In almost every officer involved shooting, if you really dig into them and isolate the dynamics and the energy that precipitates this use of deadly force, what you’re going to see is some combination of fear and anger. And anger has a lot of components.

Being disrespected is a component of anger. Feeling as if a person does not have the right to talk back to you is a component of anger. How dare this person do this? Those are all manifestations of a feeling of anger. And fear has been said to have been the flip side of anger. Fear and anger, in every psychological discipline that I’ve studied, are very closely related. We tend to feel angry towards things we don’t understand. And we tend to fear things that make us angry.

And we tend to express angry as a human race, anger, more often in situations where the subject of the anger is someone or a group of people that we don’t understand and have been taught to fear.

 

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