Fight or Flight: I did not hear you. Don’t shoot.

 

I write because the experience taught me something about why people may not respond to police orders. I watched my own video later and clearly heard, four to six times, a person yelling directly next to or behind me, “Mace, they have mace! Look out, they’re about to mace you!” or some such.

 

 

I didn’t hear any of it when it was happening. I was hyper-focused on what was happening to the person being arrested (whom Denver PD took to the ground and ground their knee into the neck of, George Floyd style).

 

 

If I could be so unaware of what was being yelled directly next to me, so must that be true of people in fight or flight mode when police yell commands at them. Thus when people ask, why don’t victims of police violence just follow orders, part of the answer is clearly, from my experience, that they aren’t registering what’s being said to them. They are hyper-focused in a way that evolution has determined is best to preserve their lives, but we didn’t evolve to have people with guns shoot us for failing to listen to their words. We evolved to confront head-on (fight) or run from (flight) danger.

 

 

Police are a construct and violent force we haven’t evolved to respond to and are an unnatural and existential threat.

 

 

 

Responders need to be skilled at bringing down tensions and dissipating this evolutionary response, to assure any person their life is precious and they are going to be treated as such.