Philadelphia, New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles. In city after city, we find case after case of not only police corruption, but vicious police violence. Young people are beaten, women are assaulted, people who are taught to believe police are their friends find out they are often deadly enemies armed with the power of the state. In city after city, police corruption scandals blare across the front pages, telling us of cops who moonlight as drug dealers, sowing the seeds of social poison from their squad cars. The media react with manufactured outrage, and the cycles of corruption reoccur again, again and again.
The recent Mollen Commission hearings held in New York City were but viler, more corrupt echoes of the Knapp Commission hearings into cop corruption a generation before. Cops caught stealing, thieving, and or robbing excite the public mind, but what of cops who brutalize, beat, or kill? How many cops of the hundreds who beat, brutalize, or kill people all across this land are ever prosecuted for their acts? How many are convicted? The numbers are minuscule. The widely reported Rodney King beating case showed us how judges bend over backwards to assure criminal cops that things will be taken care of and they won’t be hurt badly if sentenced.
The white majority media treat cop stealings as worse offenses than cop killings, and by so doing seek to minimize those acts in the public mind. Thus, it is the contention of many cops charged with such offenses that they were ‘only doing their job.’ Put quite another way, their jobs are to kill, to beat, to brutalize the poor and the powerless, to defend the interests of the rich. That’s what they are telling you.
When the human rights group Amnesty International recently released a report denouncing New York police brutality against that city’s African American and Latino communities, the white majoritarian media and police hierarchy downplayed it as if the Nobel Prize winning group was interfering. The interests of white majoritarian media converge with the interests of predominantly white police forces in the protection of the status quo. That status quo is, in America, white supremacy and the oppression of peoples of color. And to protect that status quo, it is necessary to look the other way when cops beat, lie on the stand, brutalize the poor and the powerless, or even kill. From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
