Texas School Policies Violently Enforced: Police in Schools

An organizational policy, whether in an educational, religious, or business organization, is not law. Accordingly, “police tactics” are inappropriately used on people who violate policies. The proliferation of off-duty police officers in retail in more than one of the U.S. states (and perhaps in the E.U. as well), complete with lethal weapons, renders the distinction between policy and law especially relevant and even pressing. To be sure, trespassing is indeed a crime, even though some municipal police departments in Florida have refused to recognize it as such, as, for example, when a property owner illegally enters a rented apartment, but in a store, absent a decision by a manager to have a person removed from the premises, store “police” cannot legally act violently against the public as long as no crime is being committed—even if a store policy is being violated.

Since the killings at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas in 2022, school districts in Texas “spent billions of dollars to station police officers” in every school.”[1] Crucially, the intent was “to protect students from similar tragedies.”[2] It is therefore more than unfortunate that school administrations, including local school boards, have allowed even elementary-school aged children to be subjected “to heavy-handed police tactics for behavior that once would have landed them only in the principal’s office.”[3] A principal is the head of a school. “Children in elementary school, including one as young as 6, were handcuffed. Teenagers were arrested, charged with crimes and even jailed. In the most extreme cases, they would up in hospitals, bruised or concussed, after being body-slammed or shocked by Tasers, which [were at the time] prohibited in [Texas] juvenile detention facilities but allowed in public schools.”[4] Under those circumstances, parents could hardly be blamed for yanking their kids out of public schools, preferring private schools, religious or secular, instead. In one public school, a student caught with a vape at school was “smashed into a wall” by an “officer,” another kneed a student in the face for fighting with a classmate, and still another animal (i.e., “officer”) slammed a student “into a metal cart” intentionally.[5] Admittedly, the student kneed and the one slammed were in the midst of physically fighting with other students, so some physicality was justified in order to break up the respective fights; it is the excessive violence that calls into question to motives of the police in the school hallways. For instance, the intent to severely harm out of sheer anger and even the intent to instill a sense of guilt in the respective students can both be subjected to harsh critique.

In his text, On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that punishment originally arose in ancient (and prehistoric) times so the punisher could feel pleasure from inflicting pain in another person, rather than to instill a sense of moral responsibility or deter bad behavior in the future. Nietzsche argues that this original intent, or purpose, was still in force among European parents in his own adult lifetime in the mid-to-late 1800s (before he went mad in 1890).  Kneeing a student in the face and slamming a student into a metal cart are so extreme that it can indeed be wondered whether the culprits (i.e., the “officers”) were not at least partially motivated by such pleasure. Nietzsche goes on to point out that if political, economic or any other kind of elite are getting away with the exact behavior that is subject to punishment if done by other people, no sense of guilt arises from such dogmatic inflictions of pain otherwise known as punishments. Nietzsche argues that if a criminal “sees exactly the same kind of actions practiced in the service of justice and approved of and practiced with a good conscience: spying, deception, bribery, setting traps, the whole cunning and underhand art of police and prosecution, plus robbery, violence, defamation, imprisonment, torture, murder, practiced as a matter of principle and without even emotion to excuse them, . . . all of them therefore actions which his judges in no way condemn and repudiate as such, but only when they are applied and directed to certain particular ends” then no sense of guilt will arise when those actions are punished.[6] The violence of the police in the schools in Texas de facto nullifies any intended message sent by that violence qua “punishment” that violence is wrong. In fact, it might even be that the students in physical fights at school may grow up to be hired by cities as police! As such, those kids, as police “officers,” could be expected to be unnecessarily violent precisely because the use of violence in school beyond the authority of the police stationed there nullified any “lesson” that violence is wrong and therefore violent people should feel guilty, for presumably none of the police in the schools felt ashamed of themselves, and punishment inflicted on them would not have had such an effect if those police could in turn remember violence having been orchestrated by their bosses and even the impunity that those officials received from political or judicial officers of government.

