The Passion of Fred Hampton
There Are Times When Nothing Seems to Make Sense.
The police department of Bobcat, Arizona has a use of force continuum that helps officers decide when it is permissible to draw their weapons and shoot somebody dead, or something short of that depending upon the level of resistance they encounter. The mildest form of resistance is verbal and non-verbal non-compliance and might include a look or gesture police don’t like the looks of. Don’t put your hands on your hips — it looks like non-verbal non-compliance. Passive resistance entails not cooperating with an officer’s verbal commands like, get on the ground. Don’t get on the ground? Passive resisting. Things get interesting at defensive resisting; anything from holding onto a light pole while they’re trying to drag you away to taking off on foot, always a bad idea. You get to active aggression and real bad trouble when you throw a punch at a cop, but you hit the jackpot at aggravated active aggression — drawing guns, knives or going berserk — all of which qualify you for a legally sanctioned hole in the head.
Fred Hampton had no plans of being anywhere on that continuum the night he crashed his Nissan into a tree. Fred had drank a few beers with his buddies and was trying to drive around Bobcat only a week after moving there on a football scholarship at fullback. They called him the ice breaker because he reduced defensive linemen to so many broken chunks. He lowered his shoulder pads and drove his feet forward; anything blocking the hole got crushed, even his own offensive linemen if they didn’t clear the hole when he hit it.
What Fred did not plan to hit that night was the tree, which crumpled the Nissan the way he destroyed linebackers. Fred struggled to the back seat and kicked out the rear window of the Nissan. By the time he got outside and to his feet he was exhausted and dazed. He was bleeding from somewhere. His buddy Darren had been thrown from the car as it headed down the ravine towards the tree. He looked around in the dark for Darren; not finding him, he ran up the road for help.
At the first house with a light that he saw, in a nice neighborhood with manicured lawns, he banged on the door, frantic, crazed, desperate, crying. He may have been screaming for somebody to open up. Alma Brewster sized all this up when she peered through the little window holes in her door, but she was not sure what they meant. Naturally, she called the police.
Three cars arrived with eight officers and a duty captain. They too quickly tried to size up the hulking figure half running, half staggering down the driveway towards them so they could coordinate a response. Verbal commands work for most non-verbal non-compliance, but Fred didn’t hear anybody say get on the ground; all he heard was the deafening buzz inside his skull. The officers could employ soft empty hand control and try to grab him, but they didn’t want to get that close in case he was on angel dust or something.
Fred could not be engaging in defensive resistance since he was not running away from the officers but towards them, so he was elevated to the active aggression category although he had no intent of injuring anybody; he was too injured himself. Still, at this category he rated the use of a conducted energy weapon — they hit him with a Taser turned up full to barbecue mode. Fred simply became more delirious, and when he tried to make himself clear, to make himself heard — to tell them that his buddy was probably dying somewhere back there in the woods and that he was probably dying right now on this street — he got elevated to the aggravated active aggression category; he was big, strong and obviously in some hyper-normal state of mind — all dangerous at this level. The cops decided to skip the impact weapon response option and didn’t bother drawing nightsticks. Instead, four of them drew their semi-automatic pistols and unloaded their clips into Fred Hampton’s outstretched arms, wondering how the man could still keep coming towards them after taking all that.
