Читать книгу Our Enemies in Blue - Kristian Williams - Страница 5

In the first hours of 2009, police boarded a Bay Area Rapid Transit train, responding to a call about a fight. They detained several young men, most of them Black, among them one named Oscar Grant. As Grant was lying face down on the platform being handcuffed, one officer, Johannes Mehserle, drew his gun, shot him in the back, and killed him.

The entire incident was recorded on video from multiple angles. Several witnesses were filming with their cell phone cameras when Grant was shot; afterward, they hid the cameras from police, and then posted the footage on the Internet. Within days, demonstrations were organized in Oakland, and quickly escalated into riots—beginning with an attack on a police car parked in front of the BART headquarters. More than 300 businesses and hundreds of cars were damaged in the unrest. Police responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, an armored personnel carrier, and more than a hundred arrests, but demonstrations continued for weeks.1 A year later, Mehserle was tried and convicted, but of manslaughter rather than murder. Rioting resumed. Damages were estimated at $750,000.2

While clearly a limited victory, the Mehserle verdict remains remarkable. Looking back over the fifteen previous years, the San Francisco Chronicle could find only six cases in which police were charged for on-duty shootings, and none of the thirteen officers involved were convicted.3 “If there’s one lesson to take from this,” a participant in the unrest was later to conclude, “it’s that the only reason Mehserle was arrested is because people tore up the city. It was the riot—and the threat of future riots.”4

Grant’s killing marked the start of a cycle of unrest affecting west coast cities for the better part of two years, manifesting not only in militant protests and riots, but arson, sabotage, and ambush attacks. In October 2009, several unoccupied police cars were firebombed in Seattle; a few days later, on Halloween, two cops were shot in a drive-by attack, and one died. The following month Maurice Clemmons ambushed four cops in a Lakewood, Washington coffee shop, killing them all. On January 29, 2010, Portland police shot and killed an unarmed Black man named Aaron Campbell as he was trying to surrender; his family had called 911 because they feared he might be suicidal. In March, they shot and killed a homeless man, Jack Collins, as he approached holding an Exacto knife. Then in May, they shot and killed a young Black man named Keaton Otis, whom they had pulled over because (as one officer explained) they thought he “kind of look[ed] like he could be a gangster.” Each shooting was followed by protests of increasing militancy, as well as after-hours attacks on the offices of law enforcement agencies. In August 2010, Seattle police shot and killed a Native American woodcarver named John T. Williams, seemingly without provocation. Weeks of protests followed. Then, in September 2010, after police killed Manuel Jamines, a Guatemalan day laborer, Los Angeles saw riots lasting three nights.5

It’s no surprise that the police come into conflict with members of the public. The police are tasked with controlling a population that does not always respect their authority and may resist their efforts to enforce the law. Hence, police are armed, trained, and authorized to use force in the course of executing their duty. At times, they use the ultimate in force, killing those they are charged with controlling.

Under such an arrangement, it is only too predictable that officers sometimes move beyond the bounds of their authority, and that the affected communities respond with anger—sometimes rage. The battles that ensue do not only concern particular injustices, but also represent deep disputes about the rights of the public and the limits of state power. On the one side, the police and the government try desperately to maintain control, to preserve their authority. And on the other, oppressed people struggle to assert their humanity. Such riots represent, among other things, the attempt of the community to define for itself what will count as police brutality and where the limit of authority falls. It is in these conflicts, not in the courts, that our rights are established.

The Rodney King Beating: “Basic Stuff Really”

On March 3, 1991, a Black motorist named Rodney King led the California Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles Police Department on a ten-minute chase. When he stopped and exited the car, the police ordered him to lie down; he got on all fours instead, and Sergeant Stacey Koon shot him twice with an electric taser. The other passengers in King’s car were cuffed and laid prone on the street. An officer kept his gun aimed at them, and when they heard screams he ordered them not to look. One did try to look, and was clubbed on the head.6

Others were watching, however, and a few days later the entire world saw what had happened to Rodney King. A video recorded by a bystander shows three cops taking turns beating King, with several other officers looking on, and Sergeant Stacey Koon shouting orders. The video shows police clubbing King fifty-six times, and kicking him in the body and head.7 When the video was played on the local news, KCET enhanced the sound. Police can be heard ordering King to put his hands behind his back and calling him “nigger.”8

The chase began at 12:40 A.M. and ended at 12:50 A.M. At 12:56, Sgt. Koon reported via his car’s computer, “You just had a big time use of force … tased and beat the suspect of CHP pursuit, Big Time.” At 12:57, the station responded, “Oh well … I’m sure the lizard didn’t deserve it … HAHA.” At 1:07, the watch commander summarized the incident (again via Mobile Data Terminal): “CHP chasing … failing to yield … passed [car] A 23 … they became primary … then tased, then beat … basic stuff really.”9 Koon himself endorsed this assessment of the incident. In his 1992 book on the subject, he described the altercation: “Just another night on the LAPD. That’s what it had been.”10

King was jailed for four days, but released without charges. He was treated at County-USC Hospital, where he received twenty stitches and treatment for a broken cheekbone and broken ankle. Nurses there reported hearing officers brag and joke about the beating. King later listed additional injuries, including broken bones and teeth, injured kidneys, multiple skull fractures, and permanent brain damage.11

Twenty-three officers had responded to the chase, including two in a helicopter. Of these, ten Los Angeles Police Department officers were present on the ground during the beating, including four field training officers, who supervise rookies. Four cops—Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, and Theodore Briseno—were indicted for their role in the beating. Wind was a new employee, still in his probationary period, and was fired. Two California Highway Patrol officers were disciplined for not reporting the use of force, and their supervisor was suspended for ten days. But none of the other officers present were disciplined in any way, though they had done nothing to prevent the beating or to report it afterward.12

The four indicted cops were acquitted. Social scientists have argued that the verdict was “predictable,” given the location of the trial:

Simi Valley, the site of the trial, and Ventura County more generally, is a predominantly white community known for its strong stance on law and order, as evidenced by the fact that a significant number of LAPD officers live there. Thus, the four white police officers were truly judged by a jury of their peers. Viewed in this context, the verdict should not have been unanticipated.13

Koon, Powell, Wind, and Briseno were acquitted. They were then almost immediately charged with federal civil rights violations, but that was clearly too little, too late. L.A. was in flames.