What then can we expect as to how the kids in the schools were affected by the police brutality? According to Nietzsche, “Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance.”[7] None of those can be favorable to being open to learning, so the activity of the police inside the schools beyond stopping mass shootings is contrary and thus detrimental to the mission of a school, which is to educate by imparting knowledge from teacher to student. Incidentally, it can’t be that the teachers feel comfortable being in the schools in which police are body-slamming students for carrying vaping equipment (perhaps a student is having trouble quitting smoking cigarettes, in which case vaping should be encouraged when the student feels very tempted to smoke). The result of such violent over-reaches on kids in Texas can be expected to include no longer feeling safe in their respective school hallways—not just because mass-killings have occurred in American schools, but also, and perhaps even more so, because the police installed in hallways have over-reached so from their purpose being to guard and protect students from external physical threats.

That school principals and even school boards have either given their consent or ignored the over-reaches renders those officials culpable as well. Prudent parents who love their children would be justified in voting to replace entire boards, which in turn would presumably be disposed to fire school principals who would rather than their respective students beaten up by police even for vaping than have teachers send students to the principal’s office. Police have no business enforcing school policies because policy is not law, and human beings with the means of greater power over other humans are too inclined to use it.

As Lord Acton famously wrote in 1887, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For an organization’s management to place police rather than unarmed security guards in a position of enforcing policies is to inappropriately tempt abuses of power that cannot be said to come rightly under authority. For power sans authority can be understood to be in line with Hobbes’ description of the state of nature prior to any social contract historically. As another saying goes, give a human being an inch and a mile will be taken. Or, give someone a few centimeters and a kilometer will be taken. Take your pick, but don’t over-reach even though doing so seems to be hardwired into the human psyche, which, after all, can be said to be human, all too human. Such an innate proclivity should not be tempted whether in a managerial decision or in institutional arrangements that allow for the exploitation of an institutional or personal conflict of interest.

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1. Claire Amari, Kristian Hernandez, and Asher Lehrer-Small, “At Texas Schools, Pepper Spray and Tasers,” The New York Times, May 30, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), Second Essay, sec. 14, p. 518.
7. Ibid, p. 517.

On the Hidden Police Power of Corporate America

After the UnitedHealthcare chief executive “was gunned down by a masked man outside a Manhattan hotel” in New York City, “a days-long manhunt” occurred that “spanned several states.”[1] The fact that only a few days were needed to find the suspect, Luigi Mangione, indicates just how massive and public the manhunt was. For it was not just any murder, as if the murder of a person who is the chief executive of a large corporation were worth so much more than that of the rest of us. I suspect that the influence of the company, and, moreover, corporate America, on local police in any U.S. member state is more than reaches the headlines. The case at hand my even suggest that that influence includes even tacit instructions to treat anti-corporate suspects of murder violently both in retaliation and as a visible reminder to other potential killers that CEOs are off-limits.

As Pennsylvania sheriff employees took Mangione from a vehicle to the back door of a courthouse, at least two of the employees shoved the suspect—and, remember, in the U.S. a suspect is presumed innocent unless or until proven guilty in a court of law—into a wall even though the wall was not on the way from the vehicle to the back door. In other words, the unnecessary violence was not on the way to the back door, and nor was the suspect resisting going into the courthouse. I contend that the unnecessary violence was at the behest of the corporation whose CEO the suspect allegedly shot. At that time, the evidence that would be found had not yet been found, as per the defense attorney’s statement in the courthouse. Whether the violence being maliciously applied by sheriff employees was merely to show the world how a suspect accused of killing a CEO gets treated by law enforcement, or to stop the suspect from speaking to the media present on his way to the backdoor is not clear. It seems to be possible, at the very least, that corporate instructions given to the police in Pennsylvania included: Don’t let the guy get his anti-corporate message out. This would be ironic, given that corporations had at the time the right of free speech, even through spending as if money constitutes speech.

