In Medium Cool (1969),
John Cassellis, a cameraman, maintains a medium-cool level of emotion even in
the midst of the socio-political turmoil in Chicago during 1968 until he learns
that his station manager had been allowing the FBI access to the news footage.
The film can be interpreted as providing a justification for his lack of trust
in American law enforcement even as the need for law and order is made clear
from the ubiquity of the human instinctual urge of aggression. For the film
shows not only the extent of violence, but also its engrained nature in our
species. By implication, the viewer is left to conclude that that law
enforcement is necessary in a civilized society. Yet this can only be a necessary evil, for
the last few scenes of the film show just how likely discretion is to be abused.
The atrocious and one-sided police violence during the peaceful protests
outside of the Democratic National Convention make it clear that if given the
legal authority to use weapons, human beings may abuse such discretion if too
weak to restrain their own personal passions and, albeit less common, even
their psychological pathologies.
The film opens with a small
protest in a rural area in Illinois. Of immediate concern is the involvement of
Illinois’s military in a domestic matter. The disproportionate heavy
machinery of official force seems out of place. That the soldiers’ knives at the
end of the guns are so close to the necks of the peaceful protesters also
points to bad judgment. A journalist recalls police roughing up cameramen so
they won’t show untriggered police brutality. The implicit conclusion is that
the excessive means of force together with an aggressive mentality among
soldiers and police is a dangerous cocktail.
The film moves to a scene at a
rollerball game in which individual players are beating each other up even off
the track. The crowd enjoys it, just as the viewers of local news like watching
violence. Later in the film, we see Cassellis practicing at boxing—again
illustrating the human need or penchant for violence. He explains to his
girlfriend’s son, “The object is to knock the other guy’s brains out.” At one
point in the film, a manager of a media company says on the phone, “We do not
manufacture violence.” This is true enough, for, given the human aggressive
instinctual urge, violence can be expected to be around plenty enough to fill
the time-slots on the local evening news.
The propensity for violence
interpersonally is made very clear as Cassillis and his sound man, Peter
Bonerz, contend with hostility from several black people in an apartment in
spite of the fact that the two journalists had interviewed one of the people
and thus provided a mouthpiece for the racial grievances. Even though the Black
woman is being verbally hostile to one of the journalists, a Black man insult
to injury by angrily demanding, “You got to respect our women!” The journalists
were respecting her, and, ironically, she had not been respecting them.
Conflating societal phenomena and the two journalists in the apartment, the
Black man insults them by calling them arrogant and exploiters. That the
journalists provided a societal mouthpiece for one of the men contradicts the
accusation of exploitation. But reasoning is often wan up against anger: hence
the need for law enforcement.
Violence is also on the societal
stage. Watching a television program on John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King,
Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, all of whom had been assassinated, the teacher whom
John is dating remarks, “It seems like no one’s life is worth anything
anymore.” We hear King’s “I have a Dream” speech, which we can juxtaposition
against the propensity towards violence in the apartment of the Black man whom
the journalists had (thanklessly) interviewed. The ideal is one thing; extant
human nature on the ground is quite another.
The documentary-like scenes of
the anti-Vietnam War protests of chants of “No more war” again demonstrate the
ubiquity of untriggered violence even among people who are hired to prevent
violence. Against the song, “Happy Days are Here Again,” we see Mayor Daly’s
“police state terror” playing out in the streets of Chicago as police attack
non-violent protestors. The excessive response of Illinois’ army being present
just renders the danger all the more of hiring people with criminal mentalities
to enforce the law. On the radio, we hear, “The policemen are beating everyone
in sight.” Another reporter states that the police are targeting a specific
political group—the anarchists. Appropriately, onlookers were chanting, Zeig
Heil! As a reference back to the Nazi thugs in uniform. The overwhelming,
excessive machinery of force, including that of a military, combined with the
fact that the police mentality was criminal inflicting severe injury on
innocent victims—and the fact that the criminals got away with it—is the
emotional-image that the audience is left with. But there is neither remedy nor
solution proffered.
