to the guy?
Well, no, if you would set it down on the ground next to you, after the subject is compliant, and you can move in to cuff.
I see, just because it's faster than putting it back on the belt.
Yeah, you got to watch those wires and everything, you can get a little shock from them still.
Well, but I think, go back and review this video, this is different, because he goes over and handcuffs the body, then he walks back over to the stun gun, picks it up, then he walks back over to the body and plants it on him.
It's just a drop gun type situation, seems like, pretty clear, but anyway.
It could be, but I'm not going to go that far and say that.
All right.
Well, anyway, listen, I sure appreciate you coming back on the show and talking about this.
I think the more other cops are willing to say, hey, we have a real problem here, that the citizenry are supposed to be the served, not the servants of our security forces and that kind of deal.
Our rights come first, you guys are supposedly protecting them and all that, the safer people will be on a day-to-day basis, because it's getting scary out there, and I don't think you have to be black to be terrified of cops, not at all.
And I want to speak out to officers, stop before you kill someone under these circumstances.
This is horrible, and this guy's a young cop trying to do the right thing, and he has his life destroyed as well.
And hey, Walter's brother, the victim's brother, said we don't advocate violence, we advocate change when speaking about the community response to this.
And let me turn that around a bit and say it's law enforcement that advocates and uses violence every day.
Law enforcement violence is the reason why you have rightfully lost the trust of your neighbors and citizens you swore to protect.
All right, so that's Rayford Davis from LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, and former cop in North Charleston, South Carolina.
Thanks very much for your time.
Thank you, Scott.
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