Trigger Happy?
Justin Webb makes a valid point in this piece from The Times in which he argues that the bigger issue for Americans to confront is the violence problem, not the race problem.
The overall figure quoted by Justin of 410 American citizens being "justifiably killed" by their police officers, surely has a story to tell.
How many were white, black, hispanic etc and what was the ethnic background of the cops doing the shooting?
Because it strikes me that if the recent high-profile cases, such as Michael Brown's, are pursued on a narrow black/white basis then they are unlikely to attract sufficient support to achieve and real political change.
Trigger-happy US cops are guilty of overkill
By Justin Webb - The Times
Violence is bubbling – but not from the bottom. It’s coming from over-militarised police forces
Admit it: when you go on holiday to America you half expect to be shot. The place reeks — to British noses — with the sweet, sweaty odour of only half-suppressed animal aggression. When a wag in Miami tells you that their tourist slogan is: “Come again soon, we weren’t shooting at you!”, we giggle and go anyway in the hope of seeing some madman exchange fire with a bunch of cops at dusk on South Beach.
America is a scene from the movies — from the earliest westerns to Breaking Bad, the denouement is always the gunfight. That, we assume, is how Americans settle their differences.
We are half right. There is an ever- present clenched fist in American life: but it is the fist of the cop rather than the mugger. Paradoxically, in a nation where dislike of government is in the DNA, the state is allowed to rule with the crazy stare of a Hollywood serial killer. You don’t mess with American law enforcement.
At the moment the nation is grappling with racial divisions rekindled by the violent deaths of two men and a boy who did mess with the cops; Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner on a Staten Island pavement, and 12-year-old Tamar Rice, shot dead by police in a Cleveland park. It is true that those three victims were black and the killers in each case were white. That is a source of perfectly legitimate debate and anguish.
But the real debate, the deeper malaise, is not the race problem but the violence problem. According to the FBI, 410 Americans were killed “justifiably” by police forces in 2012 — plenty more, of course, might have been killed “unjustifiably” but let us take that figure as a benchmark. In the UK the comparable figure was one, a single death in that whole year. Yes, Britain is smaller, but even given the population difference the chances of an individual getting shot by police in America are far higher.
Why are the forces of the American state so harsh? Is US society capable of maintaining itself only with a fist smashing into the faces of those who cause the slightest bit of trouble? A man complaining he cannot breathe? A boy in a park?
There are certainly some who see it that way. A decade ago Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies published their minor classic Why Do People Hate America? in which they argued: “In the history of America, both mythic and real, individual and communal violence created the state. Unable to provide justice and security and to be an effective instrument of the law, the state continued to legitimise the recourse to individual and group violence to ensure the self-preservation of the people.”
To them the violence perpetrated by the forces of law and order in a nation hostile to government and being governed is not a paradox at all; in fact the opposite: the two are sides of the same coin. Everyone’s trigger-happy because no one’s truly in charge.
They are wrong, I think, for two reasons. First, American society is actually very peaceful. If you really do go to Miami hoping to see a gunfight you will be sadly disappointed. And if you head out into the suburbs of most American cities, where most Americans live, you will be shocked (and bored rigid) by the civility of the place; American suburbs are remarkably free of the petty violent crime that scars British market towns. So the violence does not bubble up from the base. Even in inner-city badlands most people are minding their own business.
But the second reason they are wrong is a more worrying one: the violence certainly is bubbling, but the source seems to be a decades-long development of violent behaviour at the top, specifically by the police. This is not a part of the make-up of the US; it is a new direction. Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University, estimates that the most violent cops — the Swat teams — were sent out 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used 50,000 times a year. Among those new missions: the arrest of a man accused of organising cock-fighting.
Professor Kraska calls it militarisation. America never had Dixon of Dock Green but they did have a sense that the police combated individual crimes. Somewhere along the road the language changed and the thinking changed: now they fight wars; wars on drugs, wars on crime. Wars against bad guys rather than interactions with citizens who are both Jekyll and Hyde. Some Americans are talking about attaching cameras to their police to keep them decent. As a response it feels a little underpowered.