That Mangione was not resisting going into the courthouse and yet was manhandled rougher than suspects were typically treated at the time may give Americans, as well as the world, a glimpse into the power that large concentrations of private wealth (which is what a corporation is) even as translated into raw violence. The use of police by companies in twentieth-century America to beat workers on strike is well documented. What I am suggesting is that local police were still susceptible to wealthy private interests such as corporations into the next century, at least as of the 2020s. I contend that any contact between police departments and the healthcare insurance company would properly have been limited to the police gaining information in the search for the killer.

Another indication of an over-reaction by local police occurred days after Mangione had been arrested, when Briana Boston was charged with a felony “with one count of making threats to conduct a mass shooting” during a phone call with Blue Cross Blue Shield, her health-insurance company, which was denying a claim that she had submitted. Obviously angry, she said, “Delay, deny, depose. You people are next.”[2] The phrase, “delay, deny, depose,” had been written on bullets by Mangione in reference to tactics that insurers use to avoid paying out claims and had become popular online. Because of the popularity, it could not be assumed that the woman was planning on writing the three words on bullets; the phrase had entered the lexicon. In fact, “(a)ccording to a consumer survey by KFF, more than half of insured [American] adults [had] experienced problems with their insurance provider, and some [of those adults] reported serious consequences.”[3] Strangely, the local police in Lakeland, Florida, said that her statement could be taken as probable cause of “making a threat to conduct a mass shooting . . ., according to the affidavit.”[4] A reasonable interpretation of, “you guys are next,” is that if Blue Cross continues to screw policy holders who do their part in paying premiums, someone may eventually go too far in retaliation. She did not say that she was going to take any violent action, or what that action might be. Given that she was momentarily angry, and perhaps justifiably so, the police employee who leapt to the conclusion that the woman was saying she would conduct a mass killing is ludicrous, and yet the police had the discretion (and thus power) to make an example of the woman by charging her with a crime carrying a fourteen-year sentence, without her having done anything. Had being angry at customer-service employees become a crime? Or, had free-speech that is objectionable to big business become a crime? If so, could corporations next go after certain thoughts, using employees of local police departments who dismiss protecting the public as dutiful sycophants?

We can turn the Lakeland police investigation on its head by investigating that department. It is significant that “Lakeland, Florida police said they were contact by the FBI . . . in response to the alleged threat.”[5] That the police did not waste any time and did not seem to second-guess the FBI may suggest that the FBI had been determined to snuff out the “potential” copy-cat. To be sure, the FBI may simply have been over-cautious, but even that could have been due to pressure from Blue Cross or elected officials who have received campaign contributions from the giant company. That both the FBI and the local police department in Florida would knowingly seek to charge an angry policy holder of a crime that carries a sentence of 14 years in prison indicates a grossly disproportionate reaction, which itself could point back to the deference that the FBI (and local police) give to business in doing its bidding, even to scare the public.

As an anecdote, once when leaving a restaurant after barely eating a very badly cooked meal, I was speaking to people in the shopping center’s parking lot about the food. The manager of the restaurant got wind of this and approached me even though I was no longer on her establishment’s property. “The police here are my friends!” she warned me. “Keep talking about my restaurant and I will get them to make you leave.” The manager’s sheer presumptuousness was laughable, so I kept talking as was my right. She did call her friends, who told me I had to leave the parking lot even though that lot was not owned by the restaurant. That the police dismissed my legitimate objection told me enough; I moved to another suburb of Phoenix only months later; Mormon-run Mesa was simply too corrupt (and drug-ridden).

If my small window into the deference that local police pay to small business in falsely enforcing law that is not really law is correct, it is not difficult to conjecture that the FBI as well as local police may be unduly biased towards, perhaps even de facto working for, large corporations. The sort of unaccountability in accusing a distraught policy-holder of mass murder (even without noticing that she had no record of violence and not even a gun!) and being willing to put her in prison for fourteen years, likely to send the public a message from the large corporations, is consistent with the lack of accountability generally on market participants that are so large and wealthy that even competition is stifled that so enrages consumers and thus prompts anti-corporate politics. The connection can be found in Adam Smith’s claim that one of the main rationales for government is to protect the wealthy from the poor, who would otherwise steal the wealth. Does this hold of the governments in the U.S., or is the public to be served? The official answer may differ from the real answer.

