Police Brutality as Expression of Shame

A few weeks ago, police responded to OWS protests in Boston by turning their batons on a Veterans for Peace brigade standing between them and the protestors to their rear (http://intercontinentalcry.org/newswire/occupy-boston-police-attack-beat-veterans-for-peace-members/). In NYC, after Officer Anthony Bologna had already stirred the movement's momentum by showing the world one of many cruel ways in which cops get their kicks (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRN_2AmJS-k), police turned a tense situation into a dangerous one by engaging a densely packed Times Square crowd on horseback (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kXQ5RMDtBI&feature=related). And then there's Oakland, whose police department unleashed its arsenal on demonstrators, nearly killing Scott Olson in the fierce continuation of its quaint tradition of violence and lawlessness. Olson's a 24 year old marine veteran who served two tours in Iraq before coming home to get shot in the head by those whose job it is to serve and protect him (http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/28-4).

While the modes of expression are various, from the power-drunk, fratboyesque, hyper-masculine "I'm just gonna kick this asshole's face in cuz I can," to the bigotry-fueled "I'm gonna kick this asshole's face in cuz he's black," the type of noxious, all-too-common police conduct I'd like to focus on here centers on the handling of political dissent. I believe it's important to try to understand the situation that ground-level officers find themselves in when they are ordered to directly confront crowds comprised of individuals who look like them, talk like them, and who, as they do, struggle to make their lives work out as painlessly as possible.

One explanation for the manner in which police have dealt with OWS protestors the nation-round has to do with provocation. The logic goes as follows: the police behave badly, the protestors respond badly, and the media covers the latter, turning away from joining the movement's ranks those whose personal circumstances have led them to assess it sympathetically and supportively.

For Ralph Nader, provocation is ostensibly at the heart of the recent conduct of police departments. According to him, the "moral authority" of the OWS movement rises in direct proportion to each new example of police aggression that goes unanswered by the protestors. To maintain the moral high-ground, the movement must commit itself to non-violent civil-disobedience lest it become discredited; the movement's sustainability and success depends on it.  He writes: "Each new protest gives the protesters new insights. The protestors are learning how to challenge controlling processes. They are assembling and using their little libraries on site. They are learning the techniques of open, non-violent civil disobedience and building personal stamina. They are learning not to be provoked and thereby win the moral authority struggle which encourages more and more people to join their ranks" (http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/27-7). Nader's emphasis on the essential need for the protesters to not merely act non-violently, but to appear visually non-violent, is on point if the movement is to grow. Think the Black Panthers, whose shotguns were at once their salvation and their undoing.

Conversely, others aver that police violence resulted from the protesters own provocations. The Washington Post last week led the charge with its absurd coverage of the Oakland debacle. Absurd indeed! C'etait absurdite par excellance: Above an article entitled "Protesters Wearing out their Welcome Nationwide," is a picture of a cop gently comforting a helpless cat; the caption beneath the photo read: "A police officer in Oakland, Calif., pets a cat that was left behind by Wall Street protesters who were evicted from the grounds of City Hall" (http://wonkette.com/455265/washington-post-illustrates-oakland-police-brutality-with-cop-petting-kitten). From this perspective, the police serve bravely and with highest honor to protect lives and properties from the motley madcap fringe threatening the functionality of American democracy. Doing the work that protects cities from fiery ruination is dangerous stuff according to proponents of this view, and the cops themselves have become victims of brash radicalism. So much that, as our friends at Fox News reported, the NYPD is considering suing protesters accused of harming police officers- this in addition to the felony awaiting the unfortunates charged with this type of assault (http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/the-five/index.html#/v/1247306262001/police-threaten-to-sue-occupy-protesters/?playlist_id=1040983441001).

So one question that everybody's talking about is whose provoking whom?

What if they were both provoking each other? What if the very presence of the cops represent to the protesters the very problem with our system, one that pits ordinary people against one another while the extraordinary watch from on high? What if the very presence of the protesters signal to your average cop that he's chosen the wrong profession, or at the least, chosen to obey the wrong orders, and thus chosen the wrong side?

Jonathon Kozol, teacher and educational activist, wrote somewhere (at least I think it was him) that when students express themselves coarsely in school, they reveal how limited their means of communication are. If an angry student hurls a chair at his instructor, Kozol argues that the child is articulating his emotions according to the limits set by his narrow capacity to express them through language. Had the child been able to simply state precisely how he felt, the chair would have been necessary only to sit in.

I think Kozol's point can serve as a useful analogy in the context of OWS and the violence the police level against it. The movement is in a large sense amorphous. Absent traditional leaders, it's also absent a catalogue of demands (I write about demands specifically in my previous post) and a timeline for action. When it will end is as difficult to determine as what it will achieve. These absences are what make it compelling to many, and they also point out the realization that got the OWS movement started in the first place: that the traditional modes of affecting change in this country are no longer effective. Like the child who desperately needs an education in speaking so he can abandon the chair, the OWS understands that words alone can no longer articulate their grievances, concerns, and aspirations to those in power most in need of hearing them. They have had to learn to speak in a different way. And thus they occupy. They occupy as a constant presence, a haunting, a fixture of light on the wall of America. Because it is non-violent, it cannot be mistaken for a chair.