The toxic American dynamic is
just there, and as the Black Lives Matter movement would attest, Americans
would be well justified in approaching police employees as dangerous even as
they enforce the law. I contend that given the salience of the aggressive
instinct in human nature, the power (discretion) enjoyed by police employees
(and departments) is dangerous. Internal affairs offices within police
departments suffer from an institutional conflict of interest (e.g., being part
of the “brotherhood”) and thus should not be relied on, and the hands-off
attitude of many city governments in favor of “citizen police commissions” is
tantamount to aiding and abetting police brutality. Given this dangerous
cocktail, the erroneous (and passive-aggressive) assumption/tactic that
intimidation by an overwhelming, police-state, police presence should not be
permitted. Simply put, there is simply too many police employees abusing their
discretion for residents to have to be presented with a constant
police-presence. The says that children should be seen but not heard is too
charitable to police; they should not be seen or heard, but, due to the human
inclination towards violence, present behind the scenes. This is the
uncomfortable position that the film provides. Law enforcement is necessary,
but, given the urge that some people feel to abuse power by instigating
violence if given the chance, democratic, municipal accountability that does
not rely at all on “internal checks” within police departments is vital.
The legitimacy of police to use
force is limited to enforcing law. Hence, physically attacking people, such as
in punching them with clenched fists and kicking them, which go beyond restraining
people, are exogenous to the job function. Police with a penchant for
attacking people may have a warped perspective justifying in their own minds,
psychologically, beating someone up as a legitimate tactic. In 2023 in Ohio,
for example, in an attempt to justify a police employee who kicked a man repeatedly
in the ribs and hit him 30 times (and used a stun-gun), the deputy chief
stated, “sometimes you do have to throw punches.” Even though his subordinates
had use of a stun gun, he tried to justify their resort to street-fighting, saying
“This wasn’t blows to the face or blows to the throat.”[1]
This excuse fails, however, given that one police employee had straddled the
victim’s legs and punched him “at least 30 times with both fists.”[2]
I contend that in going on the
offence in violence rather than merely restraining and protecting oneself
from violence, a police employee should be regarded as only another citizen. As
Hobbes claims in Leviathan, self-preservation is a natural right that is
not contingent on law. If anyone is kicking or punching a person, one
has the natural right to defend oneself. Although this does not depend on law,
city governments should encase this natural right because of the extent of
discretion given to police employees by cities—an extent that is easily
hyperextended. By no means should resisting getting kicked and hit be
considered a criminal offence; rather, the “off duty” city employee should be
charged criminally.
An obvious example of when a
police employee should be considered a mere citizen concerns an employee who held
a supervisory position in the New York City police department. Working as a
private investigator for the government of China, he “threatened, harassed,
surveilled and intimidated” a Chinese man “between 2016 and 2019.”[3]
In 2023, he was convicted by a federal jury in New York of conspiracy and
stalking charges. It made no difference that he was a police employee (and
supervisor!) because his aggressive intimidation and harassment rendered him as
a mere resident when he was engaged in that activity.
Even the language that a police
employee uses along with unprovoked violence can indicate that the individual
is no longer acting within the purview of one’s job in law enforcement. In
Alabama in 2023, for instance, a state trooper felt justified in inflicting
violence on a man who was not resisting arrest simply because he had joked “Oh,
yeah” when she asked him if he felt tip of the stun-gun she had stuck into his
back as he laid on the hood of a car. In saying, “Shut your bitch ass up,” and
“Shut the fuck up. You was big and bad,” she was clearly not acting in a law-enforcement
capacity. Her language is not professional, and thus it points to a state of
mind that is outside of acting in her official capacity, which alone justifies
the use of the stun-gun. That she ignored his pleas for her to stop using her
stun-gun means that her desire to inflict pain was immune to any sense of
compassion.
In his text, The Theory of
Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith, who went on to write on competitive markets,
claims that sympathy, aided by the imagination (in being in someone else’s
place), is something that is normal to feel for others, especially if they are
in pain. We don’t have to feel the pain in order to empathize. If someone who
has been hired for a job in which deadly weapons can be used does not have
compassion, then they are not the sort of psychology that should be hired for
such a job. That such people have been hired suggests that the hiring processes
of police departments are not yet advanced enough to be relied on, and so
external accountability should receive more resources and attention.
Anger such that eviscerates natural sympathy can be immune even from the pleas of other police employees. Also in 2023, a Black man “was attacked by a police dog in Ohio after surrendering” to police employees “following a high-speed chase.”[4] That the truck driver had “refused to pull over, and was chased for about 25 minutes before spiked bars placed across the highway brought the rig to a stop” does not justify releasing an attack dog on the man when he was standing with his hands above his head, having clearly surrendered to the police.[5] Hence the police employee who released the dog was no longer acting in his capacity as an employee of the police department when he released the dog and could be charged criminally.
