Ohio episode shows toxic impunity that poisons policing

The system needs to be changed

A tiny, ridiculous episode that took place Wednesday in East Palestine, Ohio, shows what is wrong with policing in the United States.

A TV news reporter with NewsNation was working on a live broadcast before a news conference by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine. When DeWine started talking, officers asked the reporter, Evan Lambert, to stop his broadcast and he did.

That should have been the end of it. Lambert was doing his job at a public news conference, where other reporters were doing their jobs. As DeWine said later, Lambert had every right to be there.

But an officer with the National Guard took umbrage with the way Lambert followed their request that he stop talking. Apparently, he was not quite deferential enough and had the gall to say something like “I am allowed to be here.”

Lambert was “aggressive,” said the officer, and we can’t have that.

The officer, John Harris, went after Lambert, verbally and then physically, shoving him. Lambert kept talking but did not retaliate. Meanwhile, a state trooper got in front of Harris and kept him back.

Harris had that look of a guy being restrained in a bar — face flushed, shoulders tense. He could have used some cooling off, maybe a walk outside.

Instead, another officer tells Lambert, the reporter, he has to leave, and when he refuses, two more officers grab him and frog-march him out the door.

Lambert is a big, tall man, and although, in a video of the incident, he doesn’t look happy about what’s happening, he doesn’t resist as the cops bend his wrists and shove him toward the exit. In the front entranceway, the officers decide to drag him to the floor, pinning him face-down and cuffing him.

A press release from the East Palestine police department describes the episode in the bland distortions in which police specialize. The situation, the release says, “evolved into a physical confrontation and required law enforcement intervention.”

It wasn’t a physical confrontation, though, because that implies a two-way encounter. This was one man shoving another, and afterward, officers arrested the man who got shoved.

It’s a silly episode, and I’ll bet the charges — disorderly conduct and trespassing — get dismissed. 

But it shows, without the spectacle and the trauma of more serious cases, the impunity that lies at the heart of police abuse.

Evan Lambert got arrested because an officer got offended.  Lambert hadn’t broken any laws, but Harris didn’t like his attitude, so he shoved him, and when Lambert still refused to bow to his authority, other officers arrested him.

That is police abuse, and it springs from the same toxic source as the horrible, fatal beating that a group of uniformed men in Memphis gave Tyre Nichols — a belief that police officers stand on a higher ground than other citizens, from which they can require obedience through force, even when the citizen in question has done nothing wrong.

So, in this case as in many others, the charges have nothing to do with what Lambert did. They stem from what he didn’t do after the officers got involved — he didn’t show enough respect. He didn’t say, “Oh, I’m sorry, sir.”

You can argue — and lots of people will — that Lambert should have just shown enough deference to Harris to get him to calm down. But why should he?

Our Constitution does not place one class of citizens, by occupation or any other marker, above the others. The point of the American Revolution was to break away from such a system.

Although no one was injured in East Palestine, Ohio, you can see, watching the video, how easy it would have been for the situation to spin out of control. When you empower people to assert their will through force, at their own discretion, and arm them with lethal weapons, and show that, in the vast majority of cases, they will not be held accountable for their actions, you are creating the conditions for rampant abuse of authority.

Of course, lots of cops are good people. But there were several officers from a number of different agencies at the press conference in East Palestine and not one, witnessing an obvious injustice, said or did anything to stop it.

The system must be improved — police officers must be given no more freedom to assault other human beings than any other citizen, and they must be prosecuted when they fail that standard — or we will continue to see people abused, in minor and terrible ways.