(For more perspective on this, see Zizek's article "Occupy First. Demands Come Later:" http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/26/occupy-protesters-bill-clinton)

The cops, on the other hand, don't have the liberty of finding novel ways of communicating with those who it's fallen upon them to manage. They must stand guard, listen and watch, corral, make arrests, swing batons and spray pepper juice, drag innocent people through the streets, the whole while facing down people with whom they share much in common at the command of others who are economically and politically apart.

On Friday's broadcast of Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed Brian Willson, a Vietnam vet and activist who lost his legs protesting munitions shipments to Nicaragua in 1987. In a lotus position, he occupied the track as it approached him, however, seeing him there blocking the tracks, the trains conductors decided to accelerate, running him down, nearly killing him, and irrevocably changing his life.

AMY GOODMAN: Brian Willson, do you regret what happened on September 1st, 1987?

S. BRIAN WILLSON: Well, I regret that I lost my legs, but I don’t regret that I was there. I did what I said I was going to do. The Navy crew, themselves Vietnam veterans, the three civilian employees of the Navy, were following orders. And I no longer follow orders. Following orders, I discovered, is not what I’m about. (my emphasis)

Willson argues that following orders establishes a false hierarchy of values and power which is ultimately dehumanizing. Personally, Willson stopped following orders after he'd seen firsthand the innumerable bodies of men, women and children that lay dead on the ground after an American air strike in Vietnam. It was a moment that he describes as an epiphany, after which he awoke from a long sleep in the nightscapes of social and political indoctrination.

The OWS protesters were raised exposed to the same sociocultural and political pressures as the police, yet, like Willson, they seem to have awoken. Though job duty and security keep them on the frontline of the protests, what precludes the cops from such, and can we really assume that they haven't begun to wake up already? This last part sounds ridiculous in light of the brutality we've seen, but it's not so simple to figure out.

If we say that the cops are just following orders, it takes agency away from them as individuals who willingly carry them out. Yet by holding them as individuals directly responsible, we might neglect to consider how conflicted these people might be. As Stanley Milgram discovered a long time ago, true obedience to authority is not determined solely by the threat of reprisal for disobedience:

There is a propensity for people to accept definitions of action provided by legitimate authority. That is, although the subject performs the action, he allows authority to define its meaning.
            It is this ideological abrogation that constitutes the principal cognitive basis of obedience. If, after all, the world or the situation is as the authority defines it, a certain set of actions follows logically.
            The relationship between authority and subject, therefore, cannot be viewed as one in which a coercive figure forces action from an unwilling subordinate. Because the subject accepts authority’s definition of the situation, action follows willingly ...
            Dissent may occur without rupturing hierarchical bonds and thus belongs to an order of experience that is qualitatively discontinuous with disobedience. Many dissenting individuals who are capable of expressing disagreement with authority still respect authority’s right to overrule their expressed opinion. While disagreeing, they are not prepared to act on this conviction ...
            Disobedience is the ultimate means whereby strain is brought to an end. It is not an act which comes easily.
            It implies not merely the refusal to carry out a particular command ... but a reformulation of the relationship between the subject and authority.
                                                            -Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority.
                                                            (New York: Harper and Row) 1974, p. 145 - 62

When we consider Milgram's research in the context of the cops, who the protesters ask daily to join them, we may begin to understand that the cops have not reached the point where they can effectively reformulate their relationship to the authority they represent and obey. I say not yet, because, like the rest of us, the decline of material prosperity in this country has affected them, too. Like ours, their wages the last three decades have not kept pace with inflation; they, too, must find ways to deal with rising college tuition costs; they, too, must pay for the entitlements devoted financially to the rich; they, too, must pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign aid to dictatorships, and the patent criminality of the financial sector; they, too, send their children to public schools whose funding has been slashed and whose existence is threatened; they, too, must work longer hours with fewer resources to get the job done.

All this leads me to wonder if recent police violence in the context of the OWS paradoxically signals deep undercurrents of support for the movement. As I argued in a previous post ("The Anachronism's in the Nation"), what I called the symbolic bond to nation, and here I'll add authority itself, weakens when material conditions decline. When these conditions reach a low enough point, then the "reformulation" that Milgram discusses, to say a paradigm shift of mind, can take place. Since the cops share our shitty affairs, I assume that questions are being asked in the hearts and minds of police officers everywhere. And when questions are asked and the answers are revolting, what are the police officers left with but a job that is the physical arm of the authoritative state that has worsened the conditions of their lives? Worse yet, as this physical arm, they are charged with containing and beating back a movement that has asked the same questions and generated the same revolting answers about how the "system" fuctions.

To return to the child and the chair, how are the cops to articulate the conflict of their emotions when the only language they can speak is violence? I'm not suggesting that all cops overtly sympathize with the movement, and it's out of sympathy that they pumped some kind of slug into Scott Olsen's skull. I'm saying that they're between a rock and a hard place, defenders of a system that works only for those at the controls. What shame these officers must feel. It's not for long that working class cops can police working class people before the tension between job-security and doing the right thing causes something to snap. Perhaps this snapping is an articulation through violence of their own personal shame. Because shame speaks violently, the cops act violently, and disgusting violence in cops is in the job description.

However difficult and perhaps repugnant a task, we must try to empathize with the position the cops are in, and continue to model for them, even at the fist of their brutality, non-violent ways for reformulating mentally and physically the way we understand and resist the dominant structure of power in this country and world.