Why do the police kick the shit out of people?

[nexus]

+ 1 to snail and Steve C

[emordnilap]

Coincidentally, I just read this passage from a brilliant piece of work, The Dark Valley, A Panorama of the 1930s by Piers Brendon:

Peaceful protest was difficult. For in America's liberal democracy, by a sad paradox, the standard methods of maintaining social control were viciously authoritarian. Throughout the country the police frequently employed terror and torture. The latter was euphemistically known as 'the third degree' (of pressure - after arrest and incarceration) and it approached, as one critic said, "the ingenious cruelties of the Spanish inquisition". Policemen were apt to treat the unemployed as hobos, pickets as criminals, demonstrators as insurrectionaries. But the private armies which industrialists recruited to protect their interests, such as that created by Henry Ford after the fatal Dearborn riot in March 1932, or Pennsylvania's murderous coal and iron police, were little more than gangs of hoodlums. They were a brutal by-product of the approach towards industrial relations memorably summed up by R B Mellon, Andrew's brother: "You couldn't run a coal mine without machine guns." At times Americans even anticipated techniques later refined by the Russians: in Oregon, for example, political agitators were sent to lunatic asylums. The prison authorities, too, meted out savage punishments to offenders, while the chain gang was a reversion to medieval barbarism. So was the lynch law, which was by no means confined to the south.

[Snail]

The above quote reminded me of the novel Grapes of Wrath which I've also just reread recently. Here's some stuff from its wiki page:

"...and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

"If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I", and cuts you off forever from the "we"."

Steinbeck wrote: "I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects]."

This was a book which was burned and banned and Steinbeck villified as a socialist peddling communist propaganda.

[Kentucky Fried Panda]

Your post reminded me of this.

"Let me tell you something about humans, nephew. They are a wonderful, friendly people as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time, and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people will become as nasty and violent as any Klingon." - Quark, the Ferengi bartender in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

[JavaScriptDonkey]

We appear to be descending in to fantasy about the causes of the 1930s depression and the current world wide recession.

People also appear to have forgotten everything the East should have taught them about socialism and communism.

Extreme authoritarian states of all hues are unpleasant places to live as are economies beset by economic woes.

The Grapes of Wrath tells a story of a generation that inherited marginal farms on land stolen only a few decades earlier and what happened when their resources dried up and they were unable to repay the loans guaranteed by their land. Steinbeck had an agenda when he wrote it and that wasn't to create a work of dispassonate history.

The 1920s was fuelled by a consumer debt bubble with increasing urban wages. Stock markets and property generated unsustainable returns and eventually, as with all debt backed bubbles, it burst. The cause was greed at the level of the workers not some elitist cabal of capitalists intent on destroying the fatted calf. In the US in 1930 around 1000 banks, presumably owned by the hated banksters, went to the wall. When all the money is loaned out against bad debts to farmers and factory workers there is nothing left to pay interest to the savers.

[RenewableCandy]

Milgram experiment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Stanford prison experiement

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

Yes. the interesting bit is what happened to the subjects of the experiments after their return to the normal world. Some of them, so I've heard, committed suicide. These were the days before ptsd was properly understood.

[nexus]

From the guardian:

Greek anti-fascist protesters 'tortured by police' after Golden Dawn clash

Fifteen people arrested in Athens says they were subjected to what their lawyer describes as an Abu Ghraib-style humiliation

Fifteen anti-fascist protesters arrested in Athens during a clash with supporters of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn have said they were tortured in the Attica General Police Directorate (GADA) – the Athens equivalent of Scotland Yard – and subjected to what their lawyer describes as an Abu Ghraib-style humiliation.

Members of a second group of 25 who were arrested after demonstrating in support of their fellow anti-fascists the next day said they were beaten and made to strip naked and bend over in front of officers and other protesters inside the same police station.