A Social Conflagration

The people of Los Angeles offered a ready response to the acquittal. Between April 30 and May 5, 1992, 600 fires were set.14 Four thousand businesses were destroyed,15 and property damage neared $1 billion.16 Fifty-two people died, and 2,383 people were injured seriously enough to seek medical attention.17 Smaller disturbances also erupted around the country—in San Francisco, Atlanta, Las Vegas, New York, Seattle, Tampa, and Washington, D.C.18

Despite the media’s portrayal of the riot as an expression of Black rage, arrest statistics show it to have been a multicultural affair: 3,492 Latinos, 2,832 Black people, and 640 White people were arrested, as were 2,492 other people of unidentified races.19 Likewise, despite the media focus on violence (especially attacks on White people and Korean merchants), the data tell a different story. Only 10 percent of arrests were for violent crime. The most common charge was curfew violation (42 percent), closely followed by property crimes (35 percent).20 Likewise, the actual death toll

definitely attributable to the rioters was under twenty. The police killed at least half that many, and probably many more.… Moreover, although some whites and Korean Americans were killed, the vast majority of fatalities were African Americans and Hispanic Americans who died as bystanders or as rioters opposing civil authorities.21

Depending on whom you ask, you will hear that the riots constituted “a Black protest,” a “bread riot,” the “breakdown of civilized society,” or “interethnic conflict.”22 None of these accounts is sufficient on its own, but one thing is certain: the riots speak to conditions beyond any single incident.

In the five years preceding the Rodney King beating, 2,500 claims relating to the use of force were filed against the LAPD. To describe just one: In April 1988, Luis Milton Murrales, a twenty-four-year-old Latino man, lost the vision in one eye because of a police beating. That incident also began with a traffic violation, followed by a brief chase. Murrales crashed his car into a police cruiser and tried to flee on foot. The police caught him, clubbed him, and kicked him when he fell. They resumed the beating at the Rampart station; the attack involved a total of twenty-eight officers. One commander described his subordinates as behaving like a “lynch mob.” Though the city paid $177,500 in a settlement with Murrales, none of the officers were disciplined.23

Such incidents, as well as the depressed economic conditions of the inner city, supplied the fuel for a major conflagration. The King beating, the video, and the verdict offered just the spark to set it off.24

A Lesson To Learn and Learn Again

Rodney King’s beating was unusual only because it was videotaped. The community that revolted following the acquittal seemed to grasp this fact, even if the learned commentators and pious pundits condemning them did not. By the same token, the revolt itself also fit an established pattern.

In 1968, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (commonly called the Kerner Commission) examined twenty-four riots and reached some remarkable conclusions:

Our examination of the background of the surveyed disorders revealed a typical pattern of deeply-held grievances which were widely shared by many members of the Negro community. The specific content of the expressed grievances varied somewhat from city to city. But in general, grievances among Negroes in all cities related to prejudice, discrimination, severely disadvantaged living conditions and a general sense of frustration about their inability to change those conditions.

Specific events or incidents exemplified and reinforced the shared sense of grievance.… With each such incident, frustration and tension grew until at some point a final incident, often similar to the incidents preceding it, occurred and was followed almost immediately by violence.

As we see it, the prior incidents and the reservoir of underlying grievances contributed to a cumulative process of mounting tension that spilled over into violence when the final incident occurred. In this sense the entire chain—the grievances, the series of prior tension-heightening incidents, and the final incident—was the “precipitant” of disorder.25

The Kerner report goes on to note, “Almost invariably the incident that ignites disorder arises from police action. Harlem, Watts, Newark, and Detroit—all the major outbursts of recent years—were precipitated by routine arrests of Negroes for minor offenses by white officers.”26

A few years earlier, in his essay “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem,” James Baldwin had offered a very similar analysis:

[T]he only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive. None of the Police Commissioner’s men, even with the best will in the world, have any way of understanding the lives led by the people they swagger about in twos and threes controlling. Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding gumdrops to children. They represent the force of the white world, and that world’s real intentions are, simply, for that world’s criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in his place.… One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up. Before the dust has settled or the blood congeals, editorials, speeches, and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened. What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men.27

Baldwin wrote his essay in 1960. Between its publication and that of the Kerner report, the U.S. witnessed civil disturbances of increasing frequency and intensity. Notable among these was the Watts riot of 1965. The Watts rebellion has been said to divide the sixties into its two parts—the classic period of the civil rights movement before, and the more militant Black Power movement after.28

Like the riots of 1992, the Watts disturbance began with a traffic stop. Marquette Frye was pulled over by the California Highway Patrol near Watts, a Black neighborhood in Los Angeles. A crowd gathered, and the police called for backup. As the number of police and bystanders grew, the tension increased accordingly. The police assaulted a couple of bystanders and arrested Frye’s family. As the cops left, the crowd stoned their cars. They then began attacking other vehicles in the area, turning them over, setting them on fire. The next evening, the disorder arose anew, with looting and arson in the nearby commercial areas. The riot lasted six days and caused an estimated $35 million in damage. Almost 1,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. One thousand people were treated for injuries, and thirty-four were killed.29

