Below is an excellent article by an ex-cop about the 'entrenched
culture' of the police and the brutality associated with the
administration of 'law' in the United States.

Today, I had the experience of going to a board meeting of the people
that administer the death penalty here in Texas.     The hotel
conference room positively oozed 'entrenched culture'.

The meeting started off with awards being handed out to about 7 'law
enforcement' personnel, for their excellent handling of crowd control
and execution of the execution of Shaka Sankofa.    There was a lot of
smiles and joking going on afterwards.     It was kind of an in-crowd
gathering.

Since this was a public meeting, they had to let rif-raf (like me) from
the public speak.      But only for 3 minutes per point on the agenda.
I chose to speak about the additions being made to regulations on force
used to take prisoners down.     In fact, I was the only non-Board
person who spoke to any point on the agenda.

One of the things I mentioned, was that additions being proposed made no
difference what-so-ever, as the regulations are not abided by in the
many dark and hidden corners of the Texas Department of Corrections,
anyway.    And that they knew that already, so why not just throw out
all the regulations and start over again?

I mentioned that the concentric levels of violence that they iniiated
within the TDC effected not just prisoners, but guards,  families of
prisoners and guards, and people on the streets that were innocent of
any criminal activity.    That the Texas Department of Corrections was
infamous worldwide for its brutality.     And that the death penalty was
only the tip of the iceberg of the violence via concentration camps that
they administered.

I kind of soured the party, but since these were professionals from an
'entrenched culture', they immediately (with now more serious faces than
before) began to discuss the addendums regarding the correct manner of
spraying the correct substance at the correct people at the correct
moments.

Damn, if I had only brought the correct substance with me.     Alas,  I
hadn't.    And these very nice people (or so they seemed) were able to
continue on in a 'responsible' manner.

It's nice to know that 'democracy' makes these discussions so easy.
Just be sure to express your opinions in the correct manner, and in the
correct place, and a citizen can be heard.     Next time I go, I should
put on my coat and tie.

Tony Abdo
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Entrenched Subculture Is At Root Of Police Brutality And Bias Cases
by Christopher Cooper

The videotaped beating of Thomas Jones by Philadelphia police officers
is yet another incident that calls attention to the nationwide,
systematic problems of police brutality and racially discriminatory
policing.

I am a former U.S. Marine and police officer who has come under gunfire
and confronted many fleeing suspects both armed and unarmed. Regardless
of the severity of Jones' alleged actions, his having been set upon by a
mob composed of law-enforcement agents indicates cowardice and a lack of
professionalism by the officers involved. A courageous, physically fit
police officer does not behave like a bully or lose control of himself
when things become tense.

For many Americans not of color, what happened to Thomas Jones is an
aberration. For people of color, in particular black people and Latinos,
Jones' beating is commonplace police behavior. Another group that knows
it's commonplace is police officers themselves.

Sadly, in our early tenure as cops, we are instructed on the "code" of
the police subculture. These are norms that are almost always perverse.
Two such norms were operable in the Jones mob attack. The first is that
if a citizen runs from one of us, we are to beat him severely.

Another is that if a citizen physically hurts one of us, we are to hurt
that citizen even more before we bring him to the station. And if that
citizen has killed a cop, he shouldn't make it to the station alive.
This is well-documented in research literature about policing (including
the work of Elizabeth Reuss-Ianni and Jonathan Rubinstein) and in public
testimony by police officers.

The police say Thomas Jones hurt a cop - shot him in the hand, says the
police report. As that information was passed by police radio from
officer to officer, the police subculture sprang into action. Officers
turned on lights and sirens and accelerated to the site with total
disregard for the community. Time to carry out the subcultural mandate.

Some police officers, fortunately, decide to resist such norms. We are
the code violators. We testify against fellow officers and routinely
interrupt beatings of the Jones type. Too many of our colleagues,
however, choose to be strict adherents of the code.

Prosecutors fail to realize that the police subculture provides
justification for Jones-type beatings long before the beatings ever
occur. It teaches police officers how to have a ready excuse to explain
away bad behavior. Meanwhile, lay people - DA's, judges and juries - are
willing to accept authoritative versions of what happened on a police
scene without question. Such automatic deference, coupled with lay
ignorance of the police code, allows police brutality and racially
discriminatory policing to flourish.

Imagine the success we as Americans, good police officers included,
would have in stamping out police brutality if we took the police
subculture seriously.

No surprise that civilians who report mistreatment at the hands of
police are often made out to be liars. Black and Latino people report
weapons being planted on them, report being beaten for merely
questioning an officer's inquiry. Their accounts are deemed
"unbelievable" and the products of wild imagination.

That view is supported by many white social scientists. Unlike their
colleagues of color, they assert that police officers' actions are
seldom if ever motivated by race. When officers gun down an unarmed man
in a barrage of 41 bullets on a Bronx street, or when officers beat a
man viciously on a Philadelphia street, these scholars assert that it's
the ineptitude of the officers or an "adrenaline rush," but never a
crime with the ingredient of malice. If anyone is to blame, they point
to automatic weapons that fire too quickly, supervisors who didn't
supervise, a training course that was never delivered.

A different perspective is held by people and academicians of color, as
well as some whites. We recognize that American policing suffers from a
perverse subculture, and that all too often, individual officers lack
the courage to stand up to that code. The result is a too-frequent lack
of integrity and respect for human life, a lack of respect that all too
often exacerbates the racial tensions that still exist in our society.

Christopher Cooper, a lawyer, is a former Washington D.C. metropolitan
police officer. He is on the board of directors of the National Black
Police Association and is an associate professor of criminal justice
with a specialization in policing at St. Xavier University in Chicago.

Copyright 2000 Philadelphia Newspapers