Re: Fwd: Edward Said : Law and order (fwd)

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Subject: Edward Said : Law and order
> Date: Sun, 09 Apr 2000 17:48:14 +0000
> From: MENA Info <MenaInfo@aol.com>
> To: MENA Info <MENAInfo@listbot.com>
>
> MENA Info - http://www.listbot.com/archive/menainfo
>
> Law and order
>
> By Edward Said
>
> During the past year, New York City has been racked by three major crises
> involving both the police department and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a very
> right-wing man of extreme as well as volubly expressed views that have
> frequently landed him in serious trouble with the people he was elected to
> serve. In the first instance, a Haitian black man, Abner Louima, was
> apprehended by policemen in Brooklyn, taken to the station for
> interrogation, and then badly beaten, sodomised with a bottle and
> subsequently hospitalised with several broken bones, including his jaw. At
> the criminal trial, the self-confessed police perpetrator of Louima's
> injuries, one Justin Volpe, was sentenced to thirty years, while his three
> accomplices were found guilty of obstruction of justice at a later civil
> trial. The second case was the shooting of an unarmed Guinean, Amadou
> Diallo, by white policemen who fired 41 bullets at him (of which 19 found
> their mark) because they said they thought he was armed. They were
> acquitted, to the whole city's astonishment. The third and in a sense the
> most inflammatory, thanks to Giuliani's support for the policemen
> involved, concerned the killing of an unarmed 21-year-old black, Patrick
> Dorisman, who was shot at his doorstep for no evident reason. Without
> justification, the mayor had Dorisman's police record -- the young man had
> been arrested and acquitted for assault and possession of marijuana --
> released to the press, as if to justify the man's shooting, even though it
> was perfectly obvious that the white policemen who did the shooting could
> have had no prior knowledge of Dorisman's record.
>
> The troubling theme in all three killings is not only that they involved
> blacks being shot by white policemen, but that Giuliani's sympathies
> seemed mostly to be for his officers rather than for their victims. In a
> racially divided society such as this, it is noteworthy that Giuliani's
> political reputation has been staked from the beginning of his tenure on
> the fact that New York's image had been that it was a violent, dangerous
> place (largely because it was known to contain a large non-white
> population of essentially poor people), an image which his administration
> has totally changed. It is certainly true that New York has now become one
> of the safest cities in the country: Giuliani has increased the police
> budget, he has put thousands more police on the streets and, most
> significantly, he has promoted harsh measures against the city's
> undesirables, i.e., the poor, minorities, the homeless, etc. As a result,
> it has been assumed that anyone not white and middle-class must fear for
> his or her safety, since the police have been encouraged to arrest or
> otherwise detain "suspicious" individuals with relative confidence that
> they will be rewarded rather than punished for their actions. Part of this
> strategy has been to put white policemen rather provocatively on the
> streets of Harlem, as if to say to the inhabitants of that section "here
> we are, whether you like it or not." The Diallo case in particular aroused
> the black community's ire; and the Dorisman killing, given Giuliani's
> egregious proclamations in support of the man's execution so to speak,
> fanned the flames of racial war.
>
> Nor has New York been alone in the matter of police brutality. In Los
> Angeles, another huge city with a considerable minority population,
> policemen in the Ramparts area have drawn attention to their brutal
> methods, not only because of how violent they have been, but also because
> the media has revealed that in addition to its bullying the police has
> also engaged in drug-selling and extortion in the supposed discharge of
> law and order. The American jail system is therefore bursting with great
> numbers of unjustly persecuted blacks whose "crimes" are dubiously
> prosecuted by policemen who claim that they are acting on behalf of
> society to protect the majority from an already down-trodden and
> long-suffering minority.
