Behind the ornate rooms and regalia
of a head of state, the stately appearance of legislative chambers, and even
revered democratic constitutions, the basis of a government is its power—even if
beyond authorized limits—to use lethal force against even its electorate
peacefully protesting. As the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971
show, human beings who have police power—even beyond the authorized—have at the
very least a proclivity to abuse people without countervailing power. The
students who were assigned as prison guards in the experiment because so
abusive toward the students assigned as prisoners that the experiment had to be
terminated after only 6 days in a two-week period. Even the experimenter, who
took on the role of prison superintendent during the experiment, “had become
indifferent to the suffering” of the students who were in the role of prisoners.[1]
Lest it be concluded that college students are simply too immature to assume
even what seems to be absolute power over other students, such behavior is
arguably common among actual police employees. Lest it be further concluded
that such behavior is part of an autocratic regime, even the known instances in republics suggest
that human nature itself cannot handle such discretion as police departments
and their employees have. Incredibly, even with the result of the Stanford study,
no one seems to go to this conclusion; rather, primitive human nature may be
poised to jump from incident to incident as if doing so enough would end the
abuse of such power.
The presumptuousness that police
departments and individual employees have in abusing their powers to harm even
nonviolent protesters was on display to the world on June 4, 2020 as police in
Buffalo, New York, pushed down a 75 year-old man who ironically had stood for peace
and justice for decades. The violent act itself by two police employees was
telling. Video shows Martin
Gugino approaching an oncoming police employee in a nonviolent manner to talk—perhaps
to ask a question. Another police employee immediately speeds up his pace—the first
indication of possible aggression. Then he and another employee pushed Martin
backwards. Incredibly, one of the employees who pushed Martin then shock his
head back and forth as if the incident had been Martin’s fault, when the fault
lied with the employee. Such shirking of responsibility is a convenient mental
tactic by which the abusive mind seeks to justify/protect itself—the delusion
being hidden to such a mind by the mind itself.
That the other police employees
kept walking past Martin as he lied on the cement with blood coming from his
right ear suggests the presence of a group-think dehumanizing even a victim of
police aggression. A man off-camera then scolds the police employees for
walking past Martin and not even bothering to call an ambulance. Instead of
respecting the man for his compassion for Martin and justified reproach of the
tax-payer salaried employees, they push the man forward and handcuff him. Perhaps
that man and other people in the vicinity should have acted on an instinct to
remain silent and offer a NAZI salute. I’m sure the police employees would have
felt especially emboldened to exploit the personal conflict of interest out of
anger. Were he alive, Gandhi might have recommended that the people in the vicinity
stay silently in place and take the blows to show the employees’ moral sickness
to the employees themselves and the world.
At the very least, the moral
sickness could include exploiting a personal conflict of interest out of anger,
and taking non-threats as threats—that is, being over-sensitive and over-reactive.
Out of arrogance, the employees may even have presumed, how dare the old man come to us to ask a question! As for the man—the
anonymous Christian—who attempted to shame the Roman police into at least
stopping to tend for Martin, how dare
anyone talk to us that way.
In short, the mentality of the
police employees on the scene may have been too used to abusing their power
even and especially when its exercise goes beyond their delegated authority.
This implies that accountability from and on police departments in general—and not
just in New York—had been practically non-existent. In other words, police
employees are routinely given too much discretion (i.e., power) relative to
what the human brain can handle, and a system has been set up that protects
this dysfunctional sickness such that it is no longer viewed by the aggressors
as a sickness.
The implications for public
policy are not merely to fix the system of broken accountability; a reduction
of discretion is also called for both in terms of what authority governments
give their respective police departments and what authority they in turn give
to their managers and non-supervisory employees. Incident-specific responses to
police brutality do not do justice even to the first task.
How police departments, police
unions, and the police employees themselves react to accusations of can say a
lot about the dysfunctional sickness that protects abuse manifests in a “clean
up” capacity. The sickness itself may convince the infected brains, but the
denial makes it possible that people without the vested interest get to glimpse
the disease through its symptoms. That is to say, the sickness may cause the
infected brains to unwittingly reveal too much.
In trying to defend the two
abusive police employees, John Evans, president of the local police union,
said, “Our position is these officers were simply following orders from Deputy
Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia to clear the square. It doesn’t specify
clear the square of men, 50 and under or 15 to 40. They were simply doing their
job. I don’t know how much conflict was made. He did slip in my estimation. He
fell backwards.”[2]
Evans’ statement is revealing in ways that he did not likely intend. Firstly,
general orders, such as to clear an area because of a curfew, have plenty of
room for discretion, which the head of the labor union ignores. For example,
the police could simply have stood at one end of the public square and fired on
anyone in it. Alternatively, the police could have walked through the square,
arresting people who refuse to leave. Both approaches are consistent with the
general order to clear the square. Secondly, in asserting that Martin fell
backwards from slipping, which is clearly not the case in the video, the police
union’s position was that lying to protect abusive police employees is
acceptable—perhaps even laudable.
