Law, Order, and Social Suicide
Published on
Thursday, December 31, 2015
by
Common Dreams
Law, Order, and Social Suicide
by
Robert C. Koehler
Minneapolis police officers block the entrance to the 4th Precinct during
the fifth night of demonstrations following the police shooting death of
Jamar Clark in November. (Photo: Tony Webster/flickr/cc)
Want a ringside seat for the war on crime? Go to killedbypolice.net. A few
hours ago (as I write this), the site had listed 1,191 police killings in
the U.S. this year. I just looked again.
The total is up one.
This, about killing number 1,192, is from the Fresno Bee, which the site
links to:
"Authorities have identified the woman fatally shot by a deputy early
Tuesday as a 50-year-old military veteran.
"According to Merced County Sheriff's Sgt. Delray Shelton, Siolosega
Velega-Nuufolau was shot after waving a kitchen knife 'in a threatening and
aggressive manner' at the deputy.
"Authorities were called to the scene in the 29000 block of Del Sol Court
(in Santa Nella, Calif.) by a neighbor, who reported that Velega-Nuufolau
was in the neighbor's driveway, screaming for someone to call 911 at about
12:30 a.m. It is not clear why she wanted authorities called."
Mentally disturbed woman with a knife, police officer fires, another one
dead - and it just happened, reaching public attention while I was shuffling
papers in my office, ambling downstairs for coffee. Something about this
feels so raw, so . . . personal. Indeed, as personal as a heartbeat. And the
"wrong" that I felt pulsing as I read about the shooting - and, justified or
unjustified, police killings have been happening this year at the rate of
almost three a day - had nothing to do with procedure or legality: whether
the shooting was "justified." The wrong felt so much bigger. We deal with
social dysfunction by discharging bullets into it, over and over and over.
We're killing ourselves.
This is the outcome of a punishment-based conception of social order. And
because it's mixed with racism and classism, the toxicity is compounded
exponentially.
We live under the illusion that social order is sustained by law . . . I
mean, ahem, The Law, a collection of rules allegedly grounded in some
godlike moral sensibility located in state and national legislatures and
enforced - lethally, if necessary - by a system of justice almost completely
conceived as a mechanism to dole out punishment for disobedience. Not only
are many of the rules that have attained, over the years, the moral stature
of Law unbelievably stupid - "whites only" restrooms, drinking fountains and
lunch counters come to mind - even the sensible laws, against, for instance,
robbery and murder, are permeated with exceptions that protect the socially
powerful.
Human society is not a linear mechanism held together by the enforcement -
bang, bang, bang - of rules, but an organism as complex and paradoxical as
life itself.
This is why the national discussion about police killings, which has finally
gotten underway, must occur in a state of open, up-reaching consciousness
too often missing from most media accounts. Questions of order, safety and
security need to be addressed in a context bigger than the flawed system
allegedly responsible for their maintenance.
We - meaning the police, meaning all of us - don't maintain order so much as
create it, day by day, moment by moment. How do we disarm this creation
process and realign it with healing, growth and love, indeed, with the
evolution of who we are?
Consider:
"Within two seconds of the car's arrival, Officer Loehmann shot Tamir in the
abdomen from point-blank range, raising doubts that he could have warned the
boy three times to raise his hands, as the police later claimed. And when
Tamir's 14-year-old sister came running up minutes later, the officers, who
are white, tackled her to the ground and put her in handcuffs, intensifying
later public outrage about the boy's death. When his distraught mother
arrived, the officers also threatened to arrest her unless she calmed down,
the mother, Samaria Rice, said."
This is from a recent article by Dani McClain in The Nation, revisiting the
shooting a year ago of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, in the wake of
the news that no charges will be brought against the officers involved.
The outrage I feel as I read this is only peripherally about the behavior of
individual officers and the justice I want is by no means limited to their
criminal convictions. Their actions occur so clearly in a context that is
national in scope: Our police are warriors. That's how they're trained and
that's how they think of themselves.
For instance, a Wall Street Journal article from last summer notes: "The
majority of cadets at the nation's 648 law-enforcement academies in 2006
were trained at academies with a military-style regimen, which included
paramilitary drills and intense physical demands. . . .
"So-called soft skills have gotten less attention. Police recruits spend
eight hours on de-escalation training, compared with 58 hours on firearms
and 49 hours on defensive tactics, according to a 2015 survey of 281
law-enforcement agencies by the Police Executive Research Forum, a
Washington-based police research and policy organization."
Here's the thing. While the concept of the warrior, or soldier, is
glory-saturated, and while the physical and emotional intensity of the
training is enormous, and while the macho appeal of being a warrior is
understandable, the focal point of this training is the existence of The
Enemy and how to defeat it - which primarily means how to kill it. And as
many people have pointed out, training to kill The Enemy involves
deliberately dehumanizing the population in question. This is why war always
involves horrific moral backlash.
And this is the nature of militarized policing, which is the opposite of
community policing. The cops are warriors, and when they enter the zone of
the enemy - when they see themselves as belonging to an occupying army
rather than to the community they're "protecting" - they are likely to
dehumanize those they encounter, especially if the encounter is
antagonistic.
Thus in Tamir Rice's shooting, the officers were clearly acting like they
were in a war zone, surrounded by The Enemy. The boy with the pellet gun is
quickly taken out. A teenage girl, screaming in shock and grief, is tackled
and cuffed. The dead boy's mother is warned that if she doesn't calm down,
she'll be arrested.
This is worse than two officers acting illegally. This is two officers doing
their jobs. And the system they serve has exonerated them.
By the way, at killedbypolice.net, the death toll has gone up to 1,194.
