Why American cops are going out of control
My Indian friends and relatives should know that the American police are not your allies. They are paid to lie to you when convenient. They kill more people in a single year than other nations' police forces manage in decades, a fact profiled in a recent piece in The Guardian. If you haven't been keeping up with American news, you might want to Google how many unarmed minorities have been shot, strangled, or otherwise killed by the police in high-profile cases in just the past two years.
You should avoid cops at all costs; that means taking the advice of activists and civil rights advocates who rightfully tell you that you should never, ever speak to a policeman or answer their questions. It's your right – the right to remain silent. And you have this constitutional right even if you are a foreigner. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) supplies a useful list of do's and don'ts if you are stopped by the police. I highly recommend that you read it before visiting the US on your next trip. Americans should already be aware of these rights, but it's surprising how few of us are, particularly when we're confronted by the police.
Why all the much-to-do about American cops, why all the hyperlinks? Because I think American cops are out-of-control, and we should be recording and publicly shaming them whenever they break the law, especially when they turn violent for no justifiable reason. The number of high-profile instances of police brutality, especially directed at blacks and other minorities, is an indicator that what we've had all along in the US is a systemic problem. With increasingly more people finding value in using their phones to record their encounters with police comes the realisation that these are not isolated incidents. It's closer to the truth that blacks and other minorities are more likely to play starring roles as victims in some twisted and racist American reality TV programme or webisode featuring the police dishing out state-sponsored forms of physical and mental abuse. Sadly, there's also vocal public support and policies favouring an American apartheid that many believed ended in the post-civil rights era.
The latest story making the social media rounds (and driving network news) comes out of McKinney, Texas. Last week, on June 7, the world saw what could be described as another dramatic episode of "Cops Gone Wild" air on YouTube. Police responded to 911 calls placed by local residents concerned about black teens crashing an end-of-school pool party celebration, as well as an assault of a black teen by white adults, which was briefly caught on video here before the police arrived.
No, another unarmed black man didn't get murdered by cops, but it was still a nasty piece of business. The victim featured in the popular YouTube video was a bikini-clad teen who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The video was captured on 15 year-old Brandon Brooks' phone. He and his friend who witnessed the incident are both white. Ironically, this could be the only reason why this video could have been made under the circumstances, considering both youths weren't seen as threats by McKinney police officer Eric Casebolt (who later resigned over the spectacle), who was more than busy rounding up black teens for interrogation.
There's no question that the police should be receiving more basic training in how to behave in public. It should be drilled into their heads that they are public servants, not Gestapo goon squads out to terrorise neighbourhoods by murdering and abusing citizens on behalf of the state and its corporate financiers.
But such reforms will likely be ineffective in the long term by design, because historically speaking, a centralised police force wasn't created "to serve and to protect" the public. It was created to serve the interests of slave owners and businessmen.
"More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to 'disorder'," Gary Potter writes in his book, The History of Policing in the United States. "What constitutes social and public order depends largely on who is defining those terms, and in the cities of 19th century America they were defined by the mercantile interests, who through taxes and political influence supported the development of bureaucratic policing institutions. These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime control."
The proof of these claims play out on the streets of America everyday. Brave, young adults like Brandon Brooks are beginning to realise the importance of filming cops. And the rest of us are slowly opening up our eyes to police brutalisation that minority communities have been facing for nearly 200 years.