That the governments in the U.S. have allowed companies to become so large as to choke competition without anti-trust law being enforced—something that Adam Smith would not like—is yet another indication of the “under the table” power of large corporations in the United States, thanks in part to unlimited political campaign contributions being legal. Perhaps elected officials were the people delivering the instructions from the health insurance company to the Pennsylvania sheriff in Altoona: Be rough with the guy and don’t let him speak to the media. Push him up against a wall if you want. Grab him by the neck. Show the world what happens if someone goes up against corporate America.  Hence the anti-corporate political movement in a democracy that is premised on accountability rather than plutocracy with impunity.

My main point is that institutionally, or structurally, very large and wealthy private companies, whether corporations or privately held, are incompatible with not only market competition, which ensures fair prices (even at grocery stores after a pandemic), but also political democracy, wherein one person has one vote and thus is just as important as the next. Whether a man on the street or a corporate CEO is murdered, the police-response should be the same in terms of the cost and effort in the manhunt and how the suspects are treated. Innocent until proven guilty means that police violence against a suspect who is not being violent or resistant is itself a crime regardless of how rich the victim’s family or company happens to be. 

The case of the health insurance CEO’s murder in December, 2024 was deliberately not supposed to be a vehicle for getting an anti-corporate message out—with even violence being used to enforce this proscription—but how the Pennsylvania police aggressively treated the suspect unabashedly in public view can be seen as a poster advertising the interlarding of corporate power at the expense of accountability in American democracy. Both economically and politically, it can be asked whether large corporations are accountable in the United States; politically, the same question may be asked of the local police departments in the member states. The American governments in the U.S. could do worse than apply anti-trust law to a variety of markets and apply criminal law to local police departments whose actual paymasters can be characterized proverbially as the man behind the curtain—an allusion to the hidden Wizard in the film, The Wizard of Oz. Then again, perhaps Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a more pertinent film, as the senator played by Jimmy Stuart filibusters for hours and hours against corruption in his home state.

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1. Jessica Parker and Nadine Yousif, “Luigi Mangione Fingerprints Match Crime-Scene Prints, Police Say,” BBC.com, December 11, 2024.
2. Pocharapon Neammanee, “Woman Arrested After Saying ‘Delay, Deny, Depose’ On Call With Insurance Company,” The Huffington Post, December 12, 2024.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5.Ibid.

Police Brutality: A Symptom of a Brain Sickness Stimulated by Large Doses of Power

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.

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1. Stanford Prison Experiment.

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.

5. For more on institutional conflicts of interest, see Skip Worden, Institutional Conflicts of Interest.

The American City: A Police State in the Making

Crime in 2017 was down the 30 largest cities in the U.S, but police levels remained robust. Specifically, less crime did not result in fewer cops on the street. “In 2016, there were slightly more officers per capita than in 1991, when violent crime peaked,” according to the FBI.[1] American cities were on a trajectory toward becoming police states. A mentality of excessive dominance, I submit, lies behind the excessive show of force.

The notion that pruning a police force “inevitably raises the specter of more crime” does not hold, given the evidence of a more complex relationship.[2] For one thing, the actual size of a police force can be distinguished from the amount of police presence in the streets and in the air on a daily basis. I submit that the notion that a constant, ubiquitous police presence discourages crime is also problematic. In fact, blanketing a constant show of force can send the message of total societal distrust, which in turn can lead to crime as the social contract unravels. “The answer to fixing trust inside the community is to not put more distrust into it,” said Tre Murphy, a community organizer in Baltimore, Maryland. The sheer presence of police with guns implies distrust, and even a primitiveness in terms of aggression. “The answer to violence is not to put more violence into the community,” Murphy explains, “and that’s what they’re doing by increasing the police force.”[3] The additional violence here is mostly the passive aggressiveness of an excessive show of force, but also the incidents of police brutality. The latent passive and active aggression in an excessive police presence may be explained by the power vested in a police employee being too much for human nature to control.