Several of the protesters arrested after the first demonstration on Sunday 30 September told the Guardian they were slapped and hit by a police officer while five or six others watched, were spat on and "used as ashtrays" because they "stank", and were kept awake all night with torches and lasers being shone in their eyes.

Some said they were burned on the arms with a cigarette lighter, and they said police officers videoed them on their mobile phones and threatened to post the pictures on the internet and give their home addresses to Golden Dawn, which has a track record of political violence.One of the two women among them said the officers used crude sexual insults and pulled her head back by the hair when she tried to avoid being filmed. The protesters said they were denied drinking water and access to lawyers for 19 hours. "We were so thirsty we drank water from the toilets," she said.

One man with a bleeding head wound and a broken arm that he said had been sustained during his arrest alleged the police continued to beat him in GADA and refused him medical treatment until the next morning. Another said the police forced his legs apart and kicked him in the testicles during the arrest.

"They spat on me and said we would die like our grandfathers in the civil war," he said.

A third said he was hit on the spine with a Taser as he tried to run away; the burn mark is still visible. "It's like an electric shock," he said. "My legs were paralysed for a few minutes and I fell. They handcuffed me behind my back and started hitting and kicking me in the ribs and the head. Then they told me to stand up, but I couldn't, so they pulled me up by the chain while standing on my shin. They kept kicking and punching me for five blocks to the patrol car."

The protesters asked that their names not be published, for fear of reprisals from the police or Golden Dawn.

A second group of protesters also said they were "tortured" at GADA. "We all had to go past an officer who made us strip naked in the corridor, bend over and open our back passage in front of everyone else who was there," one of them told the Guardian. "He did whatever he wanted with us – slapped us, hit us, told us not to look at him, not to sit cross-legged. Other officers who came by did nothing.

"All we could do was look at each other out of the corners of our eyes to give each other courage. He had us there for more than two hours. He would take phone calls on his mobile and say, 'I'm at work and I'm f***ing them, I'm f***ing them up well'. In the end only four of us were charged, with resisting arrest. It was a day out of the past, out of the colonels' junta."

[biffvernon]

The Moonbat has probably got it exactly right this time: http://www.monbiot.com/2012/10/08/the-e ... ikes-back/

[leroy]

Well that's pretty horrible stuff.

Regarding the Greek police, I'm don't know if it is the same in their recruitment now but in my early twenties I had some Hellenic friends of a similar age who said that their was the option in Greece to drop out of the normal schooling system at 15 or so and join police training that amounted, to their view, to indoctrination.

Re: UK police, I have a mixed view. As a kid in a decidedly left-wing household (CND marches, 'Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out!' &tc.) there was a big monochrome print in the kitchen showing a mounted copper mid-swing with baton at the head of a woman who was holding her infant child. As a teen I clearly recall several incidents where black mates were taken into the back of vans and given a going over by Bristol's Finest.

However, I have been involved in criminal justice work as an adult and find the police officers that I met to be hard working, well intentioned and doing a very hard and often dispiriting job with admirable measure and humanity. There is a very sophisticated filtering system which includes waves of psychoanalitic testing to identify those seeking a position of power in order to inflict pain on the vulnerable. In the same way as it is not easy to correlate pre- and post-Scarman report prison officer cultures, the same may be said of the police force. Of course there will still be rot in there, but from anecdotal experience I feel fairly confident of our criminal justice executive in their general integrity. Just what I've seen.

[RenewableCandy]

I think the Police here have changed a lot since the 1980s. I think they had to: people were losing faith in them.

Meanwhile, back to the squaddies: Orlov...

Members of the US military, both officers and enlisted, are dying at a record pace—not at the hands of the enemy (although revenge killings of US servicemen by aggrieved Afghanis do feature prominently) but at their own hands. Suicide rates across all the branches—Army, Navy, Air Force, even the Coast Guard—are all registering large increases. More US servicemen die at their own hands than from any other cause.

[biffvernon]

I think the Police here have changed a lot since the 1980s.

They've certainly got younger.