Welcome back to Long Shot, a production of McClatchy Studios and I Heart Radio. I'm executive producer Davin Coburn. This is a bonus feature for a return man, taking you behind the scenes of a reporting process that lasted more than three years. In researching Jim Duncan's death, lead reporter Brett McCormick and the rest of our production team wanted to better understand the actions taken or not by Lancaster authorities following the shooting, and to learn more about how police in that era approached their jobs in general. We're continuing our coverage to night here on w c c O m CBSN. Minnesota protesters have set fire to Minneapolis's third police precinct. Policing has evolved over time and its tactics and its priorities, and as we've all seen during recent nationwide protests, the role that officers play in their communities is the subject of much debate. The third precincts where the officers involved in the George, Florida arrest were headquartered. My initial reaction was, if we change the date, we could be having a conversation about the Jim Douggins shooting from a year ago. Seth Stowton, who you heard in the show, has a unique perspective on that happened. He was a police officer himself before becoming a lawyer. I got sucked right back into studying from an academic and legal perspective all of the stuff that I had previously done as an officer, and he now teaches at the University of South Carolina School of Law. Officers get involved in a wide variety of very different situations, and good policing is context specific. Student's expertise form the basis for a ted X talk he gave there in Columbia. On another level, though, we could identify a set of principles that we could use to evaluate policing in almost any context. Principles that shape the police function itself, what officers do and how they do it, the way that officers view their job, and the way that they relate to community members. Return Man, Sir Rachel Wise and I sat down with Stouton in his office to learn more about the history of policing, lessons today's officers can take from Jim Duncan's case, and what Stowton says is the best way forward. For law enforcement in general through an approach known as guardian policing. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. All Right, Jue Boy in My life in a nutshell Um. I grew up in South Florida. I moved to North Florida to go to college, to go to Florida the now the Florida State University, and it was working as a martial arts instructor at the time, and one of the students at the martial arts studio where I worked was the public information officer for the local police department. He encouraged me to do ride along with him, which I did to start volunteering in victim services at the police department and eventually to apply as a reserve officer. That was there five years. I ultimately left the city police Department for a job as a state investigator. I was there for more than two and a half years, and in an effort to continue to expand my career horizons, essentially went to law school at the University of Virginia. I clerked for a judge for a year. I was lucky enough to get an academic fellowship at Harvard Law School for two years and then came here to the University of South Carolina School of Law, where I've been well, this is my sixth year here. What was your initial gut reaction when you heard the basic overview of the facts here. There are aspects of it that are obviously different because it happened so long ago, But the issues that it raises are exactly the same as a lot of the issues that we see, and a lot of the concerns that are brought to a head by the Walter Scott shooting in North Charleston, or the Michael Brown shooting in for Sit or the timure Rice shooting in Cleveland and so on. There are questions about transparency and accountability. There are questions about whether there was a sufficient investigation, And the reason that that's a little depressing is because the conversations that we're having now about policing aren't new. They've actually been fairly steady, going back at least as far as the eighteen thirties and forties. As American policing really started the modern era of policing in this country kicked off, there have been concerns about police abuses and overreach and unfairly targeting certain population groups. About unaccountable extra judicial killings and the like. So the shooting in the individual incident may seem like an aberration, but one it's not clear that as a factual matter, it is or was that unusual, and too certainly with regard to the concerns that it raises, those are not at all unusual. And the timeline you laid out back to the eighteen thirties and forties, very different place in American history, very different place in South Carolina history, but apparently not a very different place in these questions about police interactions with communities of color, and I think it's inevitable. I think we will always have those conversations. I don't think there's a way to alleviate everyone's concerns about the role that the police play. And it's because the police exist at the very point of tension between society's need for order, to be protected from people who do bad things, to apprehend people who do bad things. Keeping in mind that society's need for order requires us to allow the government to infringe on our freedoms in different ways, to search our cars, to use force. On the other hand, we also demand in a democracy to be protected from government overreach. How much freedom are we willing to give up to get both my individual interest in freedom and also society's interest in order. That's not a question that has a stable answer. At any given point of time, in any given community, they're going to be multiple perspectives about how to balance those priorities. So to a certain extent, it's very natural that we've always had these conversations. They're inevitable, especially in this place. And I think about the Confederate flag in the conversation that happened about that in this concept of the government should not be overstepping its bounty. And I can give you a historical example, right, um, back a long time ago before and at the time that American police agencies were really kicking off in cities like Philadelphia, New York, in Boston, right, the big cities were the first to adopt what we now would consider a police force. South Carolina and a number of the other states had slave acts that either allowed or required the government to put together groups of usually white land and slave owning men to round up fugitive slaves and to effectively prevent slave uprisings by intimidating the black population. Number of plantation owners didn't like those laws, not because they wanted to look out for slaves rights. It's because they didn't want the government interfering in what they viewed as a plantation and slave owners prerogative of disciplining their own slaves. They didn't want the government to get involved in that. That was something for me as a man to deal with and not something that the government should