Consequences of a Systematic Lack of Consequences

Last year, a video of an altercation between a black Chicago couple and a group of police officers who pulled them over circled the internet. In it, an unarmed passenger refused to leave his car (the police provided no justification), and an officer smashed his window and tasered him.The passenger’s concerns, explained rationally, about following police orders when they felt unsafe, especially after recent police violence at traffic stops, were ignored. Following the video’s release, the FBI opened an investigation, but found no police misconduct, demonstrating the immunity from legal punishment granted to police officers. The video demonstrated the violence employed against people (most often of color) by the police, and at the time, I attributed such violence to racist officers. Shocking acquittals of abusive policeman were an afterthought; the problem of ignorant, even racist juries seemed less consequential than racist police officers. This project changed my perspective on police abuse; our interviewee’s experiences challenged my assumptions that brutality stemmed soley from racism, offering insight into the role of legal impunity for police officers in prologing and promoting police brutality.

We interviewed a white man named Michael Babcock, who sent a summary of his 1992 experiences in email form prior to the interview. The last sentence, an afterthought, read “I had a special connection to Mr. King as I was also a victim of police violence.” That a white man would experience real police abuse contradicted my conviction that racism caused brutality. Mr. Babcock elaborated in the interview: “After four hours, a liutenant walked in and said, “Officer O’Malley had had a bad day.” The police in San Francisco at that time had complete immunity- they could do whatever they wanted, and no one was going to call them on it.” My previous understanding of police brutality was oversimplistic: acquittal of abusive police officers implicitly supported the use of excessive force, allowing violent racism. Based on what they saw, policeman would recieve no punishment, exacerbating the problem. Just verdicts are as important as fair policing. Mr. Babcock’s perspective, acknowledging the importance of legal consequences in ending brutality, had  resounding impact on my own perspective.    

I conveyed the tone of my monologue through specific arrangement of text and employment of line gaps. I structured my monologue to have a consistent reflective flow, beginning with narration, when Mr. Babcock recounted the story of his encounter with an abusive San Francisco policeman, and developing into a reflection on how his experiences related to the 1992 riots and current police brutality. I felt this structure made it easier for the reader to understand Mr. Babcock’s narrative as a whole, instead of a group of puzzle pieces to be put together, and the simpler structure highlighted literary choices like line breaks, which I used to dramaticize especially important statements: for example, separating Mr. Babcock’s description of the Rodney King’s position (”That this guy, after, y’know, / potentially,/ possibly, /resisting arrest) ” to highlight his use of “potentially” and “possibly”, one after the other, indicating a lingering skepticism. In giving them their own lines, I hoped to attract attention to the importance of such small words in depicting an overall narrative, and such breaks were highlighted through the use of a simple, reflective structure. 

                                                                         

Image credit (cartoon): https://latuffcartoons.wordpress.com/tag/ferguson/

Image credit (photo): http://nvcopblock.org/1287/video-compilation-las-vegas-police-brutality-via-submission/