Fourteen years after Watts, and thirteen years before the Rodney King verdict, a similar drama played out on the other side of the country, in Miami. On December 17, 1979, the police chased, caught, beat, and killed a Black insurance salesman named Arthur McDuffie. McDuffie, who was riding his cousin’s motorcycle, allegedly popped a wheelie and made an obscene gesture at Police Sergeant Ira Diggs, before leading police on an eight-minute high-speed chase. Twelve other cars joined in the pursuit, and when they caught McDuffie, between six and eight officers beat him with heavy flashlights as he lay handcuffed, face down on the pavement. Four days later, he died.30

Three officers were charged with second-degree murder, and three others agreed to testify in exchange for immunity. Judge Lenore Nesbitt called the case “a time bomb” and moved it to Tampa, where an all-White jury had recently acquitted another officer accused of beating a Black motorist. The defense then used its peremptory challenges to remove all Black candidates from the jury. The outcome was predictable: the cops were acquitted; crowds then looted stores, burned buildings, and attacked White passers-by. Crowds also laid siege to the police station, breaking its windows and setting fire to the lobby. When calm returned, seventeen people were dead, 1,100 had been arrested, and $80 million in property had been damaged. Four hundred seventeen people were treated in area hospitals, the majority of them White.31

Here was a key difference: in Miami, the typical looting and burning of White-owned property were matched with attacks against White people. In the disorders of the 1960s, attacks against persons had been relatively rare. In three of the sixties’ largest riots—those of Watts, Newark, and Detroit—the crowd intentionally killed only two or three White people. Bruce Porter and Marvin Dunn comment:

What was shocking about Miami was the intensity of the rage directed against white people: men, women and children dragged from their cars and beaten to death, stoned to death, stabbed with screwdrivers, run over with automobiles; hundreds more attacked in the street and seriously injured.… In Miami, attacking and killing white people was the main object of the riot.32

Among those injured in the riots was an elderly White man named Martin Weinstock. Weinstock was hit in the head with a piece of concrete and suffered a fractured skull. He was hospitalized for six days. Still, he told an interviewer:

They should only know that I agree with their anger.… If the people who threw the concrete were brought before me in handcuffs, I would insist that the handcuffs be removed, and I’d try to talk to them. I would say that I understand and that I’m on their side. I have no anger at all. But they’ll never solve their problems by sending people like me to the hospital.33

Weinstock is right: violence directed against random representatives of some dominant group is hardly strategic, much less morally justifiable. But if such attacks are (as Porter and Dunn insist) “shocking,” it can only be because Black anger has so rarely taken this form.

White violence against Black people has never been limited to the destruction of their property. Even in Miami, Black people got the worst of the violence. Of the seventeen dead, nine were Black people killed by the police, the National Guard, or White vigilantes.34 Are these deaths somehow less shocking than those of White people?

Yet—how loudly White people denounce prejudice when it is directed against them, and how quietly they accept it as it continually bears down on people of color. They indignantly point out the contradiction when those who object to prejudice employ it, and all the while adroitly ignore their own complicity in the institutions of White supremacy.

James Baldwin, again in his “Letter from Harlem,” imagines the predicament of a White policeman patrolling the ghetto: “He too believes in good intentions and is astounded and offended when they are not taken for the deed. He has never, himself, done anything for which to be hated.… But,” Baldwin asks, “which of us has?”35

The Basics

We are encouraged to think of acts of police violence more or less in isolation, to consider them as unique, unrelated occurrences. We ask ourselves always, “What went wrong?” and for answers we look to the seconds, minutes, or hours before the incident. Perhaps this leads us to fault the individual officer, perhaps it leads us to excuse him. Such thinking, derived as it is from legal reasoning, does not take us far beyond the case in question. And thus, such inquiries are rarely very illuminating.

The shooting of Oscar Grant, the beating of Rodney King, the arrest of Marquette Frye, the killing of Arthur McDuffie, and any of the less noted atrocities I’ve mentioned here in passing—any of these may be explained in terms of the actions and attitudes of the particular officers at the scene, the events preceding the violence (including the actions of the victims), and the circumstances in which the officers found themselves. Indeed, juries and police administrators have frequently found it possible to excuse police violence with such explanations.

The unrest that followed these incidents, however, cannot be explained in such narrow terms. To understand the rioting, one must consider a whole range of related issues, including the conditions of life in the Black community, the role of the police in relation to that community, and the history and pattern of similar abuses.

If we are to understand the phenomenon of police brutality, we must get beyond particular cases. We can better understand the actions of individual police officers if we understand the institution of which they are a part. That institution, in turn, can best be examined if we have an understanding of its origins, its social function, and its relation to larger systems like capitalism and White supremacy.

Let’s begin with the basics: violence is an inherent part of policing. The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry.36 When persuasion, indoctrination, moral pressure, and incentive measures all fail—there are the police. In the field of social control, police are specialists in violence. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. With varying degrees of subtlety, this colors their every action. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent.

Defining Brutality

The study of police brutality faces any number of methodological barriers, not the least of which is the problem of defining it. There is no standard definition, nor is there one way of measuring force and excessive force. As a consequence, different studies produce very different results, and these results are difficult to compare. Kenneth Adams, writing for the National Institute of Justice, notes:

Because there is no standard methodology for measuring use of force, estimates can vary considerably on strictly computational grounds. Different definitions of force and different definitions of police-public interactions will yield different rates.… In particular, broad definitions of use of force, such as those that include grabbing or handcuffing a suspect, will produce higher rates than more conservative definitions.… Broad definitions of police-public “interactions,” such as calls for assistance, which capture variegated requests for assistance, lead to low rates of use of force. Conversely, narrow definitions of police-public interactions, such as arrests, which concentrate squarely on suspects, lead to higher rates of use of force.37

Adams himself outlines multiple definitions for use-of-force violations, focusing on different aspects of the misconduct.