Moreover, that 57 police
employees in that riot squad quit because the two abusive employees were
suspended allows us access into the sordid mentality of entitlement even to
push over an old man and walk past him with apparent indifference. A squad’s
solidarity can thus effectively enable the presumption to over-react to
non-threats by committing violent acts. Such a squad, and police department,
moreover, would have no moral objection to covering up episodic eruptions of
the sickness within. In short, the law doesn’t apply to the departments and
employees tasked ironically with enforcing the law. In conveniently excluding
themselves, such departments and employees therein reveal their criminal
mentality under the ripped cloak of public decency.
In spite of living in democratic
republics, Americans were at the time especially vulnerable. “In recent
decades, police [there] have amassed power through laws that grant them a high
level of immunity, a lack of oversight, big budgets and a focus on reforms that
[have brought] little change.”[3]
Even though police departments are responsible to democratically-elected
officers of cities in a given republic, such as New York, the International
Association of Chiefs of Police has been involved in modifying anti-crime
legislation and “trying to make elected officials accountable to police, rather
than the other way around.”[4]
An institutional conflict of interest has been exploited here at the expense of
legitimate democratic governance.[5]
To be sure, electorates in some
of the American republics have willing ceded to the police a lot of power. In
Phoenix, Arizona, for instance, the dominant political ideology assumes that a
visibly-heavy police presence is justified and even necessary as a deterrent
against crime. That ideology falsely assumes that innocent citizens would not
be uncomfortable seeing so many police cars and helicopters on a regular basis—in
what can be called the emergencization of the status quo. That fly-through helicopters
fly regularly in one area outside of the FAA-mandated corridor with impunity points
to how much power the police department has and what its mentality is. That
even the campus police department at a local university, Arizona State
University, presumes (over academic culture) to park regularly on campus
sidewalks and in the middle of academic courtyards suggests that perspective can be warped by the brain sickness of power and little
accountability on that sickness would be very unlikely from a pro-police “academic” administration (and student government!), which in
turn is not democratically elected. The explicitness by inconsiderate shows of the dominance by force impedes the free exchange of ideas and an atmosphere conducive to thinking. Rather than enhancing the feeling of security, especially during school days, the culture of dominance puts everyone there, especially students from more balanced States on edge. That is not an academic culture, and in fact eclipses it on its own turf.
Given the weaknesses of the human mind, the
decisions or captures of governments and especially non-governments such that
they succumb to their own police departments are dangerous, and in fact can easily
enable police over-reaches, whether aggressive or passive-aggressive (e.g.,
pensive presences) with the presumption of impunity. In 2020 with protests taking
place in the U.S., E.U., Australia, and Brazil (and other countries), the world
may have been awakening to just how lapse-prone the brain can be with de facto absolute physical power.
To be sure, that those protests were blind to a likely-increasing sordid, deeply selfish disrespect for the law and inconsiderateness of strangers and even neighbors does nothing to reduce that problem (if indeed such respect and considerateness can be treated, much less forced). Although that mentality can easily spark anger, police employees who act on the basis of personal emotion are themselves disrespecting law. In other words, even if incidents of police brutality had been increasing to meet another mentality that refuses to respect the law and thus its enforcers (even apart from their abuses of power), one primitive mentality need not match another, that is naturally anger-provoking. Perhaps the flash point is disrespect being naturally met with disrespect. In the end, anti-social criminals can expect to be dealt with, but within measures that are compatible with the human brain.
To be sure, that those protests were blind to a likely-increasing sordid, deeply selfish disrespect for the law and inconsiderateness of strangers and even neighbors does nothing to reduce that problem (if indeed such respect and considerateness can be treated, much less forced). Although that mentality can easily spark anger, police employees who act on the basis of personal emotion are themselves disrespecting law. In other words, even if incidents of police brutality had been increasing to meet another mentality that refuses to respect the law and thus its enforcers (even apart from their abuses of power), one primitive mentality need not match another, that is naturally anger-provoking. Perhaps the flash point is disrespect being naturally met with disrespect. In the end, anti-social criminals can expect to be dealt with, but within measures that are compatible with the human brain.
2. “Buffalo Police Riot
Squad Quit to Back Officers Who Shoved Man,” BBC.com, June 5, 2020
(accessed June 6, 2020).
3. Julia Mahncke, “Why
Police in the US Are So Powerful,” DW.com, June 6, 2020 (accessed same
day).
4. Ibid.