intervene. So, even when we're talking about that really disturbing history that I think it's important for us to acknowledge as one of the precursors to modern policing, we still see this resistance or this tension between how much do we want to allow the government to infringe and how much do we want to keep the government out. In the sixties and seventies, when Duncan would have been growing up, and then when he died, can you offer sort of a general description of police procedures and the sort of tactical and training revolution of that era. So there are a couple of things to keep in mind about that era. When policing was first introduced in this country, it was introduced as a very localized endeavor, which of course it is today. We don't have one police agency. In the state of South Carolina, we have more than two hundred police agencies. When policing originated in the larger cities and spread to the midsize cities in starting in the eighteen forties and getting into the eighteen fifties and sixties, the officers job was in large part to make sure that their local elected official state and power. Because someone knew got voted in, they would fire all the police officers, and then through a political patronage system, they would hire an all new group of police officers, many of whom would pay the political patron for the privilege of getting hired as a police officer. Starting in the very late eighteen hundreds and into the early nineteen hundreds, there was a police reform or police professionalism movement. The reform era sought to shift policing from a politically involved constituent services type endeavor to being primarily about law enforcement and crime fighting. Officers were crime fighters first and foremost. There are all kinds of reasons why that was actually wrong. Crime started going up and police agencies couldn't handle it. So the image that they had been selling to the public, we are crime fighters, let us do our thing, well, if you're crime fighters, you're doing an awful job of it. So that the perspectives started to shift in the sixties and seventies, in part because of public pressure during the Civil Rights movement. So that started what we now refer to as the tactical revolution in policing, making sure that there is now a book so that officers can go by the book. But that was a slow process. It didn't penetrate fully. Like a lot of things in policing. It started at the largest agencies and kind of trickled down to smaller agencies, which ultimately gets us to Jim Duncan Lancaster event and these questions of trust faith. In the aftermath of a critical incident like a shooting, there is always going to be uncertainty. When Officer Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, there were different pieces of information flying all over the place, and two narratives came out of that, and one of those narratives was that Michael Brown had violently attacked Officer Wilson and then was returning aggressively, approaching a second time, purportedly to violently attack him again at the time he was shot and killed. The second narrative is that Officer Wilson shot Michael Brown while Michael Brown's hands were up and he was surrendering. After that shooting, I would hazard a guess that anyone who wasn't an eyewitness did not have facts to figure out which narrative was correct, which narrative they should believe. So one of the big questions for me is not just what happened in that shooting. One of the big questions is why did so many people in Ferguson and the surrounding area and across the country believe the second narrative? Why did so many people think, Yeah, I could totally see that an officer would shoot and kill an unarmed black man whose hands were raised in surrender. The answer to that question and his lack of trust. People in Ferguson, people in the St. Louis area, and many people across the country saw the shooting of an unarmed black man while surrendering as consistent with their perspective of policing. So when I see the Jim Duncan shooting story, it raises that same question of trust, and it raises a question of power. Who in that story trusted the police and who had the power to express that trust or distrust. And I don't just mean express it like saying it. I mean express it through their actions. In Ferguson, you had a lot of people who distrusted the police and were empowered to show that distrust by marching, by protesting, by holding visuals. I don't think you've had quite that same dynamic in the sixties. We'll be right back after the break. I was out in Lancaster yesterday afternoon. I went by Duncan's house where he was living at the end of his life. And for a long time that house has been vacant, and there was a car in the driveway this time. So I went up and I knocked on the door. There's a new owner and her name is Camelia Funderburke. And I asked her if she knew anything about who had lived in the home before or this case. She had not known anything about this. She had lived in Lancaster all her life, but I told her about it. He played for the Baltimore Colts and he actually died in the Lancaster police station. And I would like to just play you her reaction and get your reaction to it. Camelia Funderburke declined to let us use her voice in this podcast, but Stonton's reaction to hearing the tape spoke volumes, Yeah, that's she had never heard the story before, that some total of her knowledge about this was be outlining the facts for and it's fascinating, isn't it? And a little frightening that her immediate conclusion is, I don't believe that it's not completely crazy, right, like people absolutely have in the course of American history walked up to officers and attempted to wrestle their gun out of their holsters. So why not believe it? I would hazard a guess it's because either she doesn't trust police now, which may be part of the story, or she thinks about what policing was like at the time in the nineteen sixties and says, there's no way that I'm going to trust that institution, right, that's a distrust issue. Even then, if Duncan's death did happen exactly as it's described based on what we know of how police investigated the incident, there are critics, obviously, who say that they sort of invited these kinds of questions and second guessing based on what seemed like a perfunctory kind of an investigation the incident. Is that fair the criticism the criticism, absolutely, that's fair. Well, let's be a little bit cautious. Investigations into police shootings in the sixties do not look like what should be investigations of police shootings today. Unfortunately, there are at least some investigations of police shootings even today that would have looked pretty normal back in the sixties. That's not because the investigations in the sixties were so good. That's because even today we still have some pretty shitty investigations into officer involved shootings. There wasn't the same demand for that in the sixties, and what demand there was was not from a part of the population that really had the power to make that demand a reality. Since the