Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

Aiyana Jones was asleep on the sofa of her Detroit home early Sunday morning when police executed a warrant and came looking for her aunt's fiance, who was wanted for a murder earlier in the weekend.  Accounts differ about what, exactly, happened when officers entered the home.  Everyone agrees that, within seconds, Aiyana Jones was dead, shot by a police bullet.  She was 7 years old.

You might imagine that there's a fair amount of crime and trauma discussed in my family.  My tween daughter has heard it all -- probably much more than she should.  As a result, some things that would horrify other kids don't really faze her.  She knows that bad stuff happens, and she also knows, for the most part, that it doesn't happen to her.  My husband and I try, when we can, to make sure that we are the ones to tell her scary news so we have the opportunity to put it in some context, be reassuring, and answer any questions.  That's not always possible, of course, because sometimes we're getting the news at the same time she is.

That's what happened this morning.  News of Aiyana's death came on the radio, and my daughter and I heard it at exactly the same time.  My first thought was, "Ugh, that's going to be messy."  Then I looked over at my daughter, whose mouth was hanging open.  She finally said, "That's -- that's -- that's so sad!!" 

Instantly, I knew that her reaction was the right one, not mine.  Yes, this is going to be messy.  No matter whose version of events you believe -- did the grandmother tussle with a police officer whose gun went off?  Did police fire from outside the house?  Was the girl burned by a flash grenade before she was shot?  Had neighbors warned officers that there were children in the house? -- this is not a good situation.  Police, in the course of their jobs, killed a little girl.  That has the potential to ignite huge problems between police and residents and certainly will trigger a big investigation, as it should.

But whether it's messy or not is really not the main issue.  A little girl died.  Her father and grandmother have just lost an important member of their family, a child.  Whatever anyone inside the house did or did not do, they didn't intend for this to happen.  No parent tucks their child in at night and contemplates the possibility they won't be alive in the morning, at least not due to this kind of incident.

Why did my daughter and I have such radically different reactions?  To some extent, it has to do with age and experience.  I look at things from a crisis point of view, and she looks from a human point of view.  Still, you'd think I would have keyed into the trauma the family experienced a little better than I did.  I've also heard stories like this before, while she hasn't.  Thankfully they aren't common, but they do happen and probably don't shock me the way they shock my daughter.

If I'm honest, though, I have to say that, because of my age and experience and the society in which we live, I have an expectation that "things like this" happen in Detroit.  I would be shocked if it happened in Ann Arbor, but not in Detroit.  My daughter, either because her mother does a better job of teaching compassion than of living it or because she just hasn't been steeped in the negative expectations of Detroit and its citizens the way I have, knows that a child is a child, no matter where you live.  It's one of those moments in parenting when you realize your kid embodies your values better than you do.  I'm very proud.  I'm also a little ashamed.

This weekend someone packed a bunch of explosive and flammable material into an SUV and parked it in Times Square in New York.  The investigation of this is the number one most popular story on Google News today, and I am not going to blog about it.  President Obama gave the commencement speech at the University of Michigan here in Ann Arbor, and I'm not blogging about that either.  Thousands of gallons of oil are threatening the Gulf Coast, and I probably will blog about that tomorrow.  Massachusetts is still without drinking water, and I blogged about that yesterday.  You probably knew about all of these things (perhaps not the U of M story, but you would if you lived here).

Early this morning, Detroit police officers responding to shots fired in a vacant apartment were ambushed.  Four were wounded, one was killed.  Officer Brian Huff became the first line of duty death in the Detroit Police Department since 2004.  The national press barely covered it.  The Ann Arbor press, 40 minutes from Detroit, didn't cover it at all.  Neither did the Michigan-wide public radio affiliate.

Certainly a lot more people are affected by the Massachusetts water situation and the oil spill in the Gulf.  The President speaking in town is pretty rare.  The bomb in Times Square affected a lot of people directly, and scares a lot of people vicariously.  All of these things are important.

