Purchasing Truth - Fighting The Police: Politics, Truth And The Fight-Flight-Freeze Response Of The Brain

Bill, the last time we talked about truth and the police, there’s so much happening here on a daily and almost weekly basis regarding this subject. There’s more to talk about that’s very relevant now in our society. The clear obvious one that we need to address is what’s happened in Atlanta with Rayshard Brooks who, by all reports, was asleep in his car in a drive-through at a Wendy’s fast food restaurant. Somebody from within the Wendy’s restaurant called the police because it’s disruptive. This car is not moving through the drive-through line. Most people are getting takeout through drive-through now because of COVID-19. The police intervened. For about 45 minutes, they’re assessing this man, woke him up, talking to him, trying to decide if he fell asleep or is he intoxicated or what’s going on. They suspect that he’s intoxicated after talking with them and then proceed to try to arrest him. Things go south in a hurry when he resists arrest.

The first step to approach something like this is to slow down and feel sad. The grief of the loss of life of a young person who has young kids at home and was struggling with drugs. I watched a lot of the footage. The hardest thing to get the brain to do is to make sure that we don’t equally proportionalize the loss and then you lose the action the police took to try to get safety and protection for the environment. You make sure that that action is both not lost, but also not scaled to the level of the loss of life. The loss of life has got to remain 9 and 10 on the list. You don’t want to minimalize all the work that the police were doing right before the handcuffing. That’s when the triggering of the brain took place inside the young man, as well as inside the police. They immediately all shifted to a fight response, which is the surge of adrenaline and cortisol. There are weapons around. It’s going to be dangerous. We’re going to tase the guy.

All of those policing, protective restraining, the years of practice and focus is there and it then escalates to suppress and rise to, “We’re trying to protect and following our safety protocols. We’re going to secure the environment because this person is fighting. We might get hurt or somebody else might get hurt.” Is the person on drugs lethal to another person? That is not the way it’s talked about or thinks, but if he goes running into a street and he runs on doing an if-then. That car swerves and then hits another car and kills somebody in that car. All of a sudden, we’re talking about the police not restraining him properly. That’s why the sadness comes up. The sadness is that the situation, the dynamics happening at this time, it’s what needs to take place to protect. We can watch different police being in a place of rationale describing what the two officers should have done. What should have they done? Let him run, set up a net around that area, call in for reinforcing, catch the guy, you have the guy’s car, all of those things are beyond what the limbic protective brain is doing in that moment.



It’s into, “Here’s my training. Here’s what protection looks like. Here’s what safety looks like. Here’s what the good of the public looks like. This is my job as a police department and this is what I’ve been trained to do.” I know I’ve laid an entire pushback to take place, but I want to get early in our conversation about how sad, helpless and disheartened people feel around this. To make sure that we’re proportionalizing the loss, those children are growing up with their father dying on that day with the drug use and all those things that went with our society that is struggling on multiple levels. It’s tough to get ahold of truth because you and I are like, “We’re white guys.” We’re outside of this. Every day I see the range of, “We’re getting scared every day. We’re feeling more and more scared and helpless by this group of people called police because of the color of our skin.” That’s a large truth of the matter of it.

I appreciate you helping to cast some perspective on this. To me, the word that comes up with this whole situation repeatedly is tragic. It is tragic that this man’s life has been lost. It should not have been lost and it did not deserve to be taken away. There’s an investigation and all sorts of things that were not there at the time. Everybody is from the outside looking in with all the cell phone videos that were taken and everything. It certainly seems very clear from the observational evidence. Did he do something wrong? Yes. Did the police called inappropriately? It sure appears that way that they were called inappropriately. They were doing a good job there for about 43 minutes assessing the situation, not rushing to judgment.

There are a lot of triggering responses that put a person into a fight response.

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Here’s the thing. You’re right, Bill. Had they given him a warning and said, “Go home and sleep it off.” They gave him a breathalyzer and he was over the legal limit in some way for some substance. Had they let him drive home and he crashed into somebody’s car and killed somebody, they would have been negligent. They took appropriate action and doing their jobs in the beginning of this situation. When they start to say, “We’re going to arrest you,” they turn around and starts to put the cuffs on, he gets into this fight, flight or freeze type of mindset in his brain. He fears the police. He fears getting arrested, the consequences of all of this. Maybe he isn’t even thinking clearly because he is impaired. He struggles and fights them and runs. The other tragic part of this. He did not deserve to die and the police officer pulling his gun and shooting him, even if he had been fired up by his own taser, by Rayshard Brooks, he still did not deserve to die for this. Had Rayshard Brooks accepted that he was going to be arrested and not resisted arrest, he would be alive now.