summer, when we've had a number of high profile police killings, one of the reasons that we've seen such a spotlight being shined on policing is because of video, Because people who otherwise would not have believed that police could do these things are now looking at their phones and being shown effectively incontrovertible proof that in fact, police do, on at least some occasions, engage in these entirely and obviously inappropriate and egregious actions. And then you have people, especially from the black community or other communities of color, who say, of course that's possible. We've known about stuff like that since um slavery. That's not a surprise to us. Can you talk about what sort of an investigation might have been done, what sort of capabilities they would have had, technological or Okay, so there are things that we could do today that wouldn't necessarily have been an option at the time. And I'll give you a very superficial example. Today, it would probably be the case that the police station would have had a security camera rolling. It would probably be pretty simple to just pull the tape. So what would an investigation look like? Well, the first sort of investigations one oh one, which was as true in the nineteen sixties as it is today, is you separate the witnesses and get statements from them. There were multiple officers around, as I understand, and you're going to want to separate them so they don't cross contaminate each other's interviews. We're not just going to say go in with a list of questions and get specific answers. We want to have more open ended interviews. We want to engage in what today is called cognitive interviewing, and then we compare those statements to make sure that they are consistent, and when we find inconsistencies, we look for reasons for those inconsistencies, but would also be looking at other pieces of evidence. We would, for example, do a gunshot residue test, particularly back at the time, with a revolver when the revolver goes off. Um, sorry, I don't have a revolver. I don't think I'd didn't think to ask how many firearms might be in this room? Right now? I have a taser, very plastic. Uh, you know the sad things. I used this as a prop in class sometimes, and every time I use it as a prop in class, I feel like I have to say the gun you were about to see is not real. Please don't come up and tackle me. I didn't used to say that, and now I kind of have to which ship. It's troubling. Okay. So this is a plastic replica of a semi automatic firearm, and very basically, um, in a real semi automatic firearm, this piece here would come out that would be the magazine you would load bullets into the magazine. A revolver is an old timey wheel gun, and the wheel would have a little thing that you pull out and then it would fall open and you could put your five or six bullets in, and then you close the wheel, and when you pulled the trigger, the firing pin would hit the bullet and send it to the barrel, and then the wheel would rotate by one fifth or one sixth of a turn to line the next bullet up with the barrel. A semi automatic like this will eject gunshot residue, burnt powder, a little bit of unburnt powder, the chemicals from the explosion of the bullet in the chamber. A wheel gun, a revolver is even more open, so you're going to have even more gunpowder residue coming out of the back sprang off to the sides. Obviously some coming out of the front with a bullet coming out of the muzzle with a bullet um, but there might be a lot more gunpowder residue to test form. If you have no gunpowder residue on someone's hands, you can be pretty sure that that person either was not the shooter, or they were the shooter, but they were wearing multiple sets of gloves that came up to their forearms that someone took off afterwards. Right. So in a case like this, I would have wanted to see them test Jim Duncan's hands for gunshot residue, and if it turns out that he didn't have gunshot residue, then that would have suggested that he was not the shooter here. Also, I mentioned that when the bullet is fired, gunshot powder which is on fire right, which is in the process of exploding, comes out of the front of the gun. It propels the bullet forward. Essentially, when the firearm is too close to someone, the powder that's expelled from the front, the chemicals and the residue that's expelled from the front can penetrate the skin. That's called stippling. And what we now know, but I'm not sure we would have known in the nineteen sixties, is how to measure approximately a burn pattern from a particular gun or the stippling pattern from a particular gun, and estimate about how far away the gun was at the time, also the position an angle of the wound. And this is something that I would have expected them to have been able to identify it's not always possible to line up with perfect accuracy the penetration pattern of a bullet, and thus to backtrack that and say, okay, well, the bullet penetrated here, then it clearly came off at this angle. But we can rule out certain things, right. We can say, okay, well it definitely came from somewhere over here as opposed to somewhere over here. If they're examining this gunshot wound and the person is right handed, but it's from over here, then we have some questions. It's not impossible, but it becomes a little bit more improbable when you start to put together things like distance and angle. Then you can maybe, and I'm emphasizing maybe, start to say this looks consistent with or this does not look consistent with a self inflicted gun job wund We'll be back after the break. Then we get into the questions of report and what would be written down, what would have what are current best practices and what how do you anticipate they might have differed from what was happening in a rural police station in the early nineteen seventies. Yeah, best practices now are largely officers report everything an officer's report is their representation of the facts as best as they can make it. When you're talking about an officer being involved in a critical incident, particularly police shooting, the rules change a little bit. Ideally, you still want the officer to give a statement, and you still want them to give a statement fairly promptly. But a lot of agencies now allow officers to either not write their own report or to delay the providing of a statement or report for reasons that I think are are largely flawed, but it is common practice. We're going to give the officer time to decompress a little bit, maybe time to have a representative present with them, a lawyer or a union rap or something like that. The purported facts of this case is that this wasn't an officer involved shooting. Applying modern standards, I would expect officers to write reports as if this was a suicide that they had witnessed. Back in the day at a smaller agency, at a more rural agency, at an agency that may not have been leading the charge of police reform and professionalization, a lot of ship happened that never got reported, and so is where today we might have this massive case file