That the predator (i.e., the police employee) ignored his coworker’s demand,
Do not “release the dog with [the black man’s] hands up. Do not release the dog
with his hands up,” demonstrates just how flawed the hiring process of a police
department can be, and thus how important external, municipality
accountability is on police departments. The attacker shouted at the
man, “Get your ass on the ground or you’re going to get bit!” which indicates
not only extremely flawed judgment, which in turn likely points to underlying
psychological problems, but that the guy was on a “power-trip” enabled by the
discretion given to him as a police employee. That one of the police employees
had aimed a machine gun on the truck driver can also be flagged in terms
of flawed judgment. It is very significant that the employee had been hired for
a position that includes use of a deadly weapon even though he had a penchant
for violence.
The role of dysfunctional judgment is, I submit, a major problem in police departments. In 2023, two Los Angeles sheriff employees attacked an elderly Black couple in the parking lot of a grocery store because they had taken a cake (which could have been only a mistake). The employee attacking the man ignored the woman’s pleas that her husband was ill. Just for saying so, she was slammed to the ground by the other sheriff-department aggressor. Ignoring the woman’s pleas and shoving both people to the ground evinces utter disrespect, as if people deemed to be criminals by criminal police were not people. In actuality, such aggressors are not worthy of respect.
In yet another case, Los Angeles Sheriff deputies repeatedly punched a woman who was holding her 3-month-old baby simply because her maternal instinct would not allow her to release her baby to such aggressors.
Interestingly, cities might consider enacting a “Good Samaritan”
law protecting onlookers who stop attackers whether they happen to be city
employees or not, for it is easy to tell if someone is resisting arrest or
being pummeled with kicks and punches while passive. I contend that onlookers
are ethically obligated to pull attackers off their passive victims, and,
furthermore, that the criminal attackers should be criminally charged.
Because police hiring cannot be
relied on, given the discretion with deadly force that police are given, the
discretion should not include being able to turn off body-cams and cameras
mounted on police cars. In 2023, internal documents showed that the police
employee in Memphis, Tennessee who killed a man without cause didn’t turn on
the body camera.[6]
Just as Internal Affairs “internal accountability” within police departments
should not be relied on, for police regard themselves in a brotherhood of
sorts, so too is it a fatal flaw to presume that police employees can resist
the temptation to turn off any cameras by which accountability could be aided.
We are all flawed, finite beings, human, all too human. Societies should thus be keen to check the power that is likely to be abused, and those with lawful physical power should be subject to psychological assessments that go beyond surveys and proforma interviews. Indications of “street” talk, bad (i.e., disproportional) judgment, and “street” fighting should be sufficient for terminations and criminal charges in cases involving violence, for the line between enforcing law and going on the attack is clear. Lastly, police employees should have more humility (i.e., a recognition of fallibility) in dealing with people assumed to be less, or lower, for every human being is worthy of respect as a human being. Being a city employee is conditional, rather than an entitlement. City governments should not only hold employees accountable, but also castigate police departments for policies allowing disproportionate force, such as aiming a machine gun at a truck simply because the trucker did not pull over. Retaliation is extrinsic to law enforcement. As the film demonstrates, accountability may be needed even on a mayor, such as Mayor Daly of Chicago, who astonishingly refused to stop the unprovoked violent attacks by his police even after his complicity was made public at the Democratic Convention. Even then, he evinced the Biblical pharaoh’s hardened heart. Similarly, the police predators discussed above demonstrated such stubbornness, in some cases even dismissing pleas for humanity from their fellow police employees.
2. Ibid.
3. Hannah Rabinowitz and Emma Tucker, “Former NYC Police Officer, 2 Others Convicted of Stalking New Jersey Family on Behalf of Chinese Government,” CNN.com, June 20, 2023 (accessed December 30, 2023).
4. Nick Visser, “Video Shows Police Allowing Dog to Attack Black Man Surrendering After Truck Chase” The Huffington Post, July 24, 2023 (accessed December 30, 2023).
5. Ibid.
6. Phillip Jackson, “Memphis Cop Who Fatally Shot Jaylin McKenzie Didn’t Turn On Body Camera, Internal Documents Show,” The Huffington Post, August 4, 2023.
