Cognitive Conga: a blog

The title of this post comes from a phrase taught in the medical profession, the intended interpretation of which is along the lines, given an existing problem, it may be better to do nothing than to do something that risks causing more harm than good. As with intervention by doctors, intervention by police, especially violent intervention - however well-intentioned - has the possibility of being more harmful than helpful. It is important that police officers are aware of this, and that they are imaginitive enough to consider and assess the likely outcomes of the different courses of action available to them when handling an incident.

Police brutality - the use of excessive or inappropriate force by police officers while engaged in other professional misconduct or in the course of their duties - has been a popular topic in the British media since the death of Ian Tomlinson during the recent G20 protests in London. It's a phenomenon I was aware of by the time of the Hillsborough Disaster, if not before. I have a vague idea that I had heard of the Battle of Orgreave by then, but I am not certain that I had.

Police brutality was something I first learned about via newspapers, via the television news programmes I saw at friends' houses (my family did not own a TV when I was little), and also by reading the sleeves of some of my parents' records - e.g. The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, and Victor Jara's Manifesto - and asking what they meant.

In 1992, my mother visited Los Angeles after her mother's death, and later told me how Los Angeles had, at the time, been aflame in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating. The media, both in the US and in the UK, had been aflame with the Rodney King story too, and the US media certainly bore some responsibility for stoking the anger that led to the riots. Still, it meant that everyone in those countries with a newspaper or a television set now knew what police brutality was supposed looked like. That year was also, if my memory serves, when I first obtained a copy of Rage Against The Machine's eponymous debut album. Songs like Know Your Enemy, not to mention Pearl Jam's w.m.a., which I came to know a year later, increased my awareness of the idea that police misconduct could be insidious and covert, in addition to the spectacular and overt brutality of the kind that generates a media frenzy. The uncovering of substantial corruption at my local police station a year after that served to confirm the legitimacy of this awareness.

Whether it involved children being shot in South Africa in the '70s and '80s, peaceful World Trade Organisation protestors being tear-gassed and unconstitutionally arrested in Seattle in the '90s or riot police beating monks to death in Burma in the noughties, the same conclusion could be drawn from every instance of police brutality I learned of during my youth and subsequently: although the police exist ostensibly to help prevent citizens from harming each other, police officers can - and do, on occasion - needlessly harm civilians themselves, unless those police are responsibly governed.

That last point is important, because it is key to a safe, free society. Without an effective police force, vigilantism - which can be far worse - rises largely unchecked and the risk to personal safety increases. But police, like the government, should be - to paraphrase the Gettysburg Address - of the people, by the people, and for the people. They must abide by the same laws they exist to help enforce. Responsible government of police would ensure that not only are police of the people and for the people, but also that those police officers see themselves in this light. Otherwise there is a risk that the following statement by Victor Jara could - as I'm afraid it sometimes does - apply to those police officers as well as to the Chilean soldiers Jara was referring to:

I think that the professional soldier, from the fact of wearing a uniform and having power over the rest of the contingent, loses the sense of his own class. I think the exercise of command makes him, consciously or unconsciously, put himself on a different plane and see life from a different point of view. He believes himself to be superior.

Substitute police officer for soldier, and this statement explains much of the behaviour seen in the instances of brutality I have mentioned.

Let's just consider the other side of the coin for a moment. Is it possible that police brutality is beneficial or deserved? In short, no. Police brutality cannot ever be deserved, as it is, by my understanding (see above) unnecessary a priori. That's not to say that police should never use force - clearly, force can sometimes be needed to take a suspect into custody or to keep him there - merely that a minimum of force should be used.

There are some oblique ways in which the harm caused by police brutality can be mitigated. One is by inspiring artistic responses. If there were no police brutality, songs like N.W.A.'s Fuck Tha Police and bands like T.B.A.C. would surely have no raison d'être. But I, for one, would be willing to trade this music - which I like, by the way, even if I don't agree with every one of the artists' sentiments - for proportionate policing.

There is one other mitigation I can think of: if the brutality is widely reported, the outrage it prompts can lead to official reviews of police tactics, which, if carried out well, could limit further brutalities. This may yet happen as a result of the Ian Tomlinson tragedy. But it comes a very poor second to having no brutalities at all.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 5:17 am and is filed under Ethics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.