hundreds of pictures, hundreds of pages of statements from officers, of reports of witnesses, of forensic reports. Um. Yeah, in a case like this, if you had anything, you might have a one line or one paragraph right up in the watch log. At eight oh three pm, one man later identified as Jim Duncan entered, attempted to take an officer's firearm and shot himself. Period it done. If you had that, nobody's going to jail. The officers are never gonna have to testify against anyone because the only bad actor here, so to speak, is the decedent. Why bother? That leaves the door open for a lot of questions about how authoritative that narrator is. Yeah, it does, But you know, at the time, officers didn't feel the need to present an authoritative narrative because their verbal explanations would be enough. At least it would be enough for everyone who they cared about. And I want to emphasize that's not policing specific right. We constantly make divisions based on differences or perceived differences, and we're using them to adjust how much deference we give the other person and how much difference we expect them to give us. There's some problems that are particularly acute in the policing context when both people expect more deference than the other one is giving them. Social psychologists called this an asymmetric deference norm. The officer might say, this person should defer to me because I am the authority. The other person might say the officer should defer to me in at least some respect because I am a taxpayer, or something like that. The potential for conflict comes up when the officer may not just view lack of deference as something that is upsetting. They may view it is something that requires a physical response. And I can think of no better example than the Sandra Bland traffic stoff. Hello man, well it takes how I've told The reason for your stop is you didn't fail. You failed to signal lane change. You get a dramas lice insurance with you. After an initial interaction, the officer walked back to his car, wrote out what we later learned as a warning ticket, walked back up to Sandra Bland's car, and one of the first things he said was you seem irritated. Okay, I'm like, now you you this is Joja. I'm know you what you seem very irritated. I am, I really am like that. But what I'm doing tychical. I was getting out of your way. You're speeding up tailorly, so I'll move over and you stop. So yeah, I am a little irritated, but that doesn't stop you from giving me a ticket. Sever If that had been me in my newer model car, dressed in my business suit, I think the cop would have, again, unconsciously and without realizing it, given me a little more deference than he gave Sandra Bland. But what he did was Sandra Bland is He waited four seconds and he said, are you done? You asked me what's wrong, and I told you so now I'm doing you. In other words, he was telling her, I'm not deferring to you that I don't care about or respect your concerns. They were in a staring contest, and the problem with the staring contest in this context is not who blinks first. It's who has the power to swing for and that's the officer. I'm giving you a law for to turn around, will you. I'm not complaining because you just pulled me out of my car around and the idea that a guy coming from Baltimore at the time, where he was royalty, where he where he might have expected quite a bit of deference. Again, I want to emphasize I'm not saying that is what happened. But if Jim Duncan, the football star who is used to deference and even a degree of hero worship in Baltimore, comes down to South Carolina, the potential for explosive conflict is pretty obvious. There's an interesting parallel here again that in a lot of ways, NFL players are at the forefront of this conversation about police interactions with communities of color. Yes, yes, yes, look at I oh my god, the whole the kneeling, the Colin Kaepernick's um. Yeah. Look at the way that that we have responded as a society. Look at the way that we responded to other sports figures taking stances on things. No one got upset when Chuck Norris started his Kick Drugs out of America program. These are the faces of America's future now more than ever. They need our help. Hi, I'm Chuck Nora. I want to talk to you about our kids. What the hell does Chuck Norris know about drugs? Stay in your lane, Chuck, that's why I'm here to ask your support for kick drugs out of America. Of course that would be absurd to say, right, But Colin Kaepernick, he should just shut up and play any case like this, whether it was Ferguson, whether it was Lancaster, it's frustrating to try and pick apart because we don't know if this was a cover up. Yeah, we don't know if this was actually a straightforward, open and chut kind of thing, or if it was a straightforward, open and shut kind of a thing that was just handled really badly. Yeah, what can we learn from this historical incident that we can apply today? And one of the things I can tell you, just very superficially is we need accurate and legitimate investigations. At risk of repeating you, there are some predictable possibilities to explain what happened. It happened the way that the police later said it did, and they acted appropriately in the aftermath. It happened the way the police said it did, and they botched the aftermath. It did not happen the way that the officers said it did, and there is some ineptitude at best, or active cover up at worst. We don't know. That's again where trust comes in. That's again why trust is so incredibly important. If I'm the police chief, I need to be able to say we messed up or the circumstances, the facts, the evidence certainly suggest that we messed up. Here's what I'm going to do immediately, and here's what I hope to do in the mid term, in the long term, to make sure that we stay on top of this. By acknowledging missteps, police agencies can build that trust step by painful step so that when something happens, and it's not a matter of if, it is a matter of when. When something happens in which there is ambiguity or uncertainty that can ignite a fire in the community, when the police chief steps forward and says this is not as bad as it looks, they'll have some trust that if it was as bad as it looks, that would be acknowledged. They're not going to have the same questions then that we have now about the Jim Duncan shooting. I'm Davin Coburn. Return Man is a production of The Herald McClatchy Studios and I Heart Radio. Brett McCormick is the lead reporter, and the show is produced by Matt Walsh, Tara Tabor, Caught Stevens, and Rachel Wise. I'm the executive producer from McLatchy Studios. The executive producer for I Heart Radio is Sean Titone. For lots more on this story, go to Harold Online dot com Slash return Man. If you have any additional information about Jim Duncan's life or death, email us at return Man at Harold online dot com. To continue supporting this kind of work, visit Herald online dot com slash podcasts and consider a digital subscription. And for more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows

Welcome back to Long Shot, a production of McClatchy Studios and I Heart Radio. I'm executive producer Davin Coburn. This is a bonus feature for a return man, taking you behind the scenes of a reporting process that lasted more than three years. In researching Jim Duncan's death, lead reporter Brett McCormick and the rest of our production team wanted to better understand the actions taken or not by Lancaster authorities following the shooting, and to learn more about how police in that era approached their jobs in general. We're continuing our coverage to night here on w c c O m CBSN. Minnesota protesters have set fire to Minneapolis's third police precinct. Policing has evolved over time and its tactics and its priorities, and as we've all seen during recent nationwide protests, the role that officers play in their communities is the subject of much debate. The third precincts where the officers involved in the George, Florida arrest were headquartered. My initial reaction was, if we change the date, we could be having a conversation about the Jim Douggins shooting from a year ago. Seth Stowton, who you heard in the show, has a unique perspective on that happened. He was a police officer himself before becoming a lawyer. I got sucked right back into studying from an academic and legal perspective all of the stuff that I had previously done as an officer, and he now teaches at the University of South Carolina School of Law. Officers get involved in a wide variety of very different situations, and good policing is context specific. Student's expertise form the basis for a ted X talk he gave there in Columbia. On another level, though, we could identify a set of principles that we could use to evaluate policing in almost any context. Principles that shape the police function itself, what officers do and how they do it, the way that officers view their job, and the way that they relate to community members. Return Man, Sir Rachel Wise and I sat down with Stouton in his office to learn more about the history of policing, lessons today's officers can take from Jim Duncan's case, and what Stowton says is the best way forward. For law enforcement in general through an approach known as guardian policing. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. All Right, Jue Boy in My life in a nutshell Um. I grew up in South Florida. I moved to North Florida to go to college, to go to Florida the now the Florida State University, and it was working as a martial arts instructor at the time, and one of the students at the martial arts studio where I worked was the public information officer for the local police department. He encouraged me to do ride along with him, which I did to start volunteering in victim services at the police department and eventually to apply as a reserve officer. That was there five years. I ultimately left the city police Department for a job as a state investigator. I was there for more than two and a half years, and in an effort to continue to expand my career horizons, essentially went to law school at the University of Virginia. I clerked for a judge for a year. I was lucky enough to get an academic fellowship at Harvard Law School for two years and then came here to the University of South Carolina School of Law, where I've been well, this is my sixth year here. What was your initial gut reaction when you heard the basic overview of the facts here. There are aspects of it that are obviously different because it happened so long ago, But the issues that it raises are exactly the same as a lot of the issues that we see, and a lot of the concerns that are brought to a head by the Walter Scott shooting in North Charleston, or the Michael Brown shooting in for Sit or the timure Rice shooting in Cleveland and so on. There are questions about transparency and accountability. There are questions about whether there was a sufficient investigation, And the reason that that's a little depressing is because the conversations that we're having now about policing aren't new. They've actually been fairly steady, going back at least as far as the eighteen thirties and forties. As American policing really started the modern era of policing in this country kicked off, there have been concerns about police abuses and overreach and unfairly targeting certain population groups. About unaccountable extra judicial killings and the like. So the shooting in the individual incident may seem like an aberration, but one it's not clear that as a factual matter, it is or was that unusual, and too certainly with regard to the concerns that it raises, those are not at all unusual. And the timeline you laid out back to the eighteen thirties and forties, very different place in American history, very different place in South Carolina history, but apparently not a very different place in these questions about police interactions with communities of color, and I think it's inevitable. I think we will always have those conversations. I don't think there's a way to alleviate everyone's concerns about the role that the police play. And it's because the police exist at the very point of tension between society's need for order, to be protected from people who do bad things, to apprehend people who do bad things. Keeping in mind that society's need for order requires us to allow the government to infringe on our freedoms in different ways, to search our cars, to use force. On the other hand, we also demand in a democracy to be protected from government overreach. How much freedom are we willing to give up to get both my individual interest in freedom and also society's interest in order. That's not a question that has a stable answer. At any given point of time, in any given community, they're going to be multiple perspectives about how to balance those priorities. So to a certain extent, it's very natural that we've always had these conversations. They're inevitable, especially in this place. And I think about the Confederate flag in the conversation that happened about that in this concept of the government should not be overstepping its bounty. And I can give you a historical example, right, um, back a long time ago before and at the time that American police agencies were really kicking off in cities like Philadelphia, New York, in Boston, right, the big cities were the first to adopt what we now would consider a police force. South Carolina and a number of the other states had slave acts that either allowed or required the government to put together groups of usually white land and slave owning men to round up fugitive slaves and to effectively prevent slave uprisings by intimidating the black population. Number of plantation owners didn't like those laws, not because they wanted to look out for slaves rights. It's because they didn't want the government interfering in what they viewed as a plantation and slave owners prerogative of disciplining their own slaves. They didn't want the government to get involved in that. That was something for me as a man to deal with and not something that the government should