Nora Levinson is a privileged white woman--she is the CEO of Caeden, a small company that mixes tech hardware with wearable fashion. Last Wednesday, she decided to join the Freddie Gray protests in NYC. She was arrested for her participation and has written an article about the experience:
I just got back from 12 hours in NYPD holding. If I can get arrested (with all of my white privilege and generally perceived non-threatening stature), so can anybody. In total over 1,000 people protested yesterday in New York, and over 120 were arrested. Here’s what that experience entailed for me:
She goes on to describe the experience in detail. I encourage everyone to read the whole article--
What Happens After You're Arrested At A Protest in New York. I'll excerpt a few details over the fold.
Arrests: There had been police along the side of the street watching as we marched, but we soon came upon a head-on police blockade. Police started randomly singling people out to arrest. An officer pointed at me and another grabbed my arms and told me not to resist. My arrest was fairly uneventful — nobody slammed me into the ground or a car, but that was happening to most everyone else except me.
This was not a case of looting or any other misbehavior, people were arrested for protesting, nothing more. The totally arbitrary nature of the arrests became clear as she was waiting in the police van she was put in:
The last two people who were arrested were not even part of the protests, they were just walking alongside.
And in most cases, brutal force was used--people being slammed into the ground or against a car. Again, in the police van:
Several people had been slammed hard and were feeling faint-headed, or had cuffs tightened to the point of loss of circulation and swelling/color change in their hands.
But what is really significant is what happened next, when the arrested protesters were transported to the police station:
Rough Riding / Police Snapchat: They raced the patrol wagons down the West Side Highway with a full police escort to 1 Police Plaza. There were several unnecessary U-turns and other sharp turns along the way. We were not belted in, and couldn’t brace ourselves against anything because our hands were cuffed. The police officers in the front of the wagon were taking selfie videos of the crazy race-car style driving and posting to Snapchat stories that they shared with each other and boasted about openly in front of us, laughing.
This is depraved behavior--a police van full of ordinary citizens of varying backgrounds, who were being subjected to danger and possible injury by bouncing off the insides of the van, which was being deliberately driven recklessly by police officers who laughed and boasted about the incident. The officers escorting them could not have been unaware of what was happening. The contempt of a whole squad of police for the lives and safety of these citizens, who had done nothing more than exercise their right to protest, is criminal. The perpetrators should be in jail. They should never be police officers again.
Shaun King has a diary up about the subject of "rough rides" which I encourage you to read. As he makes clear, this practice all too often results in severe injury or even death, and is done by police in several different cities. Let's let that sink in: this is done in many different places. King mentions Baltimore, Philadelphia and Chicago in his diary, and Nora Levinson reports the same thing being done to protestors in New York.
What we have here is not a matter of "a few bad apples". This is a systemic problem that can be found in police departments across the country, with officers engaging in conduct that reveals utter contempt for the rights and safety of citizens. It is clear that the perpetrators have no fear of accountability, that there is a culture that encourages and protects them.
People may ask, where are the "good" cops that will come forward and expose this wrong-doing? This is not something that a few individual police can combat on their own. While some officers avoid being brutal (Nora Levinson was one of the few protesters not body-slammed when she was arrested), they have no power to stop their colleagues' brutality without suffering consequences themselves. The system they are caught in encourages corruption and brutality, and those who try and buck it can, in the worst case, end up risking their lives. A clear historical example is Frank Serpico, who was set up for murder by fellow officers after he exposed department-wide corruption in the NYPD. He survived and testified in court:
The problem is that the atmosphere does not yet exist... in which an honest police officer can act... without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers. Police corruption cannot exist unless it is at least tolerated...at higher levels in the department.
(Link--Wikipedia)
Police departments, as organized in the United States, are intensely hierarchical organizations, organized along military lines, with ranks and chains of command. Further, police are given privileges that other citizens do not receive--they are given the power to detain and arrest citizens for probable cause, they carry weapons, both lethal and "non-lethal", and are given discretion in using those weapons in the course of their duty.
When you give people this kind of power, the potential for abuse and corruption certainly exists. You would expect that outside agencies, such as civilian police review boards (note, again, that police are not "civilian", they are organized, armed bodies), local and federal prosecutors, and city administrations, would perform oversight to combat such tendencies. In practice, the police are usually left to investigate and discipline themselves, with predictable results. As Lord Acton said, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Precisely as long as police do not feel accountable to the public for their actions, we will see brutality and abuse of the public continue.
What is to be done?
The protests must continue. We have a corrupt political class that uses the police for social control--they will not address this issue unless forced to. Because our political culture is corrupt, we cannot elect our way out of the problem. Look at the situation in New York City: we have a nice liberal mayor with his biracial family, and still, protesters are treated like dirt by arresting officers. Mayor DiBlasio cannot stand up to the police union when it really counts--he feels he must make appropriate law-and-order noises or risk a police strike. He is plainly not ready to take such a risk, nor are you likely to find any elected politician in the country who would. Only massive public pressure can compel the police to be accountable for their actions. The situation in Baltimore is instructive--thanks to the protests there, the authorities felt compelled to bring charges against the officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray in a timely manner.
All of this cannot be separated from what has happened to our country, post-9/11. We have seen the creation of a whole new Department of Homeland Security, the institution of widespread, intrusive surveillance, the vastly increased use of heavily armed SWAT teams, riot police outfitted with armored vehicles and military weapons, and police resort to deadly force with little or no provocation. The abuse of protesters is obviously intended to discourage citizens from exercising their right to protest--just look at what will happen to you if you dare to step out of line. And, as Nora Levinson's experience makes clear, if you do step out of line, being white and privileged does not protect you. You too can be given a rough ride while handcuffed.
The protests must continue. Only widespread public outrage will stop this downward trend. It appears our democracy is at stake.
Sat May 02, 2015 at 8:25 PM PT: Rec list... Must be a slow night. :-) Thanks.
Here's a further update:
Halfonts, in the comments, linked to a wonderful article by David Simonds on the situation in Baltimore. Simonds has been observing that situation for years. Here is an excerpt from the article:
BK: What do people outside the city need to understand about what’s going on there — the death of Freddie Gray and the response to it?
DS: I guess there's an awful lot to understand and I’m not sure I understand all of it. The part that seems systemic and connected is that the drug war — which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American city — was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police department. Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war. It happened in stages, but even in the time that I was a police reporter, which would have been the early 80s to the early 90s, the need for police officers to address the basic rights of the people they were policing in Baltimore was minimized. It was done almost as a plan by the local government, by police commissioners and mayors, and it not only made everybody in these poor communities vulnerable to the most arbitrary behavior on the part of the police officers, it taught police officers how not to distinguish in ways that they once did.