For example, “deadly force” refers to situations in which force is likely to have lethal consequences for the victim. [The victim need not necessarily die.] … [T]he term “excessive force” is used to describe situations in which more force is used than allowable when judged in terms of administrative or professional guidelines or legal standards.… “Illegal” use of force refers to situations in which use of force by police violated a law or statute.… “Improper,” “abusive,” “illegitimate,” and “unnecessary” use of force are terms that describe situations in which an officer’s authority to use force has been mishandled in some general way, the suggestion being that administrative procedure, societal expectations, ordinary concepts of lawfulness, and the principle of last resort have been violated, respectively.38

Adding to the difficulty of comparing one set of figures with another, each of these concepts refers to standards that vary according to the agency, jurisdiction, and community involved. Even within a single agency, agreement on the interpretation of the relevant standards may not be perfect. Bobby Lee Cheatham, a Black cop in Miami, noted the different standards among the police: “To [White officers], police brutality is going up and just hitting on someone with no reason.… To me, it’s when a policeman gets in a situation where he’s too aggressive or uses force when it isn’t needed. Most of the time the policeman creates the situation himself.”39

Even where the facts of a case are agreed upon (which is rare enough), there may yet be intense disagreement about the relevant standards of conduct and their application to the particular circumstances. For example, in October 1997, sheriff’s deputies in Humboldt County, California, swabbed pepper-spray fluid directly into the eyes of non-violent anti-logging demonstrators locked together in an act of civil disobedience. Amnesty International called the tactic “deliberately cruel and tantamount to torture.” A federal judge refused to issue an injunction against the practice, however, claiming that it only caused “transient pain.”40

This case highlights the disparate judgments possible, even given the same facts. A great many people feel about police brutality as Justice Potter Stewart felt about pornography: they can’t define it, but they know it when they see it. Unfortunately, they might not know it when they see it. Many police tactics—the use of pressure points, the fastening of handcuffs too tightly, and the direct application of pepper spray, for example—really don’t look anything like they feel. More to the point, in most cases, nobody sees the brutality at all, except for the cops and their victims. The rest of us have to rely on secondary information, usually taking one side or the other at their word.

Things get even stickier when general patterns of violence are scrutinized, even where no particular encounter rises to the level of official misconduct. As one Justice Department study explains: “Use of excessive force means that police applied too much force in a given incident, while excessive use of force means that police apply force legally in too many incidents.”41 While the former is more likely to grab headlines, it is the latter that makes the largest contribution to the community’s reservoir of grievances against the police. But, since the force in question is within the bounds of policy, the excessive use of force is more difficult to address from the perspective of discipline and administration.

All of this controversy and confusion points to a very simple fact: police brutality is a normative construction. It involves an evaluation, a judgment, and not simply a collection of facts. David Bayley and Harold Mendelsohn explain:

[P]olice brutality is not just a descriptive category. Rather it is a judgment made about the propriety of police behavior.… Since the use of the phrase implies a judgment, people may disagree profoundly about whether a particular incident, even though it involves the obvious use of force, is a case of brutality.

Any discussion of police brutality is therefore encumbered by confusion about whether it applies to more than physical assaults and also by disagreement over what circumstances absolve the police from blame.42

In short, the technical distinctions between, say, excessive force and illegal force, while bringing some measure of precision to the discussion, lead us no nearer to a resolution of these disputes. That’s because, at root, the disagreement is not about whether a rule was broken, or a law violated. The question—the real question—is one of legitimacy. The larger conflict is a conflict of values.

Let’s consider this problem anew: the trouble, or part of it, comes in discerning the legitimate and illegitimate uses of violence. Abuses of authority may look very much like their less corrupt counterparts. Or, stated from a different perspective, the application of legal force often feels quite a lot like abuse. But there is no paradox here, not really. The state, claiming a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, needs to distinguish its own violence from other, allegedly less legitimate, uses of force.43 In non-totalitarian societies, authority exists within carefully prescribed, if vague (one might suggest, intentionally vague), boundaries. Action within these limits is “legitimate,” similar action outside of such limits is “abuse.” But in the case of police violence, legitimate and excessive force exist as part of the same continuum, rather than as distinct species of action. (Even the term “excessive force” implies this.) Hence, where you or I see brutality, the cop sees only a day’s work. The authorities—the other authorities—more often than not side with the policeman, even where he has violated some law or policy. That is, in a sense, only fair, since the police officer—unless he engages in mutiny—nearly always sides with them. The main difference, then, between policing and police abuse is a rule or law that usually goes unenforced. The difference is the words.

Why We Know So Little about Police Brutality

The preceding observations provide a framework for understanding police brutality, but tell us almost nothing about its prevalence, its forms, its perpetrators, or its victims. Solid facts and hard numbers are very difficult to come by.

This dearth of information may say something about how seriously the authorities take the problem. Until very recently, nobody even bothered to keep track of how often the police use force—at least not as part of any systematic, national effort. In 1994, Congress decided to require the Justice Department to collect and publish annual statistics on the police use of force. But this effort has been fraught with difficulty. Unlike the Justice Department’s other major data-collection projects—the Uniform Crime Reports provide a useful contrast—the examination of police violence has never received adequate funding, and the reports appear at irregular intervals. Furthermore, the data on which the studies are based are surely incomplete. Many of the reports rely on local police agencies to supply their numbers, and reporting is voluntary.44 Worse, the information, once collected and analyzed, is often put to propagandistic uses; its presentation is sometimes heavily skewed to support a law enforcement perspective. But despite their many flaws, the Justice Department reports remain one of the most comprehensive sources of information about the police use of force.