intervene. So, even when we're talking about that really disturbing history that I think it's important for us to acknowledge as one of the precursors to modern policing, we still see this resistance or this tension between how much do we want to allow the government to infringe and how much do we want to keep the government out. In the sixties and seventies, when Duncan would have been growing up, and then when he died, can you offer sort of a general description of police procedures and the sort of tactical and training revolution of that era. So there are a couple of things to keep in mind about that era. When policing was first introduced in this country, it was introduced as a very localized endeavor, which of course it is today. We don't have one police agency. In the state of South Carolina, we have more than two hundred police agencies. When policing originated in the larger cities and spread to the midsize cities in starting in the eighteen forties and getting into the eighteen fifties and sixties, the officers job was in large part to make sure that their local elected official state and power. Because someone knew got voted in, they would fire all the police officers, and then through a political patronage system, they would hire an all new group of police officers, many of whom would pay the political patron for the privilege of getting hired as a police officer. Starting in the very late eighteen hundreds and into the early nineteen hundreds, there was a police reform or police professionalism movement. The reform era sought to shift policing from a politically involved constituent services type endeavor to being primarily about law enforcement and crime fighting. Officers were crime fighters first and foremost. There are all kinds of reasons why that was actually wrong. Crime started going up and police agencies couldn't handle it. So the image that they had been selling to the public, we are crime fighters, let us do our thing, well, if you're crime fighters, you're doing an awful job of it. So that the perspectives started to shift in the sixties and seventies, in part because of public pressure during the Civil Rights movement. So that started what we now refer to as the tactical revolution in policing, making sure that there is now a book so that officers can go by the book. But that was a slow process. It didn't penetrate fully. Like a lot of things in policing. It started at the largest agencies and kind of trickled down to smaller agencies, which ultimately gets us to Jim Duncan Lancaster event and these questions of trust faith. In the aftermath of a critical incident like a shooting, there is always going to be uncertainty. When Officer Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, there were different pieces of information flying all over the place, and two narratives came out of that, and one of those narratives was that Michael Brown had violently attacked Officer Wilson and then was returning aggressively, approaching a second time, purportedly to violently attack him again at the time he was shot and killed. The second narrative is that Officer Wilson shot Michael Brown while Michael Brown's hands were up and he was surrendering. After that shooting, I would hazard a guess that anyone who wasn't an eyewitness did not have facts to figure out which narrative was correct, which narrative they should believe. So one of the big questions for me is not just what happened in that shooting. One of the big questions is why did so many people in Ferguson and the surrounding area and across the country believe the second narrative? Why did so many people think, Yeah, I could totally see that an officer would shoot and kill an unarmed black man whose hands were raised in surrender. The answer to that question and his lack of trust. People in Ferguson, people in the St. Louis area, and many people across the country saw the shooting of an unarmed black man while surrendering as consistent with their perspective of policing. So when I see the Jim Duncan shooting story, it raises that same question of trust, and it raises a question of power. Who in that story trusted the police and who had the power to express that trust or distrust. And I don't just mean express it like saying it. I mean express it through their actions. In Ferguson, you had a lot of people who distrusted the police and were empowered to show that distrust by marching, by protesting, by holding visuals. I don't think you've had quite that same dynamic in the sixties. We'll be right back after the break. I was out in Lancaster yesterday afternoon. I went by Duncan's house where he was living at the end of his life. And for a long time that house has been vacant, and there was a car in the driveway this time. So I went up and I knocked on the door. There's a new owner and her name is Camelia Funderburke. And I asked her if she knew anything about who had lived in the home before or this case. She had not known anything about this. She had lived in Lancaster all her life, but I told her about it. He played for the Baltimore Colts and he actually died in the Lancaster police station. And I would like to just play you her reaction and get your reaction to it. Camelia Funderburke declined to let us use her voice in this podcast, but Stonton's reaction to hearing the tape spoke volumes, Yeah, that's she had never heard the story before, that some total of her knowledge about this was be outlining the facts for and it's fascinating, isn't it? And a little frightening that her immediate conclusion is, I don't believe that it's not completely crazy, right, like people absolutely have in the course of American history walked up to officers and attempted to wrestle their gun out of their holsters. So why not believe it? I would hazard a guess it's because either she doesn't trust police now, which may be part of the story, or she thinks about what policing was like at the time in the nineteen sixties and says, there's no way that I'm going to trust that institution, right, that's a distrust issue. Even then, if Duncan's death did happen exactly as it's described based on what we know of how police investigated the incident, there are critics, obviously, who say that they sort of invited these kinds of questions and second guessing based on what seemed like a perfunctory kind of an investigation the incident. Is that fair the criticism the criticism, absolutely, that's fair. Well, let's be a little bit cautious. Investigations into police shootings in the sixties do not look like what should be investigations of police shootings today. Unfortunately, there are at least some investigations of police shootings even today that would have looked pretty normal back in the sixties. That's not because the investigations in the sixties were so good. That's because even today we still have some pretty shitty investigations into officer involved shootings. There wasn't the same demand for that in the sixties, and what demand there was was not from a part of the population that really had the power to make that demand a reality. Since the