We used to laugh at folks who went to Idaho and barricaded themselves behind hefty stockades and waited for the Feds to come. Who’s laughing now?
Violence is bubbling – but not from the bottom. It’s coming from over-militarised police forces
Admit it: when you go on holiday to America you half expect to be shot. The place reeks — to British noses — with the sweet, sweaty odour of only half-suppressed animal aggression. When a wag in Miami tells you that their tourist slogan is: “Come again soon, we weren’t shooting at you!”, we giggle and go anyway in the hope of seeing some madman exchange fire with a bunch of cops at dusk on South Beach.
America is a scene from the movies — from the earliest westerns to Breaking Bad, the denouement is always the gunfight. That, we assume, is how Americans settle their differences.
We are half right. There is an ever- present clenched fist in American life: but it is the fist of the cop rather than the mugger. Paradoxically, in a nation where dislike of government is in the DNA, the state is allowed to rule with the crazy stare of a Hollywood serial killer. You don’t mess with American law enforcement.
At the moment the nation is grappling with racial divisions rekindled by the violent deaths of two men and a boy who did mess with the cops; Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner on a Staten Island pavement, and 12-year-old Tamar Rice, shot dead by police in a Cleveland park. It is true that those three victims were black and the killers in each case were white. That is a source of perfectly legitimate debate and anguish.
But the real debate, the deeper malaise, is not the race problem but the violence problem. According to the FBI, 410 Americans were killed “justifiably” by police forces in 2012 — plenty more, of course, might have been killed “unjustifiably” but let us take that figure as a benchmark. In the UK the comparable figure was one, a single death in that whole year. Yes, Britain is smaller, but even given the population difference the chances of an individual getting shot by police in America are far higher.
Why are the forces of the American state so harsh? Is US society capable of maintaining itself only with a fist smashing into the faces of those who cause the slightest bit of trouble? A man complaining he cannot breathe? A boy in a park?
There are certainly some who see it that way. A decade ago Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies published their minor classic Why Do People Hate America? in which they argued: “In the history of America, both mythic and real, individual and communal violence created the state. Unable to provide justice and security and to be an effective instrument of the law, the state continued to legitimise the recourse to individual and group violence to ensure the self-preservation of the people.”
To them the violence perpetrated by the forces of law and order in a nation hostile to government and being governed is not a paradox at all; in fact the opposite: the two are sides of the same coin. Everyone’s trigger-happy because no one’s truly in charge.
They are wrong, I think, for two reasons. First, American society is actually very peaceful. If you really do go to Miami hoping to see a gunfight you will be sadly disappointed. And if you head out into the suburbs of most American cities, where most Americans live, you will be shocked (and bored rigid) by the civility of the place; American suburbs are remarkably free of the petty violent crime that scars British market towns. So the violence does not bubble up from the base. Even in inner-city badlands most people are minding their own business.
But the second reason they are wrong is a more worrying one: the violence certainly is bubbling, but the source seems to be a decades-long development of violent behaviour at the top, specifically by the police. This is not a part of the make-up of the US; it is a new direction. Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University, estimates that the most violent cops — the Swat teams — were sent out 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used 50,000 times a year. Among those new missions: the arrest of a man accused of organising cock-fighting.
Professor Kraska calls it militarisation. America never had Dixon of Dock Green but they did have a sense that the police combated individual crimes. Somewhere along the road the language changed and the thinking changed: now they fight wars; wars on drugs, wars on crime. Wars against bad guys rather than interactions with citizens who are both Jekyll and Hyde. Some Americans are talking about attaching cameras to their police to keep them decent. As a response it feels a little underpowered.
We used to laugh at folks who went to Idaho and barricaded themselves behind hefty stockades and waited for the Feds to come. Who’s laughing now?