These reports represent various approaches to the issue. They measure the use of force as it occurs in different circumstances, such as arrests and traffic stops. They examine both the level of force used and the frequency with which it is employed. And some studies collect data from victims as well as police.

Unfortunately, under-reporting handicaps every means of compiling the data. One report states frankly: “The incidence of wrongful use of force by police is unknown.… Current indicators of excessive force are all critically flawed.”45 The most commonly cited indicators are civilian complaints and lawsuits. But few victims of police abuse feel comfortable complaining to the same department under which they suffered the abuse, and lawyers usually only want cases that will win—in other words, cases where the evidence is clear and the harm substantial.46 Many people fail to make a complaint of any kind, either because they would like to put the unpleasant experience behind them, because they fear retaliation, because they suspect that nothing can be done, or because they feel they will not be believed.47 One survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that “less than 5% of persons who believed the police had not behaved properly filed a complaint.”48 Hence, measures that depend on victim reporting are likely to represent only a small fraction of the overall incidence of brutality.

Naturally, the victim is not always the best judge as to whether force was excessive, but in some cases, he or she may be the only source willing to admit that force was used at all. This fact provides another reason to separate questions concerning the legitimacy of violence from those concerning its prevalence. One report notes:

The difficulties in measuring excessive and illegal force with complaint and lawsuit records have led academics and practitioners to redirect their attention to all use-of-force incidents. The focus then becomes one of minimizing all instances of police use of force, without undue concern as to whether force was excessive. From this perspective, other records, such as use-of-force reports, arrest records, injury reports, and medical records, become relevant to measuring the incidence of the problem.49

Of course, these indicators also have their shortcomings. Arrest records, medical records, and the like will surely reveal uses of violence that have not resulted in lawsuits or formal complaints. But they will still underestimate the overall incidence of force, since not every case will be accurately recorded. For example, attempts to assess the prevalence of force based on arrest reports leave out those cases where force was used but no arrest was made.50 Like the victims (though for very different reasons), the perpetrators of police violence are also likely to under-report its occurrence. And they are likely to understate the level of force used and the seriousness of resultant injuries when they do report it.51 Individual medical records, meanwhile, are not generally available for examination, except when presented as evidence in a complaint hearing or civil trial. And even if emergency rooms were to maintain statistics on police-related injuries, many victims of violence, especially the uninsured, do not seek treatment except for the most serious of injuries.

Other indicators, such as media reports and direct observation, are similarly flawed. The media, of course, can only report on events if they know about them. Furthermore, they are unlikely to report on routine uses of force because it is routine.52 Direct observation is limited by the obvious fact that no one can observe everything, everywhere, all the time. And observation can lead a subject (either the officer or the suspect) to change his behavior while he is being observed. In humanitarian terms, such deterrence is all for the good, but it doesn’t do much for the systematic study of police activity or the measurement of police violence.

The sad fact is that nobody knows very much about the police use of force, much less about the use of excessive force. Its prevalence, frequency, and distribution remain, for the most part, unmeasured; and there is only limited information available concerning its perpetrators, victims, forms, and causes. Nevertheless, some information is available through the sources mentioned above. And, imperfect though they are, the statistics they produce may point to a reliable baseline, an estimated minimum to which we can refer with a fair amount of certainty. With that aim in mind, and with more than a little trepidation, we should turn our attention to the data that is available, and consider what it indicates.53

A Look at the Numbers

According to a Justice Department survey, 19 percent of American adults (43.5 million people) had direct face-to-face contact with the police in 2005. Of those surveyed, 1.6 percent reported the use of force or its threat. In other words, out of every hundred people the police come into contact with, they will threaten or hurt one or two of them. The rate is much higher for Blacks (4.4 percent) and Hispanics (2.3 percent) than for Whites (1.2 percent). The vast majority of the victims (83 percent) characterized the force as excessive.54

“One and a half percent” is a polite way of saying “nearly a million.” An estimated 991,930 people experienced some level of force (including threats); more than half—55 percent, or 546,000 people—were subject to physical force.55 That latter group, if we got them all together, would make for a fair-sized city, larger than Portland, Oregon (population 537,081).56 And when you orient yourself to the fact that this city could be reproduced every year, you start to get some picture of how common police violence really is.

Also in 2005, there were 57,546 officers assaulted in the course of their work, the equivalent of 11.9 assaults per hundred officers. Most involved unarmed assailants (80 percent) and resulted in no injuries (77 percent).57 Comparing the numbers, we find that the police use violence (546,000 times in 2005) nine times as often as they face it (57,546 times that year).

There is a similar imbalance when it comes to fatalities. A study covering the years 2003–2005 found that 380 police died on duty during that time. Only 159 of these deaths were homicides, and 221 were the result of accidents. During the same period, 1,095 people were killed by police and other officials in the process of arrest. That averages 365 each year, or one a day.58 If we do the math, we see that the police kill almost seven times as often as they are killed. The fact is, the police produce far more casualties than they suffer.

The available studies tell us very little about the prevalence of excessive force, but they do indicate that the police use violence more often, at higher levels, and with deadlier effects, than they encounter it. This disparity should not be surprising, considering the nature of policing—the imperative to maintain control at all times, in every situation (hardly a realistic goal), the training to use escalating levels of force to gain compliance, and authority unhindered by genuine oversight. Policing, as I said earlier, is inherently violent; this violence, generally speaking, seems to be of an offensive—rather than defensive—character.

