Why does police
authority exist?
By James Rothenberg
June 01, 2020 "
Information
Clearing House" -
Police brutality has again injected itself into the
public eye. Today we see what could be covered up
before. The actual crime. And because we see it, we
feel it, making the brutality seem closer and more
frequent. And then we witness the hostile reaction
of lowly people to the coercive apparatus which
enforces their subordination and we feel the rage of
the lowly people. Or, do we?
Burning and
looting is unsettling to watch, even when you
understand it. And, particularly if you don’t
understand it, you may think there’s a middle ground
somewhere but none exists. What’s coming next —
what has to come next — is increased force from
above. Unless we want to be a part of that, we must
consider ourselves lowly. This I gladly do because
it puts me on a side.
Things don’t
get by as much as they did in the pre-digital age.
Oppression is not limited to skin color, but think
back to the days when blacks were lynched. Not only
were the perpetrators not hiding what they did, but
they broadcast it in the widest ways possible to act
as examples.
It’s possible
that instances of police brutality have actually
decreased proportional to population. Though this
reasoning is unscientific, the restraining presence
of security cameras, body cameras on police and
ubiquitous cell phone cameras in peoples’ hands
figure to have an effect greater than zero.
Of course
it’s beside the point if we’re alarmed at a new
level of police violence, or simply alarmed because
this violence doesn’t escape our attention. If there
is a distinction here, it is mentioned solely to get
it out of the way for a different examination.
A recent
op-ed in the New York Times by Philip
V. McHarris and Thenjiwe McHarris bore the strong
headline, “No More Money for the Police”. The
authors observe that the Minneapolis Police
Department, held up as a model of progressive police
reform, has gone through all the recommended
procedures you can think of but to what avail? It
seems we haven’t had much luck in “training” police
brutality away. At a certain point one cannot get
away from concluding that police brutality is here
because police are here.
“The problem
is that the entire criminal justice system gives
police officers the power and opportunity to
systematically harass and kill with impunity.”