In a typical year, there are less than 70 police officers nationwide that are killed by suspects.  Michigan has had two this year, but had none last year.  This isn't terribly common.  It may not affect as many people as some of the other stories, but those it does impact are affected much more severely.  Frequent Quarterbackers may recall that there is a whole Critical Incident Stress Management course just on responding to the 5 most serious types of incidents.  Not only is death in the line of duty one of those, but there is actually an additional course just on that.

So why did Officer Huff's death and his colleagues' shootings get so little attention?  I think there are two reasons.  First, there was a lot of news affecting a lot of people this weekend, which meant that this story had to more actively compete for coverage.  Second, Detroit has a lousy reputation for high crime.  In other words, people think that this sort of thing is about par for the course in Detroit.  This is especially ironic since, although Detroit's crime rate is high, its rate of line of duty deaths for police officers isn't.  By any objective standard, this ought to be a big story.  We just don't make those judgments by objective standards.

There is no community in this country for which a police officer shot in the line of duty feels normal.  The Detroit press is covering this story closely.  It's the rest of us, outside (but not all that far outside) of Detroit that are turning a blind eye.  We think "those people" in "that city" expect this sort of thing.  Unfortunately, we think wrong.

The reports are still sketchy, and the details keep changing, but as of this moment it appears that a Nigerian national on board Northwest Airlines flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit either set off or tried to set off a small explosive or incendiary device shortly before the plane landed around noon today.  He claims to have been acting on instructions from Al-Qaeda, and the White House has labeled this an attempted terrorist attack.  Reports differ on whether he actually got the thing lighted, but everyone seems to agree that two or three fellow passengers noticed what he was doing and one of them jumped on him.

At moments like this, we are conditioned to panic.  The idea that we should be extremely worried whenever a terrorist plot is uncovered, especially if it becomes operational in any way, has been pushed upon us from any number of sources over the last 8 years.  We are earnestly asked to be aware of our surroundings and report anything suspicious, and told that we may be facing additional security measures.  We are told that the terror alert level is going up, or not (as in today's incident).  Be afraid, be very afraid.

There are any number of things wrong with this picture.  Let's begin with the terror alert level.  What exactly changes when we go, say, from yellow to orange, or from orange to red?  What are we supposed to do differently?  What purpose is served by telling us that it is staying steady, or going up?  Is the fact that it's not going up supposed to mean that nothing has changed?  How does that jibe with the fact that we are told that security may be tightened at the airport? 

Add to this the fact that at least several news outlets reported that the terror alert level was being raised to orange, despite the fact that it has been at orange for airline travel for quite some time.  I wonder if I'm missing something here -- some nuance about the terror alert level that makes this actually a change.  But even if I am, that only reinforces the notion that the use of this scale is not helpful, at least as it's happening now.

More broadly, however, this incident begs the question:  Why, exactly, are we supposed to be afraid?  There are people out there, most relevantly to this event people associated with Al-Qaeda, who want to hurt Americans.  They are inclined to use air travel to do so.  This isn't news.  The only thing that changed today was that we may have actually seen someone try (or have caught someone who is completely unrelated to Al-Qaeda, but is trying to boost his own importance).

The ways we prevent terrorist attacks are multi-layered.  In this instance, the suspect was, by some reports, on the government No Fly list but was allowed to board a plane to the US anyway -- layer #1 failed.  He then managed to get something that burns or explodes and something to light it with onto a plane -- layer #2 failed.  He then tried to detonate it and both caused himself serious burns without seriously injuring anyone else and was immediately detected and subdued by his fellow passengers -- layer #3 succeeded.  What we learned today is that even if the bad guys manage to get on a plane with something they shouldn't have, we are capable of stopping them before they cause a real problem.  We don't need to be told to pay attention to our surroundings -- this incident proves that we already are.

You'll excuse me if I don't join in the panic today.  It seems to me that the new information we have from flight 253 tells us we're safer than we might have thought.