Explaining Away the Abuse

In Uprooting Racism, Paul Kivel makes a useful comparison between the rhetoric abusive men employ to justify beating up their girlfriends, wives, or children and the publicly traded justifications for widespread racism. He writes:

During the first few years that I worked with men who are violent I was continually perplexed by their inability to see the effects of their actions and their ability to deny the violence they had done to their partners or children. I only slowly became aware of the complex set of tactics that men use to make violence against women invisible and to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. These tactics are listed below in the rough order that men employ them.…

(1) Denial: “I didn’t hit her.”

(2) Minimization: “It was only a slap.”

(3) Blame: “She asked for it.”

(4) Redefinition: “It was mutual combat.”

(5) Unintentionality: “Things got out of hand.”

(6) It’s over now: “I’ll never do it again.”

(7) It’s only a few men: “Most men wouldn’t hurt a woman.”

(8) Counterattack: “She controls everything.”

(9) Competing victimization: “Everybody is against men.”59

Kivel goes on to detail the ways these nine tactics are used to excuse (or deny) institutionalized racism. Each of these tactics also has its police analogy, both as applied to individual cases and in regard to the general issue of police brutality.60

Here are a few examples:

(1) Denial.

“The professionalism and restraint … was nothing short of outstanding.”61

“America does not have a human-rights problem.”62

(2) Minimization.

Injuries were “of a minor nature.”63

“Police use force infrequently.”64

(3) Blame.

“This guy isn’t Mr. Innocent Citizen, either. Not by a long shot.”65

“They died because they were criminals.”66

(4) Redefinition.

It was “mutual combat.”67

“Resisting arrest.”68

“The use of force is necessary to protect yourself.”69

(5) Unintentionality.

“[O]fficers have no choice but to use deadly force against an assailant who is deliberately trying to kill them.…”70

(6) It’s over now.

“We’re making changes.”71

“We will change our training; we will do everything in our power to make sure it never happens again.”72

(7) It’s only a few men.

“A small proportion of officers are disproportionately involved in use-of-force incidents.”73

“Even if we determine that the officers were out of line … it is an aberration.”74

(8) Counterattack.

“The only thing they understand is physical force and pain.”75

“People make complaints to get out of trouble.”76

(9) Competing victimization.

The police are “in constant danger.”77

“[L]iberals are prejudiced against police, much as many white police are biased against Negroes.”78

The police are “the most downtrodden, oppressed, dislocated minority in America.”79

Another commonly invoked rationale for justifying police violence is:

(10) The Hero Defense.

“These guys are heroes.”80

“The police routinely do what the rest of us don’t: They risk their lives to keep the peace. For that selfless bravery, they deserve glory, laud and honor.”81

“[W]ithout the police … anarchy would be rife in this country, and the civilization now existing on this hemisphere would perish.”82

“[T]hey alone stand guard at the upstairs door of Hell.”83

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it should convey something of the tone that these excuses can take. Many of these approaches overlap, and often several are used in conjunction. For example, LAPD sergeant Stacey Koon offers this explanation for the beating of Rodney King:

From our view, and based on what he had already done, Rodney King was trying to assault an officer, maybe grab a gun. And when he was not moving, he seemed to be looking for an opportunity to hurt somebody, his eyes darting this way and that.…

So we’d had to use force to make him respond to our commands, to make him lie still so we could neutralize this guy’s threat to other people and himself.

The force we used was well within the guidelines of the Los Angeles Police Department; I’d made sure of that. And, I was proud of the professionalism [the officers had] shown in subduing a really monster guy, a felony evader seen committing numerous traffic violations.84

In three paragraphs, Koon employs minimization, blame, redefinition, unintentionality, counterattacks, competing victimization, and the Hero Defense. As is usual, his little story stresses the possible danger of the situation, and elsewhere Koon emphasizes the generalizable sense of danger that officers experience: “[W]e’d all thought that maybe we were getting lured into something. It’s happened before. How many times have you read about a cop getting killed after stopping somebody for a speeding violation?”85

The Dangers of the Job

The danger of the job is a constant theme in the defense of police violence. It is implicit (or sometimes explicit) in about half of the excuses listed above. By pointing to the dangers of the job, the excuse-makers don’t only defend police actions in particular circumstances (which might actually have been dangerous), but as often as not take the opportunity to mount a general defense of the police. This is a clever bit of sophistry, as cynical as a Memorial Day speech during wartime. It’s one thing to make a banner of the bloody uniform when discussing a case where the cops actually were in danger, but quite another to do so when they might have been in danger, or only thought that they were.

The fact that policing is risky, by this view, seems to justify in advance whatever measures the police feel necessary to employ. This point lies at the center of the Hero Defense. Its genius is that it is so hard to answer. Few people are indifferent to the death of a police officer, especially when they feel (though only in some vague, patriotic kind of way) that it occurred because the officer was selflessly working—as former Philadelphia city solicitor Sheldon Albert put it—“so that you and I and our families and our children can walk on the streets.”86 The flaw of the Hero Defense, however, is both simple and (if you’ll pardon the term) fatal: policing is not so dangerous as we are led to believe.

