People around the world reacted with horror, again,
at the murder, again, of an unarmed person by police in the United
States. On May 25, 2020, a Minneapolis, MN, USA, police officer steadily knelt
on the neck of George Floyd for nearly nine minutes, slowly crushing the life
out of Mr. Floyd with an incomprehensible cold-blooded nonchalance. Mr. Floyd
was a 46-year old Black man, unarmed, not resisting, and suspected of an offense
involving $20. Only days earlier, a video was leaked of the February 23, 2020
murder of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed 25-year old Black man, by law enforcement
vigilantes in Glynn County, GA, USA. On March 13, 2020, at about 1 a.m.,
Breonna Taylor, a sleeping, unarmed 26-year old Black woman, was shot eight
times and killed by police who forced their way into her apartment in Louisville, KY, USA, on a "no-knock" warrant issued, looking for a drug suspect who lived 10 miles away.
Around the world, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators and
thousands of organizations have been declaring their solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter
and all who protest these murders and the unceasing abuse of power by police and security forces around the world. In the U.S., about 1000 persons are killed by the police annually (1004 in 2019; 991 in 2018, Washington Post). U.S. cultural dominance has the
effect of highlighting these deaths, yet officially over 5000 persons have been killed (or as many as 12,000 according to human rights groups) in
the Philippines by police and security forces since June 2016, to cite a
representative instance of a global pandemic of unlawful police violence and
misconduct.
These murders are only the most dramatic culmination of
wholesale police misconduct. People around the world are sick and tired of being
routinely harassed by law enforcement officers and security forces, very
frequently under the pretext of suspicion of possession or distribution of
drugs. Countless times, every day in every nation, without any lawful justification,
people are stopped, questioned, and frequently assaulted as they are searched
for contraband or weapons. These stops are always accompanied by the threat of
violence, explicit or implicit! In many places, these threats are part of a
systematic extortion racket by the police and security forces -- the
consequence of failing to pay a demanded bribe is violence or arrest.
Large populations -- people of color in the United States,
and religious and racial minorities and residents of poor neighborhoods in
almost every nation – are fully aware of the culture of impunity surrounding
police and security forces and live in dread that any police stop can result in
incarceration, severe physical injury or death. This culture of violence
is global. From the favelas of Brasil to the islands of the Philippines, from
the People’s Republic of China to the Russian Republic, from the United States of America to the Republic of
South Africa, from Nigeria to El Salvador, from Syria to Jamaica -- the world’s police are generally
not accountable to the communities they purport to serve. Whether the police
are following the orders of autocrats like President Duterte in the Philippines
or are indifferent to or in defiance of the civilian authorities in many
American cities, there is a global crisis of police violence and
unaccountability. In all these instances, this unlawful violence is part of a
wholesale violation of human rights and due process rights -- including rights
of freedom of association, expression, free exercise of religion and privacy --
that is justified and financed by the “war on drugs” and supported by the
colonialist ideology of prohibition.
Drug prohibition exemplifies the fundamentally flawed
psychology of “justice” systems that harsh punishment -- imposed or threatened –
is the foundation of good behavior and the just retribution for misconduct. The
flaw is that harsh punishment does not work.
While some lethal police violence grows out directly out of individual
racism, one thread of institutional or organizational toleration for police violence
grows out of a rationalization that “street justice” is necessary and deserved to
compensate for the inefficiencies of prosecutors and courts that fail to punish.
The toleration of extra-judicial violence builds a culture of impunity.
People who use drugs are prime targets for “street justice”
and police violence. Due to the illegality of drug use, people who use drugs do
so privately to avoid attracting attention. Yet, in many parts of the world, drug
use is widespread and normative behavior, and justice system bureaucracies are
unable to impose legal punishments on most drug users. Police, as the primary
warriors in the “drug war” and able to impose the punishment on the spot, often feel justified using “street justice” -- intimidation, violence and
confiscation of property in illegal stops -- in order to carry out the “war on
drugs” and advancing its century-old goal of punishing drug users.
The specific legal and political character of the problem of
police violence varies. In some nations the violence of the police follows the
policies of the rulers -- elected or not, civilian or not. In other
nations, police violence is simply tolerated as one of the perquisites of the
office, and the price endured of having police provide some measure of state
sanctioned social control. And in other nations, such as the United States, the
police violence is formally unauthorized but institutionally protected by Jim
Crow-style legal doctrines of “qualified immunity” and collective bargaining
agreements ratified by city, county and state governments.
