Police Who Kill and the Zeitgeist

       In Mason Ohio police Taser-ed and kicked a mentally ill man to death. In Boulder a policeman killed a community's pet elk. In Brighton Colorado a policeman killed a man's pet dog. In White Plains NY police killed an elderly man in his home after his medical alert sounded.  Black comedians joke that a black man can never reach into his pocket if police are near -- "They will kill you." After Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida will teen-agers have to stop wearing hoodies? Will some company begin manufacturing hoodies with the words "Don't Kill Me" embroidered on the back? 

        Stories of killer police are reported almost daily. Commonsense observance of our culture tells us there are many other killings and assaults not reported.

      It's easy to have an angry knee jerk reaction: Bad Police!  However, while I have the same knee jerk at first, I have to think about the police as they exist within, hired by and enforced by the zeitgeist, the spirit of our age and society. I think we need to think about the hidden and unacknowledged messages they are receiving from the world we have helped to create, that we create every day.

       Ever since I was in the civil rights and anti-war protests of the 1960s I've been reflecting about the police violence I saw close to me in Boston. I began wearing a hard hat when covering Boston Common demonstrations because the police waded in with night sticks. When they brought those sticks down on the heads of the kids near me I could sometimes hear the skull crack. It was just luck and vigilance that kept me away from those sticks. The police used a killing force with the sticks, I never saw anything resembling just a prod. We know from films and photographs of the demonstrations in southern states that the same violence was common. Mostly the dead are reported. No reports -- in Boston or any of the southern states -- detail the crippled, those injured beyond the hope of healing.

         I watched the police at the demonstrations, both to try to keep from being beaten and to see what I could find out. Their faces usually looked maddened and fierce, with determination, as they brought down the night sticks. The demonstrators usually were slender and young, dressed in light weight clothing, carrying nothing. The police were in thick military type uniforms, boots, armed with guns and sticks. The imbalance was dramatic.

         When I lived as a journalist in Hungary during the Russian occupation I experienced and saw what it felt like in an occupied country. The Russian solders, with their rifles, stood on street corners. The posture of every single individual on the streets changed from that you saw in their homes. You could see in the bearing of their heads and shoulders that they felt themselves to be in danger from a force they could not affect or control, a force that could kill them at random, with no repercussions possible, no matter what the circumstances.

          Reports, stories and observations tell us that this is often the situation of young men of color in the American society. There are also, of course, other classifications of those who are not entitled to the "protect and serve" ethos of police work: prostitutes, the homeless, the poorly dressed, the mentally ill, teen-agers wearing expressive clothing. When you expand the classification to the "animal" community, it's open sesame. All stray or unaccompanied cats, dogs and companion animals of any kind, all "wild" animals may be killed. A woman who adopted a wolf puppy in one of the western states had to move to a remote area because of threats from both neighbors and police that they would shoot the pup through her fence.

          In every circumstance, human and animal, the police have a procedure:  report that the victim was attacking them or scaring them. If it goes to court there is even an inside argot, an invented word:  "testa-lie," as in "I have to go testa-lie in court today."

           However, from watching the police and from reflecting on European actions against the Jews -- study shows that the brutality and killing was not alone from Germany, not only from Germans -- I think about the zeitgeist. We all live in it, no matter how independent we may think we are from it. We all create it or allow it to be created. We are never entirely innocent of it.

           For the police who are killing, I wish we could consider them in the context of our persistent national definition of the "man" as a powerful agent who expresses and proves his primary characteristic by the act of killing, by the position of being able to dominate to the point of killing. Sure, there are the other ideas and scenes of the "gentle" man, the ahh-h-h moments of a man cuddling a baby or a puppy. Just one moment: why the ah's?  Why isn't that "normal."

           While there are millions of instances and discussions in government, politics, law and religions about whether and how society can regulate the hormonal affects of estrogen for women, there is no discussion about the concomitant hormonal affects of testosterone for men. In fact, the testosterone-ruled man is held up repeatedly as a hero in films and other presentations. Looked at from another point of view, these men may be considered as being on the verge of pathology. Sure there may be a time for killing, as there may be a time for everything. I don't know. But why did we create a zeitgeist in which we -- more often than we would think -- tacitly approve of police as killers? There are nations, perhaps primarily the Scandinavian ones, where police are not expected to be killers.

          Thinking about our zeitgeist in which we brutalize and distort the definitions of men -- and women -- we need to also consider police killings in the context of our national obsession (illness) about guns. The matter of killer police is not separate from the gun rights conflict.

          Apart from that, what to do with the police who "illegally" kill? Could we think about how to be kind to them, how to help them. Killing is never neutral. If it doesn't change a person's life in some way, that is a cause for serious concern. Next,relieve them of duty, perhaps a term of imprisonment. Most important, intensive and extensive therapy to be provided and required. Maybe a lifelong pension and a prohibition from being hired for police work. Although this last is a bit frightening -- we must not be seen as providing a guaranteed pension for police who kill. That would open the door even wider. Daunting questions.

          I am only a person looking out the window at a tree. Please don't kill me.