A total of 105 patrol officers died on the job in 2012. Less half of those (51) died as the result of violence, and another 48 died in traffic accidents.87 Between 1961 and 2012, 3,847 cops were murdered and 2,946 died in accidents—averaging about 75 murders and 58 fatal accidents in a typical year.88

Naturally it is not to be lost sight of that these numbers represent human lives, not widgets or sacks of potatoes. But let’s also remember that there were 4,383 fatal work injuries in 2012. As dangerous professions go, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, policing is not even in the top ten. In terms of total fatalities, more truck drivers are killed than any other kind of worker (741 in 2012). A better measure of occupational risk, however, is the rate of work-related deaths per 100,000 workers. In 2012, for example, it was 17.4 for truck drivers.89 At 15.0 deaths per 100,000, policing is slightly less dangerous than being a maintenance worker (15.7) and slightly more dangerous than supervising the gardener (14.7).90 The highest rate of fatalities is among loggers at 127.8 per 100,000, just ahead of fishers at 117.0. The rate for all occupations, taken together, is 3.2 per 100,000 workers.91

Where are the headlines, the memorials, the honor guards, and the sorrowful renderings of Taps for these workers? Where are the mayoral speeches, the newspaper editorials, the sober reflections that these brave men and women died, and that others risk their lives daily, so that we might continue to enjoy the benefits of modern society?

Policing, it seems, is the only profession that both exaggerates and advertises its dangers. It has done so at a high cost, and to great advantage, though (as is so often the case) the costs are not borne by the same people who reap the benefits.92 The overblown image of police heroism, and the “obsession” with officer safety (Rodney Stark’s term), do not only serve to justify police violence after the fact; by providing such justification, they legitimize violence, and thus make it more likely.93

Institutionalized Brutality

Given the pervasive nature of police violence, it is astonishing that the public discourse so frequently focuses on the behavior of individual officers. Commonly called the “Rotten Apple” theory, the explanation of misconduct favored by police commanders and their ideological allies holds that abuse is exceptional, that the officers who misuse their power are a tiny minority, and that it is unfair to judge other cops (or the department as a whole) by the misbehavior of the few.94 This is a handy tool for diverting attention away from the institution, its structure, practices, and social role, pushing the blame, instead, onto some few of its agents.95 It is, in other words, a means of protecting the organization from scrutiny and of avoiding change.

Despite the official insistence to the contrary, it is clear that police organizations, as well as individual officers, hold a large share of the responsibility for the prevalence of police brutality.96 Police agencies are organizationally complex, and brutality may be promoted or accommodated within any (or all) of its various dimensions. Both formal and informal aspects of an organization can help create a climate in which unnecessary violence is tolerated, or even encouraged. Among the formal aspects contributing to violence are the organization’s official policies, its identified priorities, the training it offers its personnel,97 its allocation of resources, and its system of promotions, awards, and other incentives.98 When these aspects of an organization encourage violence—whether or not they do so intentionally, or even consciously—we can speak of brutality being promoted “from above.” This understanding has been well applied to the regimes of certain openly thuggish leaders—Bull Connor, Richard Daley, Frank Rizzo,99 Daryl Gates, Rudolph Giuliani, Joe Arpaio (to name just a few)—but it needn’t be so overt to have the same effect.

On the other hand, when police culture and occupational norms support the use of unnecessary violence, we can describe brutality as being supported “from below.” Such informal conditions are a bit harder to pin down, but they certainly have their consequences. We may count among their elements insularity,100 indifference to the problem of brutality,101 generalized suspicion,102 and the intense demand for personal respect.103 One of the first sociologists to study the problem of police violence, William Westley, described these as “basic occupational values,” more important than any other determinant of police behavior:

[The policeman] regards the public as his enemy, feels his occupation to be in conflict with the community and regards himself as a pariah. The experience and the feeling give rise to a collective emphasis on secrecy, an attempt to coerce respect from the public, and a belief that almost any means are legitimate in completing an important arrest. These are for the policeman basic occupational values. They arise from his experience, take precedence over his legal responsibilities, are central to an understanding of his conduct, and form the occupational contexts with which violence gains its meaning.104

Police violence is very frequently over-determined—promoted from above and supported from below. But where it is not actually encouraged, sometimes even where individuals (officers or administrators) disapprove of it, excessive and illegal force are nevertheless nearly always condoned. Among police administrators there is the persistent and well-documented refusal to discipline violent officers; and among the cops themselves, there is the “code of silence.”

In its 1998 report, Human Rights Watch noted the inaction of police commanders:

Most high-ranking police officials, whether at the level of commissioner, chief, superintendent, or direct superiors, seem uninterested in vigorously pursuing high standards for treatment of persons in custody. When reasonably high standards are set, superior officers are often unwilling to require that their subordinates consistently meet them.105

Even where officers are found guilty of misconduct, discipline rarely follows. For example, in 1998 New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board issued 300 findings against officers; fewer than half of these resulted in disciplinary action.106

LAPD assistant chief Jesse Brewer told the Christopher Commission:

We know who the bad guys are. Reputations become well known, especially to the sergeants and then of course to lieutenants and captains in the areas. But, I don’t see anyone bringing these people up and saying, “Look, you are not conforming, you are not measuring up. You need to take a look at yourself and your conduct and the way you’re treating people” and so forth. I don’t see that occurring.… The sergeants don’t, they’re not held accountable so why should they be that much concerned[?] … I have a feeling that they don’t think that much is going to happen to them anyway if they tried to take action and perhaps not even be supported by the lieutenant or the captain all the way up the line when they do take action against some individual.107