summer, when we've had a number of high profile police killings, one of the reasons that we've seen such a spotlight being shined on policing is because of video, Because people who otherwise would not have believed that police could do these things are now looking at their phones and being shown effectively incontrovertible proof that in fact, police do, on at least some occasions, engage in these entirely and obviously inappropriate and egregious actions. And then you have people, especially from the black community or other communities of color, who say, of course that's possible. We've known about stuff like that since um slavery. That's not a surprise to us. Can you talk about what sort of an investigation might have been done, what sort of capabilities they would have had, technological or Okay, so there are things that we could do today that wouldn't necessarily have been an option at the time. And I'll give you a very superficial example. Today, it would probably be the case that the police station would have had a security camera rolling. It would probably be pretty simple to just pull the tape. So what would an investigation look like? Well, the first sort of investigations one oh one, which was as true in the nineteen sixties as it is today, is you separate the witnesses and get statements from them. There were multiple officers around, as I understand, and you're going to want to separate them so they don't cross contaminate each other's interviews. We're not just going to say go in with a list of questions and get specific answers. We want to have more open ended interviews. We want to engage in what today is called cognitive interviewing, and then we compare those statements to make sure that they are consistent, and when we find inconsistencies, we look for reasons for those inconsistencies, but would also be looking at other pieces of evidence. We would, for example, do a gunshot residue test, particularly back at the time, with a revolver when the revolver goes off. Um, sorry, I don't have a revolver. I don't think I'd didn't think to ask how many firearms might be in this room? Right now? I have a taser, very plastic. Uh, you know the sad things. I used this as a prop in class sometimes, and every time I use it as a prop in class, I feel like I have to say the gun you were about to see is not real. Please don't come up and tackle me. I didn't used to say that, and now I kind of have to which ship. It's troubling. Okay. So this is a plastic replica of a semi automatic firearm, and very basically, um, in a real semi automatic firearm, this piece here would come out that would be the magazine you would load bullets into the magazine. A revolver is an old timey wheel gun, and the wheel would have a little thing that you pull out and then it would fall open and you could put your five or six bullets in, and then you close the wheel, and when you pulled the trigger, the firing pin would hit the bullet and send it to the barrel, and then the wheel would rotate by one fifth or one sixth of a turn to line the next bullet up with the barrel. A semi automatic like this will eject gunshot residue, burnt powder, a little bit of unburnt powder, the chemicals from the explosion of the bullet in the chamber. A wheel gun, a revolver is even more open, so you're going to have even more gunpowder residue coming out of the back sprang off to the sides. Obviously some coming out of the front with a bullet coming out of the muzzle with a bullet um, but there might be a lot more gunpowder residue to test form. If you have no gunpowder residue on someone's hands, you can be pretty sure that that person either was not the shooter, or they were the shooter, but they were wearing multiple sets of gloves that came up to their forearms that someone took off afterwards. Right. So in a case like this, I would have wanted to see them test Jim Duncan's hands for gunshot residue, and if it turns out that he didn't have gunshot residue, then that would have suggested that he was not the shooter here. Also, I mentioned that when the bullet is fired, gunshot powder which is on fire right, which is in the process of exploding, comes out of the front of the gun. It propels the bullet forward. Essentially, when the firearm is too close to someone, the powder that's expelled from the front, the chemicals and the residue that's expelled from the front can penetrate the skin. That's called stippling. And what we now know, but I'm not sure we would have known in the nineteen sixties, is how to measure approximately a burn pattern from a particular gun or the stippling pattern from a particular gun, and estimate about how far away the gun was at the time, also the position an angle of the wound. And this is something that I would have expected them to have been able to identify it's not always possible to line up with perfect accuracy the penetration pattern of a bullet, and thus to backtrack that and say, okay, well, the bullet penetrated here, then it clearly came off at this angle. But we can rule out certain things, right. We can say, okay, well it definitely came from somewhere over here as opposed to somewhere over here. If they're examining this gunshot wound and the person is right handed, but it's from over here, then we have some questions. It's not impossible, but it becomes a little bit more improbable when you start to put together things like distance and angle. Then you can maybe, and I'm emphasizing maybe, start to say this looks consistent with or this does not look consistent with a self inflicted gun job wund We'll be back after the break. Then we get into the questions of report and what would be written down, what would have what are current best practices and what how do you anticipate they might have differed from what was happening in a rural police station in the early nineteen seventies. Yeah, best practices now are largely officers report everything an officer's report is their representation of the facts as best as they can make it. When you're talking about an officer being involved in a critical incident, particularly police shooting, the rules change a little bit. Ideally, you still want the officer to give a statement, and you still want them to give a statement fairly promptly. But a lot of agencies now allow officers to either not write their own report or to delay the providing of a statement or report for reasons that I think are are largely flawed, but it is common practice. We're going to give the officer time to decompress a little bit, maybe time to have a representative present with them, a lawyer or a union rap or something like that. The purported facts of this case is that this wasn't an officer involved shooting. Applying modern standards, I would expect officers to write reports as if this was a suicide that they had witnessed. Back in the day at a smaller agency, at a more rural agency, at an agency that may not have been leading the charge of police reform and professionalization, a lot of ship happened that never got reported, and so is where today we might have this massive case file