With regard to the murder of George Floyd: many people are determined to learn the wrong lessons.
Recently Medawar saw an answer on Quora which suggested, probably factually, that in a
single month at the beginning of this year, American police managed to
kill more people than British police had killed between 1900 and 2019.
Other answers had highlighted the apparent fear which American police had of American citizens and vice versa.
There
is no way that American police have been running up such a huge
body-count solely by killing black Americans who do not pose an imminent
threat to the police or anybody else. They have to be killing white,
brown and yellow Americans who do not pose an imminent threat to the
police or anybody else as well.
There is
something wrong, somewhere, in either the culture or training of
American law enforcement officers which biases them towards killing
people to a quite incredible extent compared to other countries. Whether
this is paranoia, arrogance or just a conditioned reflex arising out of
training procedures, or a combination of these, is unclear. But there
is something badly wrong in the way that American police and citizens are
reacting to each other and it is not solely about race.
If
anyone wants to make comparisons between America and Apartheid South
Africa, well: Medawar was in South Africa when J.W. Vorster was president and
America currently seems to be worse. In most provinces of South Africa, the right
of self-defence extends to shooting policemen invading property without a warrant,
and police tend to talk to you, loudly and generally from behind a brick
wall, before taking any action. Taking proper cover enables the police to
communicate without shooting someone out of panic. American police seem
to expose themselves to the "suspect" and confront them at gunpoint
whilst establishing threat rather than communication: this escalates
most situations very effectively.
When
Arab policemen suspected Medawar of being a burglar (he had a door open in a
factory unit and they had never seen him before) they were nervous, but
they came and talked, said they were concerned about the door, and
accepted Medawar's assurance that the door was open in the middle of the night to let members of their
own armed forces into the factory without being too visible and alarming
anyone. He would NEVER have been able to explain that one to American
law enforcement without getting thoroughly drilled through the head.
They would have given him no real opportunity to explain himself at the
scene. The act of explaining, by itself, is to a psyched-up American policeman a challenge and a threat.
Americans have the right to bear arms, but they are MUCH more likely to be shot by police than in almost any other
democratic country (Medawar's non-lethal interaction with the Arab police did
not even happen in an actual democracy), and in most cases there will be no
legal remedy and the officer responsible will stay out of jail and
generally keep his job.
The officer
charged with the murder of George Floyd reportedly did something (kneeling on the neck to restrain George for a prolonged period) that was more or
less guaranteed to kill him (this would count as murder under English
law without needing any proof of premeditated intent, because you can be
convicted of murder if, without a reasonable excuse, you perform an
action which any reasonable person would expect to cause death.) BUT IT
WAS SOMETHING THAT ALL OFFICERS IN HIS DEPARTMENT HAD BEEN TRAINED TO
DO. (Which will be why his colleagues did not stop him and why he may be acquitted when tried.) There is
something wrong with the whole premise and philosophy of the training
programme and the culture behind it. A sudden outbreak of anti-racism
will not cure this, because nearly as many people will go on being killed
by police on some non-racist trigger.
Posts