It bears mentioning that quality of life also suffers for law-abiding citizens as a city becomes a de facto police state. When I lived in Tucson, Arizona, I was stunned to see low-flying police helicopters on a daily basis, even during weekdays, and this was on top of a myriad of police cars constantly on the major roads. Seeing a low-flying helicopter flying nearby in tight circles with a spotlight dotting here and there is downright creepy, and thus unnerving, especially on nearly a nightly basis. The city’s mayor’s office was oblivious. At the local university, both city and campus police, plus police aides, regularly circled within the campus, giving students and faculty the sense that they were being continuously monitored. The distrust in the air on that campus was so palpable I avoided it. It was not uncommon to see a campus policeman wearing a bullet-proof vest perpetually circling on a bike around the library and campus green, while police vehicles slowly pass by as if also necessary during the day.  

Such over-the-top policing especially during weekdays raises the problem of the culprits being wholly unaware that their conduct is excessive—more specifically excessively passive aggressive. It is precisely such being oblivious that prevents police forces from accepting the very notion of less rather than more. Downsizing is not in a police force’s DNA, according to Meghan Hollis, a criminologist. “Police departments, as long as they have the funds, they’re going to keep their force size the way it is or grow it, regardless of the crime rate. They can always adjust their statistics to make it look like they need the officers they have.”[4] Likewise, police forces can rationalize even what is an excessive daily police presence on the street and in the air such that the excessive amount can become normalized as the default. Hence even citizens feeling constantly monitored out in public spaces and even on their property can come to accept the fait accompli. The passive aggression inherent in the excessive show of force is, I submit, in the DNA of a police force. Perhaps mayors and university managers are afraid to reel in their respective police forces.  

Perhaps it bears mentioning that the quality of life in a city suffers from a constant police presence. This point is perhaps as obvious as the obliviousness of police forces regarding their own excessive show of force is hidden from the public as well as the police themselves. I submit that America is on the road to a police state, rendering “land of the free” into a farce. To deem oneself to have great liberty and yet live in—and implicitly tolerate!—a police state is to live in a state of denial: oblivious. This may have become the American unconsciousness.

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[1] Jose Del Real, “Crime Is Falling, But Police Levels Remain Robust,” The New York Times, January 8, 2018.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

Violence at a Trump Campaign Rally Spurs Lawsuits against the Candidate: A Case of Incitement?

Is it natural for people to become enraged at other people at political events? Is violence simply part of the territory? Even if war stems from political differences, a political rally is a long way from being on a battle-field. The psychology, I submit, should be very different, and yet some people at campaign rallies cross the line as if they have no control over their emotions and behavior. That some protesters and a Trump supporter sued U.S. President Donald Trump for his role in inciting violence at one of his campaign rallies makes the matter of rage and violence at political events more public, and thus subject to analysis. The issue, I submit, goes beyond whether Don Trump incited violence against protesters at his political rallies. 

In Ceder Rapids, Iowa on Feb 1, 2016 at a Trump-for-President rally, the candidate told supporters there to “knock the crap out of” anyone preparing to throw a tomato.” He added, “I promise you. I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise.”[1] The next month, at a similar rally in Louisville, Kentucky, he bellowed, “Get ‘em out of here!” in response to several protesters interrupting his rally.[2] Matthew Heimbach, a Trump supporter, “gave a hard shove in the back” to Kashiya Nwanguama, “who had been holding up a poster depicting [Trump’s] face on the body of a pig.”[3] Implying that Trump had incited the violence, Heimbach would go on to say of Trump, “He knew what he was asking for.”[4] So Nwanguama and two other protesters sued Trump, contending incitement—the legal argument being that the candidate was legally liable because the violent Trump supporters had been acting as his agents. In fact, Heimbach also filed a civil suit against Trump, arguing “he was responsible for any injuries [Heimbach] might have inflicted because [Trump] directed him and others to take action.”[5]

According to Samuel Issacharoff, an instructor of constitutional law at New York University, the central issue raised by the federal civil suits “is how society should deal with the passions which are necessarily unleashed in political events. The courts bend over backward to protect the freedom of political exchange in this country, even when it’s ugly.”[6] Trump’s lawyers argued that the candidate’s public statements are protected by the First Amendment. Moreover, the lawyers contended that there was no evidence that Trump intended for his followers to harm anyone. As an eye-witness to another case of incitement at a Trump rally, I question this claim.

