Waffle House and the Death of the Hero Cop

Travis Reinking being arrested peacefully

The Waffle House shooter is in custody. Travis Reinking barely made it a mile from the restaurant where he killed four Black and Hispanic customers, and wounded three others, before he huddled down. A combination of good police work and community engagement make Reinking easy to spot, and he was taken alive, with minimal conflict. This was an excellent example of how police conduct a manhunt for a known dangerous fugitive.

But it didn’t produce any heroes.

News reports surrounding the capture notably don’t mention any individual police officers by name, or interview anybody who participated in Reinking’s capture. No individual has claimed credit for the intelligence, pursuit, or actual physical capture. This story has produced only one acclaimed “hero,” James Shaw, Jr., the customer who wrestled the rifle from Reinking’s hands. The subsequent police investigation is a triumph of organization, unity, training, and skill.

This provides a problem for the narrative. Who, actually, brought down Reinking? The Antioch, Tennessee, PD can claim collective responsibility, but who can President Trump pin a medal on? The Commissioner of Police? The squadroom captain? This wasn’t a triumph for the officers in command, or the hierarchy. Without an individual to display for cameras, the police department lacks the ability to monetize this capture for future negotiations.

Sidney Poitier as Virgil Tibbs, the only
fictional hero cop I actually respect

David Graeber, of the London School of Economics, writes that hero cop harratives, a standard of American genre literature, usually begin with the police officer turning in his badge, getting grilled by Internal Affairs, or otherwise demonstrating his disregard for rules. We actively admire police who spit on the rules. Dirty Harry, John McClain, Murtaugh and Riggs… before a cop becomes a hero, he must first circumvent the bureaucracy.

That didn’t happen here. Nobody went off the ranch pursuing the killer, bringing justice down like God’s hammer. The Waffle House manhunt showcases efficiency, organization, preparedness, and skill. All the action took place in a matter of minutes; heroes and villains emerged from the narrative seamlessly. Everything after the original confrontation became a mopping-up operation.

Which, let me emphasize, it should be.

Because when one lone nut goes haywire, the results are often ugly. Movies made a hero of Dirty Harry Callahan, and critics consistently overlook the fact that white, clean-shaven Harry, a picture of postwar American manhood, delivered his iconic “Do ya feel lucky, punk,” speech while holding his gun on an afro’d Black man. This wasn’t a soliloquy, it was an enactment of white America’s fears during the racial realignment of the Vietnam era.

Somebody could criticize me now, saying: Hey, Murtaugh is black! John McClain’s foes are consistently white, and he brought down one of those foes by making an alliance with Samuel L. Jackson! Don’t make this into a racial thing when it doesn’t deserve to be one!

True, it isn’t necessarily racial. There are other explanations regarding what happens in these circumstances. Yet when individual discretion overrules procedure, individual prejudice intrudes. At this writing, we’re barely a month out from the Stephon Clark shooting, when police unloaded twenty bullets into a Black man whom they accosted in his own yard, claiming they mistook his cell phone for a gun. How many police would’ve mistaken a white man’s phone?

Or how about Eric Casebolt, who in 2015 famously wrestled a fourteen-year-old girl to the ground at a pool party in McKinney, Texas. When I voiced complaints about this action at the time, friends responded: “But he had a right to defend his life!” I respond, where on a teenager’s bikini did Casebolt see a lethal threat? Or did he react to black skin? Don’t lie to me in your answer, I know when you’re bullshitting.

A still from the cell phone video that ended Eric Casebolt's law enforcement career

Police have procedures established to prevent rogue actions. They do this because hard experience teaches that order means nothing without rule of law. And while, yes, you’ll find examples of police organizationally pursuing injustice, those examples remain horrifying because we no longer expect them like we did in Bull Connor’s day. Even if individual and systemic racism survive, organizations exist to prevent its sudden reappearance.

The notable quality about Travis Reinking’s arrest isn’t that police arrested him, but that they did so justly. No heroes, no guns a-blazing, no yippie-ki-yay mother… You know the rest. It shows a group, authorized by the community, valuing justice over heroism. If we could reward people for treasuring justice, and finally lay the hero cop myth to rest, maybe organized arrests and trials will become the norm. Hopefully we’ll see that day soon.