By Venia Kontogianni,
As said by writer Robert Ingersoll, “If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power”. And boy, have we ever gotten to experience with our own eyes how excessive power and lax scrutiny over the police force’s actions have corrupted it. This is not groundbreaking news; it is a global problem at this point. In countries all over the world, there is a plethora of police brutality sightings that, in some cases, have even led to the passing away of not just detainees, but also innocent bystanders.
What is going on in the world?
For decades, the police have exploited their position and exhibited discriminatory behavior. In countries with history of segregation or where minorities make up a considerable part of the population, sometimes the police play favorites with the citizens. Especially in the US, minorities have been mistreated for decades. Over the last years, though, the police have gotten all the more brazen with their actions, seemingly not caring about the rectification of a situation as much as shooting gratuitously. People argue that policemen often lack higher education and appropriate decision-making skills, due to inadequate training. Others blame the US for simplifying the process of becoming a policeman, due to high job demand stemming from high criminal rates. While in some countries policemen-in-the-making train for years, in some states of the US potential law enforcers are in training for as little as six months before they are assigned a weapon and go on duty. This leaves people wondering whether that period suffices for accurate psychological, physical, mental or critical thinking evaluations. No matter how “intense” the training is, can someone’s critical thinking actually evolve in just six months? And going off of that, if a training is so fast-paced and condensed timewise, and therefore packed with physical examinations and studying, is six months or even, in some cases, two years enough to develop a precise, split-second decision-making? When things are put in perspective, it takes on average four years to receive a standard Bachelor’s degree, but around one or two to entrust someone with a weapon for the rest of their career.
Police brutality in the US is just a link in the chain of citizens’ mistreatment and police misconduct that has swept the world. From Bolivia to Greece, to the UK, to France, to Russia, to Brazil, to the Philippines, to Hong Kong, to Kenya, to Jamaica to Iraq: police are disregarding civil rights by violently repressing rightful protests everywhere, doing unwarranted armed house searches, physically violating people as a way to establish dominance and sometimes they unhesitatingly shoot to kill; all topped off with vehement racism and sexism.
What has given them the right to abuse their power?
Police actions stretch as far as the government will allow them and when the criminal behavior of a law enforcer is not brought to justice -as it should-, it is an affirmation of police impunity and general injustice towards the victims and the public. A large portion of them shows signs of a bad case of the god’s complex, often thinking that they are executively both the jury’s gavel and the jailer, while keeping law and order, but only what their meager training allows them to perceive as lawful and orderly. In most cases, they give off the impression that they separate themselves from the crowd, adopting the mentality of “us versus them”, which villainizes the people and views them as the enemy. This could possibly be the outcome of them growing power-hungry, getting caught up in the rush of their job and essentially heroizing themselves. Perhaps entrenched lobbying and nationalistic brainwashing are the causes of their behavior, or maybe it is the existence of a conservative political past that used to place copious amounts of prestige on the job of a policeman. Another possible reason for their misconduct is that they are either afraid of the government and wish to be in its good graces, or work with it to suppress the people.
Instilling fear is one of their ways to maintain societal order, however when people start getting assaulted or killed for no reason other than them trying to prove their power, the issue is no longer that of “police misconduct”, but rather, of a corrupt police system altogether. A system that is, in this case, made up of unsuitable, uneducated, insufficiently trained and scared boys with guns, whose critical thinking ends at the “shoot now, ask later” mentality. It is heart-wrenching to think that after decades, the respective governments have done nothing to cease police brutality and protect the people from those who are supposed to uphold the law.
References
- Amnesty International, Police Violence. Available here.
- CBS News, Some U.S. police train for just a few weeks, in some countries they train for years. Available here.
- United States capitol police, Police Officer Academy Training. Available here.