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Law, Order, and Social Suicide
Published on
Thursday, December 31, 2015
by
Common Dreams
Law, Order, and Social Suicide
by
Robert C. Koehler
. 25 Comments
.
. Minneapolis police officers block the entrance to the 4th Precinct
during the fifth night of demonstrations following the police shooting death
of Jamar Clark in November. (Photo: Tony Webster/flickr/cc)
. Want a ringside seat for the war on crime? Go to killedbypolice.net.
A few hours ago (as I write this), the site had listed 1,191 police killings
in the U.S. this year. I just looked again.
. The total is up one.
. This, about killing number 1,192, is from the Fresno Bee, which the
site links to:
. "Authorities have identified the woman fatally shot by a deputy
early Tuesday as a 50-year-old military veteran.
"According to Merced County Sheriff's Sgt. Delray Shelton, Siolosega
Velega-Nuufolau was shot after waving a kitchen knife 'in a threatening and
aggressive manner' at the deputy.
"Authorities were called to the scene in the 29000 block of Del Sol Court
(in Santa Nella, Calif.) by a neighbor, who reported that Velega-Nuufolau
was in the neighbor's driveway, screaming for someone to call 911 at about
12:30 a.m. It is not clear why she wanted authorities called."
Mentally disturbed woman with a knife, police officer fires, another one
dead - and it just happened, reaching public attention while I was shuffling
papers in my office, ambling downstairs for coffee. Something about this
feels so raw, so . . . personal. Indeed, as personal as a heartbeat. And the
"wrong" that I felt pulsing as I read about the shooting - and, justified or
unjustified, police killings have been happening this year at the rate of
almost three a day - had nothing to do with procedure or legality: whether
the shooting was "justified." The wrong felt so much bigger. We deal with
social dysfunction by discharging bullets into it, over and over and over.
We're killing ourselves.
http://www.commondreams.org/donatehttp://www.commondreams.org/donate
This is the outcome of a punishment-based conception of social order. And
because it's mixed with racism and classism, the toxicity is compounded
exponentially.
We live under the illusion that social order is sustained by law . . . I
mean, ahem, The Law, a collection of rules allegedly grounded in some
godlike moral sensibility located in state and national legislatures and
enforced - lethally, if necessary - by a system of justice almost completely
conceived as a mechanism to dole out punishment for disobedience. Not only
are many of the rules that have attained, over the years, the moral stature
of Law unbelievably stupid - "whites only" restrooms, drinking fountains and
lunch counters come to mind - even the sensible laws, against, for instance,
robbery and murder, are permeated with exceptions that protect the socially
powerful.
Human society is not a linear mechanism held together by the enforcement -
bang, bang, bang - of rules, but an organism as complex and paradoxical as
life itself.
This is why the national discussion about police killings, which has finally
gotten underway, must occur in a state of open, up-reaching consciousness
too often missing from most media accounts. Questions of order, safety and
security need to be addressed in a context bigger than the flawed system
allegedly responsible for their maintenance.
We - meaning the police, meaning all of us - don't maintain order so much as
create it, day by day, moment by moment. How do we disarm this creation
process and realign it with healing, growth and love, indeed, with the
evolution of who we are?
Consider:
"Within two seconds of the car's arrival, Officer Loehmann shot Tamir in the
abdomen from point-blank range, raising doubts that he could have warned the
boy three times to raise his hands, as the police later claimed. And when
Tamir's 14-year-old sister came running up minutes later, the officers, who
are white, tackled her to the ground and put her in handcuffs, intensifying
later public outrage about the boy's death. When his distraught mother
arrived, the officers also threatened to arrest her unless she calmed down,
the mother, Samaria Rice, said."
This is from a recent article by Dani McClain in The Nation, revisiting the
shooting a year ago of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, in the wake of
the news that no charges will be brought against the officers involved.
The outrage I feel as I read this is only peripherally about the behavior of
individual officers and the justice I want is by no means limited to their
criminal convictions. Their actions occur so clearly in a context that is
national in scope: Our police are warriors. That's how they're trained and
that's how they think of themselves.
For instance, a Wall Street Journal article from last summer notes: "The
majority of cadets at the nation's 648 law-enforcement academies in 2006
were trained at academies with a military-style regimen, which included
paramilitary drills and intense physical demands. . . .
"So-called soft skills have gotten less attention. Police recruits spend
eight hours on de-escalation training, compared with 58 hours on firearms
and 49 hours on defensive tactics, according to a 2015 survey of 281
law-enforcement agencies by the Police Executive Research Forum, a
Washington-based police research and policy organization."
Here's the thing. While the concept of the warrior, or soldier, is
glory-saturated, and while the physical and emotional intensity of the
training is enormous, and while the macho appeal of being a warrior is
understandable, the focal point of this training is the existence of The
Enemy and how to defeat it - which primarily means how to kill it. And as
many people have pointed out, training to kill The Enemy involves
deliberately dehumanizing the population in question. This is why war always
involves horrific moral backlash.
And this is the nature of militarized policing, which is the opposite of
community policing. The cops are warriors, and when they enter the zone of
the enemy - when they see themselves as belonging to an occupying army
rather than to the community they're "protecting" - they are likely to
dehumanize those they encounter, especially if the encounter is
antagonistic.
Thus in Tamir Rice's shooting, the officers were clearly acting like they
were in a war zone, surrounded by The Enemy. The boy with the pellet gun is
quickly taken out. A teenage girl, screaming in shock and grief, is tackled
and cuffed. The dead boy's mother is warned that if she doesn't calm down,
she'll be arrested.
This is worse than two officers acting illegally. This is two officers doing
their jobs. And the system they serve has exonerated them.
By the way, at killedbypolice.net, the death toll has gone up to 1,194.