That’s the expectation people have. People believe that the front part of the brain can override the back part of the brain. It doesn’t have the bandwidth to do it. It’s like when you’re in a fight, flight and freeze response. Your body is locked up and clicking into the one and to that moment. Under a drug influence, the drugs are messing with the front part of the brain anyways. It’s not like that our society isn’t having trouble with drugs right now to an extreme place because of the amount of loss or helplessness that’s in the environment. The trauma is being transferred from person to person. To get ahold of this, Tom, is that Wendy’s got burned down. That’s a transfer of trauma. Let me show you how that one works because the truth is that if our society does not face trauma, the trauma gets transferred into, “We’re not going to feel helpless and hopeless anymore. Anything that reminds us of trauma, it’s going.” The statues are coming down. People are pulling those things down. The people are going like, “We’re not sure if we want this thing down.” City mayors are going, “We better pull these things down.”

They’re getting pulled down and trashed. Tom, have you ever driven by a place where there was a solid memory in your head and it brings the memory back like, “I remember that place and I had a happy thing there,” or there was a corner where in high school, I drove by that and that brings back that memory? Does that community want to drive by that Wendy’s ever again? No. That’s called a transfer of trauma. I don’t want to be traumatized by thinking about a police officer shooting somebody in the neighborhood because of that situation. That place has got to go. We’ve got to do a better job of caring for our communities, not traumatizing our communities. You’ve got to do a better job of providing moments of hope, of progress, of the ability to get out of things. Not to say, “You’re making this job and there’s no way out. There’s no future showing up.” It’s a life or death thing that people are facing in these traumatized environments.



What you’re getting at there is a little bit of this call to defund the police. That phrase, as we’ve mentioned a little bit in the previous episode, is an unfortunate choice of words. That phrase, Defund the police,” is sticking. It was intended to be one way and it’s interpreted so many different ways to be like, “We’re not going to have police anymore.” Originally, that was not the intent. It was that let’s redistribute some of the funds we are putting to policing and distribute it to places where it could be more effective in trying to help society with these issues that end up resulting in the need for police to do something that maybe they’re not well suited to do.

I’m so glad you brought up the term. You put that right here in the environment and the escalation of defund police, that brand message because we are as a society pounded with branding and advertising over the internet in microseconds now. Can I get an impression in and distract somebody’s attention so they buy my thing? It gets to be escalated in a way that’s not in proportion. Therefore, truth is getting hijacked about defund means let go of the whole thing. There are plenty of ways to reallocate money. I can’t imagine a sign that says, “Reallocate the money for the police,” versus “Defund the police,” and which one’s going to stick. It’s like the famous “drain the swamp” is to get rid of swampy people in Washington, DC. Instead of saying, “Drain the swamp,” it changes to, “Get rid of the lobbyist.” That’s where the swamp is. That’s where the alligators are. It’s over there with the lobbyist. It’s not with the politician that is taking the money. Those are the swamp creatures.

Even if you take another head and sew it on top of the organization, it's still the same organization.

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Think about the two police officers that all of a sudden have this calm and civil situation turn on them and they’re struggling to contain this person who’s fighting against them. They were overpowered by this guy who is in this fight-flight mode and they were unable to contain him. He gets away from them. That ratchet it up their mindset, their tension. I agree with their need for respect was not met, Bill. That’s an important one that plays in here. At some point, their need for safety was threatened by him taking the taser and pointing it at them. All of us who look at the video and see what was happening here can think with a clear mind, not in the heat of the moment and say, “They would either have to do it the hard way, run after him, tackle him and overpower him or call for backup and eventually let the guy run.”

Neither of us are in both positions. Neither of us have experience as police officers and the number of conflicts that they run into on a daily basis. It’s not like the police have a great track record about their own personal life and home life. It’s hard to hold and maintain the line of mental health on their side. On the other side, you and I are not in the place of being a 27-year-old with 3 or 4 kids at home that I might go to jail. I’m in this another level of trouble with no money or whatever. All of a sudden, I’m in that quagmire of not being able to get out and not having enough money to get out or the experience of being another person in jail from my community. The reflection on whatever is going on in this experience is very hard for us. This is the scary honesty that you and I often deal with is that the amount of experiences, both of those three people are going through is escalated to the place. Can communication make a difference? The answer is it can.

