Follow Orders, Don’t Get Shot? A Response to the Common Argument

by Wayne Pac

By now everybody is familiar with the argument against recent shootings of unarmed civilians. The commonplace argument “just follow orders and you won’t get shot.” In essence, if you don’t run away from the police officer, and you do everything he asks you to do, the likelihood of something bad happening is far less than if you were to run away. This does have a lot of validity in regards to the chances of survival during an encounter with police officers. Something that isn’t mentioned by the people that use this argument often, is LEOs (Law Enforcement Officers), are people just like us. People make mistakes, people can be ill-equipped for situations.

I’m a deaf individual, I wear two cochlear implants. I have communication issues when it comes to auditory communication. For the most part I am fairly good at understanding somebody one on one in a quiet environment. The problem that presents itself, is situations like these shootings of unarmed citizens are not quiet environments. They are very loud, very quick, and easy to make mistakes in. I have met LEOs, I like LEOs for the most part. A lot of them are well meaning individuals that want to help their communities out and do some good. Although for the most part they are nice people and rational people just like you or me. They are presented with many situations everyday that puts them on edge, and it would get on the nerves of anybody. Even Intelligence Officers that work for black ops have been known to constantly go paranoid, or go on edge, and they have quite possibly the best training for those situations that can be provided by the government and military. So if Black Ops officers sometimes can’t deal with that psychological stress in an efficient way, why do we seem to expect LEOs to be able to deal with it either. It’s a foolish thing to think otherwise.

A lot of the problems that arise during situations like this are due to a lack of communication. Effective communication requires both individuals to participate, and when somebody like myself is being yelled at by two or more different people. I wouldn’t be able to understand what is going on at all. This causes myself to constantly fear being in a situation like that, because for me, it is effectively a roll of the dice whether or not I would get shot. LEOs are not trained very well for situations where there is a lack of communication, they are trained on how to deal with situations in a different way.

Because of lack of communication resulting in a higher chance of getting shot by a LEO, my hope would be that if I were ever in a situation like that, the LEOs would be able to act calmly and rationally. The best thing I can do is try to do what I think they are telling me to do, and think about protocol that they do. Put my hands on my head, get down on my knees and lay on my stomach, and pray to god that nothing goes wrong. Maybe if a situation were to arise, I would turn into a nervous wreck, and my fight or flight response would kick in. I would probably run away if I was in fear of my life, that’s what almost every human does. It’s a truth that when humans are confronted with a situation that could end their life, they either fight, or they flee. Most choose to flee, and if a cop were to see somebody fleeing from them, I hope to god they are a good enough person to let the them go if they aren’t armed.