Rank-and-file cops, likewise, are extremely reluctant to report the abuses they witness. Some of this reluctance, surely, is a reflection of their superiors’ indifference. (After all, if nothing’s going to come of it, why report it?) But their peers also enforce this silence. A National Institute of Justice study on police integrity discovered:

a large gap between attitudes and behavior. That is, even though officers do not believe in protecting wrongdoers, they often do not turn them in. More than 80 percent of police surveyed reported that they do not accept the “code of silence” (i.e., keeping quiet in the face of misconduct by others) as an essential part of the mutual trust necessary to good policing.… However, about one-quarter (24.9 percent) of the sample agreed or strongly agreed that whistle blowing is not worth it, more than two thirds (67.4 percent) reported that police officers who report incidents of misconduct are likely to be given a “cold shoulder” by fellow officers, and a majority (52.4 percent) agreed or strongly agreed that it is not unusual for police officers to “turn a blind eye” to other officers’ improper conduct.… A surprising 6 in 10 (61 percent) indicated that police officers do not always report even serious criminal violations that involve the abuse of authority by fellow officers.108

We should remember that these numbers reflect the reluctance of police to report misconduct when they recognize it as such. Given police attitudes about the use of force (when nearly a quarter of officers—24.5 percent—think it acceptable to use illegal force against a suspect who assaults an officer),109 we can reasonably conclude that the police report their colleagues’ excessive force only in the rarest of circumstances.

I have, to this point, concentrated on the means by which violence (and excessive force in particular) is institutionalized by police agencies. That is, I have discussed the ways police organizations produce and sanction violence, even outside the bounds of their own rules and the law. This examination has provided a brief sketch of the way the institution shapes violence, but has not thus far considered the implications of this violence for the institution. It seems paradoxical that an organization responsible for enforcing the law would frequently rely on illegal practices. The police resolve this tension between nominally lawful ends and illegal means by substituting their own occupational and organizational norms for the legal duties assigned to them. Westley suggests:

This process then results in a transfer in property from the state to the colleague group. The means of violence which were originally a property of the state, in loan to its law-enforcement agent, the police, are in a psychological sense confiscated by the police, to be conceived of as a personal property to be used at their discretion.110

From the officers’ perspective, the center of authority is shifted and the relationship between the state and its agents is reversed. The police become a law unto themselves.

This account reflects the attitudes of the officers, and explains many of the institutional features already discussed. It also identifies an important principle of police ideology, one that (as we shall see in later chapters) has guided the development of the institution, especially in the last half-century.

But Westley’s theory also raises some important questions. Chief among these: why would the state allow such a coup?

The Police, the State, and Social Conflict

We might also ask: To what degree is violence the “property” of the state to begin with? At what point does the police co-optation of violence challenge the state’s monopoly on it? When do the police, in themselves, become a genuine rival of the state? Are they a rival to be used (as in a system of indirect rule) or a rival to be suppressed? Is there a genuine danger of the police becoming the dominant force in society, displacing the civilian authorities? Is this a problem for the ruling class? Might such a development, under certain conditions, be to their favor? These are important questions, and we will get to them.

For now, let us concentrate on the question of why the state (meaning, here, the civil authorities) would let the police claim the means of violence as their own. Police brutality does not just happen; it is allowed to happen. It is tolerated by the police themselves, those on the street and those in command. It is tolerated by prosecutors, who seldom bring charges against violent cops, and by juries, who rarely convict. It is tolerated by the civil authorities, the mayors, and the city councils, who do not use their influence to challenge police abuses. But why?

The answer is simple: police brutality is tolerated because it is what people with power want.

This surely sounds conspiratorial, as though orders issued from a smoke-filled room are circulated at roll call to the various patrol officers and result in a certain number of arrests and a certain number of gratuitous beatings on a given evening. But this isn’t what I mean. Rather than a conspiracy, it is merely the normal functioning of the institution; it’s just that the apparent conflict between the law and police practices may not be so important as we tend to assume. The two may, at times, be at odds, but this is of little concern so long as the interests they serve are essentially the same. The police may violate the law, as long as they do so in the pursuit of ends that people with power generally endorse, and from which such people profit.

When the police enforce the law, they do so unevenly, in ways that give disproportionate attention to the activities of poor people, people of color, and others near the bottom of the social pyramid.111 And when the police violate the law, these same people are their most frequent victims. This is a coincidence too large to overlook. If we put aside, for the moment, all questions of legality, it must become quite clear that the object of police attention, and the target of police violence, is overwhelmingly that portion of the population that lacks real power. And this is precisely the point: police activities, legal or illegal, violent or nonviolent, tend to keep the people who currently stand at the bottom of the social hierarchy in their “place,” where they “belong”—at the bottom. This is why James Baldwin said that policing was “oppressive” and “an insult.”

Put differently, we might say that the police act to defend the interests and standing of those with power—those at the top. So long as they serve in this role, they are likely to be given a free hand in pursuing these ends and a great deal of leeway in pursuing other ends that they identify for themselves. The laws may say otherwise, but laws can be ignored.

In theory, police authority is restricted by state and federal law, as well as by the policies of individual departments. In reality, the police often exceed the bounds of their lawful authority and rarely pay any price for doing so. The rules are only as good as their enforcement, and they are seldom enforced. The real limits to police power are established not by statutes and regulations—since no rule is self-enforcing—but by their leadership and, indirectly, by the balance of power in society.

So long as the police defend the status quo, so long as their actions promote the stability of the existing system, their misbehavior is likely to be overlooked. It is when their excesses threaten this stability that they begin to face meaningful restraints. Laws and policies can be ignored and still provide a cover of plausible deniability for those in authority. But when misconduct reaches such a level as to prove embarrassing, or so as to provoke unrest, the authorities may have to tighten the reins—for a while. Token prosecutions, minimal reforms, and other half-measures may give the appearance of change, and may even serve as some check against the worst abuses of authority, but they carefully fail to affect the underlying causes of brutality. It would be wrong to conclude that the police never change. But it is important to notice the limits of these changes, to understand the influences that direct them, and to recognize the interests that they serve.

Police brutality is pervasive, systemic, and inherent to the institution. It is also anything but new.