hundreds of pictures, hundreds of pages of statements from officers, of reports of witnesses, of forensic reports. Um. Yeah, in a case like this, if you had anything, you might have a one line or one paragraph right up in the watch log. At eight oh three pm, one man later identified as Jim Duncan entered, attempted to take an officer's firearm and shot himself. Period it done. If you had that, nobody's going to jail. The officers are never gonna have to testify against anyone because the only bad actor here, so to speak, is the decedent. Why bother? That leaves the door open for a lot of questions about how authoritative that narrator is. Yeah, it does, But you know, at the time, officers didn't feel the need to present an authoritative narrative because their verbal explanations would be enough. At least it would be enough for everyone who they cared about. And I want to emphasize that's not policing specific right. We constantly make divisions based on differences or perceived differences, and we're using them to adjust how much deference we give the other person and how much difference we expect them to give us. There's some problems that are particularly acute in the policing context when both people expect more deference than the other one is giving them. Social psychologists called this an asymmetric deference norm. The officer might say, this person should defer to me because I am the authority. The other person might say the officer should defer to me in at least some respect because I am a taxpayer, or something like that. The potential for conflict comes up when the officer may not just view lack of deference as something that is upsetting. They may view it is something that requires a physical response. And I can think of no better example than the Sandra Bland traffic stoff. Hello man, well it takes how I've told The reason for your stop is you didn't fail. You failed to signal lane change. You get a dramas lice insurance with you. After an initial interaction, the officer walked back to his car, wrote out what we later learned as a warning ticket, walked back up to Sandra Bland's car, and one of the first things he said was you seem irritated. Okay, I'm like, now you you this is Joja. I'm know you what you seem very irritated. I am, I really am like that. But what I'm doing tychical. I was getting out of your way. You're speeding up tailorly, so I'll move over and you stop. So yeah, I am a little irritated, but that doesn't stop you from giving me a ticket. Sever If that had been me in my newer model car, dressed in my business suit, I think the cop would have, again, unconsciously and without realizing it, given me a little more deference than he gave Sandra Bland. But what he did was Sandra Bland is He waited four seconds and he said, are you done? You asked me what's wrong, and I told you so now I'm doing you. In other words, he was telling her, I'm not deferring to you that I don't care about or respect your concerns. They were in a staring contest, and the problem with the staring contest in this context is not who blinks first. It's who has the power to swing for and that's the officer. I'm giving you a law for to turn around, will you. I'm not complaining because you just pulled me out of my car around and the idea that a guy coming from Baltimore at the time, where he was royalty, where he where he might have expected quite a bit of deference. Again, I want to emphasize I'm not saying that is what happened. But if Jim Duncan, the football star who is used to deference and even a degree of hero worship in Baltimore, comes down to South Carolina, the potential for explosive conflict is pretty obvious. There's an interesting parallel here again that in a lot of ways, NFL players are at the forefront of this conversation about police interactions with communities of color. Yes, yes, yes, look at I oh my god, the whole the kneeling, the Colin Kaepernick's um. Yeah. Look at the way that that we have responded as a society. Look at the way that we responded to other sports figures taking stances on things. No one got upset when Chuck Norris started his Kick Drugs out of America program. These are the faces of America's future now more than ever. They need our help. Hi, I'm Chuck Nora. I want to talk to you about our kids. What the hell does Chuck Norris know about drugs? Stay in your lane, Chuck, that's why I'm here to ask your support for kick drugs out of America. Of course that would be absurd to say, right, But Colin Kaepernick, he should just shut up and play any case like this, whether it was Ferguson, whether it was Lancaster, it's frustrating to try and pick apart because we don't know if this was a cover up. Yeah, we don't know if this was actually a straightforward, open and chut kind of thing, or if it was a straightforward, open and shut kind of a thing that was just handled really badly. Yeah, what can we learn from this historical incident that we can apply today? And one of the things I can tell you, just very superficially is we need accurate and legitimate investigations. At risk of repeating you, there are some predictable possibilities to explain what happened. It happened the way that the police later said it did, and they acted appropriately in the aftermath. It happened the way the police said it did, and they botched the aftermath. It did not happen the way that the officers said it did, and there is some ineptitude at best, or active cover up at worst. We don't know. That's again where trust comes in. That's again why trust is so incredibly important. If I'm the police chief, I need to be able to say we messed up or the circumstances, the facts, the evidence certainly suggest that we messed up. Here's what I'm going to do immediately, and here's what I hope to do in the mid term, in the long term, to make sure that we stay on top of this. By acknowledging missteps, police agencies can build that trust step by painful step so that when something happens, and it's not a matter of if, it is a matter of when. When something happens in which there is ambiguity or uncertainty that can ignite a fire in the community, when the police chief steps forward and says this is not as bad as it looks, they'll have some trust that if it was as bad as it looks, that would be acknowledged. They're not going to have the same questions then that we have now about the Jim Duncan shooting. I'm Davin Coburn. Return Man is a production of The Herald McClatchy Studios and I Heart Radio. Brett McCormick is the lead reporter, and the show is produced by Matt Walsh, Tara Tabor, Caught Stevens, and Rachel Wise. I'm the executive producer from McLatchy Studios. The executive producer for I Heart Radio is Sean Titone. For lots more on this story, go to Harold Online dot com Slash return Man. If you have any additional information about Jim Duncan's life or death, email us at return Man at Harold online dot com. To continue supporting this kind of work, visit Herald online dot com slash podcasts and consider a digital subscription. And for more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows