Police Brutality And Respect For The Law

Nearly 2000 years ago, the Roman police put on Jesus a crown of thorns and a robe that said “King of the Jews.”

Given recent happenings in Australian state of Victoria, it appears that police has not changed much since that time.

Now the man whom they attacked was not Jesus; he was however innocent. And the entire episode got caught on camera, which is not something that happens often. And if an episode of police brutality gets caught on camera, imagine how many other episodes of police brutality go undetected.

I knew of a woman who had been raped while in a mental hospital. When she told the staff, they hosed her down with ice-cold water. I have known women who were brutally attacked by men, which men then went to the police and told them that the woman attacked them. And I also know people who've put in heroic effort into fighting corruption in the court system, only to get slandered and falsely litigated in absense of evidence.

Sometimes police corruption runs in departments. There have been three major movies – Chinatown, Changeling and another one whose name I forget – about corruption in the Los Angeles police department. Of course there is even harder evidence for corruption in that department: the Rodney King tapes. It appears that some departments resist efforts to correct them. And it appears that we see the same thing in Victoria.

Sometimes efforts to fight police corruption do bear fruit. It has been done effectively in Brazil, where police used to be so corrupt as to shoot sewer children for sport. It obviously also has to be done in Australia. It is wrong for police to act in sadistic and dishonorable manner; and the police acting in such a manner discredits law enforcement and law as such.

It is this that is the real damage done here. If police act like they did in that episode, then that discredits the law. This in turn leads many people to violate the law who otherwise would respect it. And that is very bad for the country.

If the police want people to follow the law – as they should – then they need to be leading by example. You do not hose people down with ice water for informing that they have been raped. You do not repeatedly spray someone with pepper spray while saying “how do you like the taste of it maite.” You do not – as happened in America – undress a woman and leave her naked in a cell for six hours because she called the police when her cousin got violent. You dedicate your life to enfocing the law, follow the law yourself. Otherwise any gangster can say that the police are a bunch of hypocrites and “pigs” and that the city should belong to the gangsters.

So it is time that more police departments perform audits of their employees. Once again, police violating the law discredits the law. And the more the police get a grip on themselves, the fewer people see them as hypocrites and the more people actually have respect for the law.