They Should Be Cops, Not Occupation Troops
By Patrick N. Theros - February 16, 2023
The
outrageously brutal beating of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis,
Tennessee policemen appears inexplicable to normal, decent, people
watching the videos in horror. How, I have been asked repeatedly, can
human beings display such inhuman savagery, especially given that they
knew they were on camera? Compounding the incredulity, the cops talked
on camera about how to give themselves a cover story – “he grabbed for
my gun” – while one of them kicked Mr. Nichols in the head as he lay
handcuffed. I had difficulty at first understanding what motivated such
brutality until I realized that I had seen the same absence of
conscience among a similar demographic: occupation forces.
Vicious
inhumanity should not surprise anyone with even a perfunctory knowledge
of history. After all, 1933 Germany arguably was the most civilized
nation in Europe; with the best educated, cultured and socially
responsible population on the continent. Within the next twelve years
those same Germans perpetrated the Holocaust, in a cold, organized and
measured manner that had no precedent in history. (I hope none of my
right-wing friends jump in excitedly claiming that I have equated the
Memphis police force with the Gestapo; I only describe how normal human
beings can, and too often do, descend into savagery.) The conscienceless
brutal beating inflicted by five Memphis cops on Mr. Nichols has a
counterpart in the behavior of occupation soldiers.
Nine years
ago, I wrote that, without minimizing the injustice so often inflicted
on African-Americans by police and by a justice system that fails to
hold bad cops accountable, I argued that police violence could not be
blamed on systemic racism alone. I believed that policies to save money
by taking policemen off foot patrol and putting them in cars had
destroyed community interaction with law enforcement. The modern
policeman, patrolled from “a cruiser buried in communications gear and
dashboard computers, ... (he) sits alone behind the wheel talking to no
one, unaware of who belongs and who doesn’t … limiting his social
interaction to sharing gripes with other equally isolated cops at the
end of his shift in the station house.” Five years later, I reexamined
my thesis that systemic racism was not the cause of excessive police
violence, and that the problem could be corrected by better training and
organization. It now appears clear that the problem goes beyond both
training and racism; we have instead transformed the policeman from
neighborhood cop to a soldier occupying enemy territory, most frequently
poor black neighborhoods. To quote our (then) President and Secretary
of Defense, police had to “dominate the battlespace” referring to our
own cities!
The Memphis cops behaved like occupying troops in a
hostile land. The impunity with which they discussed a cover story for
what they were doing to Mr. Nichols knowing that they were being
recorded by a police-controlled surveillance camera (not to mention
their own body cameras) indicates that they expected their superiors to
cover for them. The occupation troop mentality can explain why they
administered a brutal beating to a helpless young man following an
innocuous traffic stop. Occupation troops in many places have done the
same as a warning to the people under occupation not to “f… with them.”
History
is replete with examples of how occupation duties transform ordinary
men into killers. The Boston Massacre of 1775, a precursor to the
American Revolution, began when a bunch of locals gave a British sentry
some lip. A crowd gathered, more soldiers came up, and the locals threw
snowballs at them. The British troops opened fire killing five. In an
effort to maintain calm, the British commanders conducted a court
martial, found two soldiers guilty of murder but then administered the
most minor of punishments. The head of gendarmerie in one major European
ally – one that concentrated its migrants in urban ghettos – once told
me with glee, “We periodically sweep immigrant neighborhoods, round up
young men at random and beat the crap out of them so that they know
their place.”
Numerous Israeli studies have shown that
occupation duty in the Palestinian territories has had insidious effects
on Israeli soldiers. These studies document numerous cases of
indiscriminate murder of Palestinians, often to “teach the Arabs a
lesson.” The Israeli army rarely investigates and, when it does, usually
concludes that the soldiers “responded to threats”. Israeli Army
spokesmen often blame Palestinians, as for example, in the recent murder
of a Palestinian-American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh. Recent
American history is also replete with examples of how occupation brings
out the worst in the kids we assign to occupation duties. Have we
forgotten the atrocities at Abu Ghraib?
Memphis police
established a special unit, to deal with high crime neighborhoods. The
unit was patterned on a similar unit established in Atlanta which was
notorious for ambushing young men, yanking down their pants in public
and performing full-body cavity searches in an attempt to spread fear.
Even the name of the Memphis unit, SCORPION (Street Crime Operations to
restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods), appeared designed to intimidate.
The five cops who brutalized Mr. Nichols had been previously
“disciplined” for wrongful violence against citizens but stayed on their
jobs and even earned commendations. The cops saw themselves as
occupation troops assigned to suppress the local population and expected
impunity for their brutality. Had Mr. Nichols not died, they probably
would have been ”disciplined” once again and promptly returned to the
streets. Should we be surprised that the Memphis police chief who
created SCORPION had previously trained with the Israeli military? That
the cops and the victim were all black men had nothing to do with what
happened; the police saw themselves as elite troops sent to keep
neighborhood youth “in their place.”
So long as we task police with occupation duties, I fear that we will see the same atrocities over and over again.