At the rally I attended, Trump repeatedly urged that protesters be taken out of the arena. At one point, a small section of protesters behind him interrupted, and he asked explicitly for his private security employees to remove the protesters. When one such employee later in the rally was removing a lone (Caucasian) protester who was wearing a KKK hood to protest Trump as a racist, Trump continued to bellow, “You’re disgusting!” even as a Black military man—a Trump supporter—jumped into the aisle, threw down the protester, and, in intense motions, literally stomped on the protester. I saw Trump watching the stomping as he was continuing to denigrate the protester. This, I contend, is particularly revealing: that the candidate was continuing to bash the protester while watching the violence. I was left with the clear impression that Donald Trump not only condoned and was inciting the violence, but also actually enjoyed it. I said to the black woman sitting next to me, referring to Trump, “I don’t think he values democratic principles.” Observing the Trump supporters in our area, I added, “I thought it was just hyperbole, but this really does feel like what the Nazi rallies must have been like.” The woman next to me shook her head in agreement and we both looked on in silence—both of us feeling the surreal nature of that particular rally.

So I do believe that Donald Trump as a candidate did not respect people who protested his candidacy. I suspect that his anger was directed at the disapproval itself. As for the military man who felt compelled to stomp on the protester, whom I think was a woman, the matter may go beyond the incitement, which I believe existed. Both the intensity of the anger of the Trump supporters at the rally directed to the (mostly isolated) cases of protest and the “flash-point” intense violence of the military man suggest to me that Issacharoff’s assumption that passions are necessarily unleashed in political events may be wrong. Heimbach’s legal argument may contain the assumption that he had no choice but to act as Trump’s agent at the rally in Kentucky, or at least that acting violently as Trump’s (self-appointed?) agent was normal for the type of occasion.

I question whether such extreme passions as can so easily “jump the fire line” onto violent acts are necessarily a part of political events—whether our expectation that such acts are just part of political life is valid. Alternatively, what we may be seeing is mental illness on full display thanks to the societal excuse of sorts that tacitly permits or normalizes rage at political events. It does not follow that just because someone holds a firm belief—whether it be political or religious—that violence-level anger inexorably kicks in against a “non-believer.” In the realm of religion, Feuerbach, a nineteenth-century European philosopher of religion, argues in his text, The Essence of Christianity, that faith contains a malevolent principle predicated on the salience of belief. That is, hatred toward non-believers is part and parcel of having faith in a belief, such as that God exists. Hence the many atrocities in the name of religion may stem from religious faith itself. I think we can broaden this out to any firmly held belief.

I do not find a reasonable enough basis for a person to feel severe or intense anger in the presence of a person merely disagreeing with a strongly-held belief, for homogeneity of belief is not part of the human condition. In other words, the expectation that you and I have that people should naturally believe what we respectively believe may be the underlying problem. The flawed assumption here may trigger the anger, which may actually be angst railing against the truth of the matter—that firmly holding a belief is not as important as we think or feel it to be, and that people are naturally going to have divergent beliefs. I don’t believe that the anger is a reflex against the latent (psychological or empirical) threat in the “I disagree with your belief.” Rather, I think we humans have an instinctual dislike of people who hold a divergent belief or opinion, yet the level of the dislike is not in itself, I submit, enough to trigger violence. Rather, flawed thinking in some people supports the fallacy of an expectation that people should naturally hold the same beliefs (especially one’s own!) and psychological pathology exaggerates the anger for some people such that they lapse into violence. Free speech should not give open license to normalizing this dysfunction at political events; in fact, the culprits, whether protesters or supporters, should be called out even just on their excessive emotion, and certainly the violence should be stopped as soon as it erupts. Continuing to denigrate the victim can thus be labeled as part of the pathology, rather than as natural to politics.