Police misconduct seems to be intrinsic to most legal
systems. Worldwide, the criminal justice bureaucracies are organized primarily
to impose punishment, and operationally are largely indifferent to injustice.
Police perjury, if not engaged in by every police officer, is so widespread
that only the most egregious instances of police falsehoods are commented upon
by court personnel or acted upon. Prosecutors in most nations routinely accept
the cases brought by police and proffer the testimony of police witnesses.
Judicial officers throughout the world generally favor police testimony and the
representations of prosecutors. Concepts of due process set forth in
Constitutions, national charters, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
are widely disregarded around the world.
People of color in the United States, people who use drugs,
and disadvantaged people everywhere know an encounter with a police officer is
an extraordinarily risky situation that has the potential to become a
life-changing catastrophe. In most white-dominated societies, the police are
particularly uncontrolled in their behavior toward racial minorities. In some
parts of the United States, the contemporary state and municipal police forces
arose from the slave patrols created to prevent enslaved persons from running away
or rebelling. The authority to catch escaped enslaved persons and “deliver
[them] up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labor may be due,” is today
still part of the text of the U.S. Constitution (Art. IV, sec. 2, cl. 3). In
other parts of the United States, the early functions of the police were to
protect property-owning elites from immigrants, the indigenous and internal
migrants. Supposed “crimes” such as vagrancy or loitering have for generations
been used to control people of color, the poor, the young, and those with
disabilities, emotional distress, mental illness or the disease of addiction.
Legal reforms of the abuse of those outmoded laws have been circumvented in
much of the United States by the use of the drug laws.
Of course, we oppose violence, theft, violation of human
rights and exploitation. However, drug prohibition empowers criminals and
criminal organizations to exploit the peasants and farmers who cultivate poppy,
coca, and cannabis. The inevitable disagreements of commerce, when they arise in
the illegal drug trade, can only be resolved through violence because the
nonviolent dispute resolution mechanisms of legal commerce are unavailable. The
trade in highly valuable illegal drugs, carried on outside the legitimate
channels of commerce, can only be protected by illegal armed groups, and their
exchange for cash is perpetually at risk of armed robbery. This is a greater problem, of course, in the consumer countries. Sadly, throughout
the world, police agencies are corrupted by the illegal drug trade. One
must consider how extensively the resistance of the police everywhere to
oversight, regulation and accountability by management and civil society is due
to dependence of police officers on income from the illegal drug trade and
bribery.
Thus, not only is the war on drugs the pretext for the
initiation of police-civilian contact for the purpose of extortion,
surveillance, social control and invidious racial subjugation, but the war on
drugs is a driver of police resistance to accountability.
It should go without saying that there is a legitimate role
for proper policing, but policing as it has been practiced demands wholesale
reform of police and domestic security agencies worldwide. It must be acknowledged that policing as currently organized is dangerous, but police behavior and misconduct have fueled enormous resentment and inflamed passions for revenge. Enforcing unpopular laws in a high-handed manner increases the risk of violent resistance to police officers.
But many police agencies are so tainted by a culture of impunity and grievance that they must be
reconstituted from the ground up. Entirely new management needs to be
hired, empowered to vet potential recruits. The functions of the police
services need to be wholly reorganized. Police in the community have the
responsibility to bring services to individuals and families that are troubled.
Whenever there is a response to a call for service, a key question a police
officer should ask is, “Are everyone’s needs in this household being
met?” The primary role of the police should be crime prevention. The
investigation of crime is a specialized function of the police, not its primary
function. The primary goal of the police agencies should be maximizing health
and safety, not “law enforcement.” The police should be as vigilant about
pollution, chemical spills, adulterated food, labor exploitation because of the
many victims who are powerless, as they are about their more traditional defense
of property and certain classes of “violence.”
Police should not be trained to self-identify as “crime
fighters.” Recruits need to be carefully screened, and properly trained to
create a culture of service to the communities in which they operate and to be
scrupulous honesty. Police training regarding encounters with the public must
be completely reconceptualized to conflict de-escalation and to deprioritize
the use of force. Police officers must be paid an appropriate professional
salary. Internal systems of management, control and discipline must be vibrant
and transparent.
Now is the time to stand with #BlackLivesMatter and those
who are demanding not only accountability by the police for their acts of
misconduct, but wholesale, structural reconstruction of the criminal justice
system and the role of the police within it.
Sphere: Related Content
Posts