Can we communicate with ourselves going like, “What’s the level of safety and danger that this guy that’s running away from us is going to have in the environment and what is my Plan B? Call in for backup? Yes. It didn’t go well. He shot a taser at me. Yes, he’s going to have to also pay for that.” All of a sudden, “Your drugged brain did some things here and you’ve got to get some help on that. You’ve got to work on that and let the judge, the courts deal with it.” As soon as I say that, there’s a group of people that are going to listen and say, “The court systems aren’t fair, Bill.” A black person goes to jail much more often and much more severely than a white person. It’s like the whole reforming of the whole system becomes this big thing. The need for protection, safety, and security for the environment and fairness for the life of a victim and the consideration for the police that is going through this event. The community that’s traumatized enough to burn down the Wendy’s going like, “I don’t want to look at that Wendy’s again. They have to build something completely new here. Don’t put a Wendy’s here.” You can see there are a lot of layers here.

There are a lot of complex subjects here. You are right, Bill, to give some of them acknowledgment here because we can’t take a deep dive down all of those paths now. There are a lot of considerations. It’s a difficult, no-win situation perhaps in many ways. It’s terribly tragic and unfortunate that it escalated to the point where the officer, for whatever reason, felt he had to draw his gun and shoot this person. Bill, we’ve shined enough light on that tragic situation now.



The accountability is the next piece to go after because you have the event and all of the different things that need to be worked out with that. The post-trauma is now transferred to all of the people and all of the different situations in the environment. That accountability, if it’s not being met within the letter of the law, then who do we talk to? As a civil society, where do we lean our elbow on and go like, “At least I can rest here?” The greater social problems that are happening economically inside the environment, it becomes like, “Shall we hold the police accountable? Partly. Who else are we going to hold accountable?”

Adult thinking is not black and white thinking; it's shades of gray.

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It’s a weird metaphor to talk about it, but if you and I are going to honestly talk about what truth looks like, it’s the systemic part of the giant, the arms, the legs, the body, the rest of the body and you sew a new talking head on top of it is not the most powerful way to go. The way to go through it is through the process of restoration and to make meaningful changes to restore how the delicate balance about the police and I’m talking that it’s delicate.

How do you meet the need for safety, protection, security for an individual at the same time meet the need for protection, safety, security and fairness for society? You don’t want a person that’s traumatized going and traumatizing the rest or another event. There are all kinds of things when police don’t give somebody a pass and they’re so drunk. They run into somebody and kill a family or something in a car. There are many examples of too lenient versus too much force. That’s tough. How do you meet the needs of the individual at the same time meet the need for society? We look at the situation. We go like, “This is hard. This is what adults do.”

Adult thinking is not black and white thinking, Tom. It’s shades of gray. That’s adult thinking. That’s a logical analytical thinking is you’ve got to say, “The police officer was at the need for protection. It didn’t meet the need for life for a person.” That’s where the line needs to change inside the mindset of a person that is both as a police officer as well as society as a whole. It’s a tough job to flip the coin on protection, safety and security and say, “You have to meet the need for protection, safety, security of this person because you shot him. You may have met the need for safety and protection of somebody in the future,” but still, the cost is way too high for everybody involved. Burning down buildings because of it.

People will think that’s not wrong either. It’s terrible that now some people aren’t able to go to work and maybe they’ve lost their jobs because the Wendy’s where they worked at is burned down. Maybe they can work at another location, maybe not. You wonder if Wendy’s, the organization, would that business have died because even if they didn’t burn down the building, would anybody go and eat there again? Maybe a lot of the community wouldn’t have and they had to shut down that location anyway. I’m not saying it’s a good thing that the building was burned down, but the community needs to move on in some way from what happened there.

How can I heal? The amount of furious about justice not being met inside the community is showing up in a flaming building. That’s what that symbolizes is some form of burning justice. We’re traumatized and I’m not saying it’s right.



You’re saying you can see why it happened because of how the community, the people are thinking and the emotions that are going on. There’s a reaction taking place.