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[1] David Zucchino, “A Trump Campaign Rally Led to Shoving, and Legal Wrangling, Too,” The New York Times, May 27, 2017.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

Police Power Exceeding the Capacity of the Human Brain: Some Countervailing Measures

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Lord Acton’s timeless statement is applicable to legal and illegal power alike, for each is subject to abuse. The victims are those whose wills are bent through either harm or the threat of injury. Put another way, the human brain may lack sufficient cognitive, emotional, and perceptual machinery to check the instinctual plus socialized power-aggrandizing urge. This vulnerability is particularly apparent in viewing video showing a police employee violently over-react in a situation that quite obviously should not have involved violence. Although anger doubtlessly plays a crucial role in the trigger that unleashes the police violence, the more subtle suspension of cognition and warping of perception is also in the mix.

In December 2014, a 23 year-old policeman in Victoria, Texas, pulled over Pete Vasquez, aged 76, because Vasquez’s car did not show an inspection sticker. As Vasquez was trying to explain that his car was exempt—a point that the police chief later confirmed—the policeman grabbed the old man, pushed him to the ground, and used a tazer gun twice. “What the hell are you doing? This gentleman is 76 years old,” a sales manager watching the incident cried.[1] Clearly very angry at Vasquez, the policeman yelled at the onlooker, who seems to have suddenly feared for his own safety.

That the reasonable reaction from a third-party triggered more anger instead of any second-guessing, at least visibly, suggests that the policeman was not in control of his faculties. Crucially, he was not in sufficient control of himself to handle the power that he had been given by law. Psychologically, he evinced a weakness in handling the power in the context of not understanding why the car was exempt from having to show an inspection sticker. An arrogance in not wanting to admit even to himself that he did not understand what he himself had flagged, and a cognitive lapse in assuming that he could not be wrong likely contributed to his need to be in charge and thus his anger at Valsquez for trying to correct him. The anger itself was too much for the policeman, for it eclipsed reason and even perception whose impairment rendered any internal mechanism of self-regulation insufficiently operative.  In short, he used power beyond the capacity of his brain, emotionally, cognitively, and perceptually.

It may be that the authority given to police employees generally is not in keeping with the capacity of the human brain to process and handle power exercisable over other people. Compounding the problem, the police chief talked only about taking “a real hard look at some of the actions that occur within the department,” rather than arresting the aggressor even though the latter action would befit a person who had lost control of his faculties and acted out violently without reason. That the policeman was shifted to an administrative duty is itself an indication that official accountability would come up short within the police department. The implication is that the general public (and city officials) should not rely on departments’ internal-affairs departments to impartially investigate such cases and render sufficient punishment to “their own.” Put another way, the conflict of interest in the very nature of an internal-affairs department is inherently unethical because it can be expected to result in compromised investigations and decisions. To hold a police employee accountable, we must look beyond police departments.   

Although the district attorney said the policeman could face charges including official oppression, injury to elderly, aggravated assault and assault, the grand jury stage may be rigged to favor police employees. That is to say, the system itself may enable the propensity of the human brain to over-react with violence when in a position of power over another person without a sufficient internal check. Given the risk of aggrandized uses of power by police employees, candidates for local offices not only in Texas, but in each of the forty-nine other member-states in the U.S., might consider proposing institutionally and personally independent agencies to hold lapsing police employees accountable. Additionally, legislation changing the instructions to grand juries making it less difficult to indict an employee of a police department could be pursued. Especially if scientists find that the human brain is in fact ill-equipped to handle the power typically given to police employees, then either some of that power should be taken away, which may not be practical, or countervailing changes to grand-jury instructions enacted.

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[1] Ed Mazza, “Texas Cop Nathanial Robinson Uses Stun Gun on Elderly Man Over Inspection Sticker,” The Huffington Post, December 15, 2014.