>
> Every government allows itself the prerogative of a monopoly on coercion,
> except that in the United States there is a constitutionally protected
> right for citizens to bear arms in their own defence. This is why the
> debate on possession of guns -- which is higher per capita than any place
> on earth -- is intense, and why also the lurid incidents in which
> schoolchildren kill each other are so terrifyingly frequent. For a country
> that preaches against violence and "terrorism" all over the world to be
> more violent than any other is deeply contradictory. And for elected
> officials like Giuliani to boast that they are eliminating crime by
> inciting the police to more, rather than less, violence is a terrible
> thing. The fact is that ever since the Nixon years the phrase "law and
> order" has acquired the status of a right-wing slogan. It first appeared
> during the Chicago Democratic Party convention in 1968, when the riots
> associated with Vietnam protest were brutally crushed by the Chicago
> police acting on the principle of law and order. Since that time dissent,
> debate and protest -- as in Seattle during the November 1999 riots against
> the World Trade Organisation -- have been opposed by the forces of law and
> order, as has agitation on behalf of integration, abortion rights, and
> anti-war protest. The idea is that whatever the government does carries
> with it the authority of rectitude, so that even abuses such as the
> killing of unarmed black men can be sanctimoniously ascribed to
> maintaining law and order.
>
> In the American context, therefore, "law and order" has to do with an
> interpretation of law and order that favours the strong, the wealthy, the
> conservative currents in society, whether those happen to be in office or
> not. This is perfectly evident during debates while the presidential
> election campaign is in course: George Bush Jr is the law and order
> candidate, Al Gore is not. The notion is at bottom that the police is
> there to protect vested interests in the society and to make sure that
> social change occurs very slowly, if at all. This is why struggling
> minorities in particular associate the police with the blocking of their
> march towards equality and economic advancement.
>
> In non-democratic societies such as those in much of the Third World, the
> police is also associated with the notion of law and order, except that
> law and order is a phrase implying the defence of the government, which
> would otherwise fall were it not for its battalions of policemen,
> republican guards, presidential security and so on. This is very much the
> case in the Arab world where as long as I can remember the police --
> except for the lowly traffic policeman -- is immediately identified in the
> popular mind with interrogation, torture, unjust detention, surveillance,
> spying and cruelty. Think of the fear struck in one's mind as one faces a
> security official at the airport: this is no bureaucratic experience but
> rather a confrontation with the regime itself. It is highly significant
> that in most Arab countries the principal symbol of ruthless efficiency is
> not the tax collector or the legal system, but the security apparatus. Who
> has the most up-to-date cars, telephones, arms, and who is the
> best-dressed, the most spoiled and pampered? It is always the security
> teams whose main job is to guarantee the ruler's life, his regime and its
> interests, regardless of whether those happen to coincide with the
> interests of the population or not. There is no appeal for the average
> individual if he or she is picked up and taken to jail for "questioning."
> The whole idea imparted to citizens of so many of our "democratic" or
> "revolutionary" republics (and certainly of the monarchies) is that the
> police is there to strike fear in everyone in order to deter attempts
> against the regimes, rather than to protect the interests of a favoured
> segment of the population. But whereas in a democracy it is possible to
> change the administration and its methods through election, in our case we
> have no such option.
>
> The result has been that terror has replaced the idea of law and order,
> terror that can be visited on the wayward or inattentive citizen. Armies,
> by the same token, are not necessarily there to fight against the enemy
> (despite the vast amounts spent on munitions, air forces, and heavy,
> mostly unusable artillery) but rather to confront the population should it
> entertain plans for democratic change, and of course to provide commission
> agents with handsome profits from arms sales. In the end, it is sadly the
> case that an objective alliance has grown to connect many non-Western
> security forces with those of the United States, where paradoxically the
> same distorted situation does not in fact obtain, and the police is
> subject to the law as well as citizens' review boards, elections, and so
> on.
>
> The key to police brutality wherever it occurs is citizenship, the notion
> that all citizens of a society, including the police and security forces,
> are entitled to the same privileges and obligations subject to constant
> revision and re-interpretation. Political discourse in the Arab world has
> been so wrapped up in matters of security having to do with outside
> enemies (Israel, imperialism, etc.) that no attention has been given to
> the lamentable absence of real democratic processes inside our societies.
> Everything in those societies has suffered as a result, from education, to
> the legal system, to intellectual culture, to civil and political
> institutions. As every day goes by the situation worsens and for reasons
> that should make each of us profoundly ashamed the Arab world is the only
> part of the globe to appear as if it existed outside time and space in the
> ordinary sense. I said in an earlier article here, Godot will not come and
> it is no use waiting for a saviour. The problem of law and order, like all
> other problems, is one of our own making, and its only solution must be
> ours as well.
>
> http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2000/476/op1.htm
>
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--

Mine Aysen Doyran
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222