Saw this guy on Charlie Rose one night. Wonder if the lit critter, Bell Gale-Chevigny is related. She has a new anthology of prison literature. Good interview. Lifted this from bn.com. Skolnick, back in the late 70's was part of a research collective of radical criminologists at UC, Berkeley that published a classic agitational analysis, "The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, " on police repression.
This on a related topic looks good. 1988. Undercover: Police Surveillance in America. Berkeley: University of California Press by Gary T. Marx. Same publisher, Frank Donner's last book on Red Squads. And this huge paper at this URL looks fascinating on social control. http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/bullet.html
And Lou Cannon from the L.A. Times has a huge book on the Rodney King case.
Michael Pugliese
Edge of the Knife, Police Violence in the Americas Paul Chevigny
>From Jerome H. Skolnick
Rarely, as Paul Chevigny concludes in his estimable study of police
violence, do reports about human rights bring good news. After all, their
purpose is to embarrass governments through revelations of abuse, hoping
that such exposures will generate reforms. At the same time, such reports
can be said to be optimistic, albeit perhaps, naively so. They are based on
the assumption that human rights standards are widely recognized, that means
exist to hold governments accountable, and that reformation is possible in
at least minimally democratic governments. So on one level, this is an abuse
of human rights report. If it were merely that, it would be a worthwhile
effort. But letÆs face it, human rights reports, by their nature, rarely
offer much in the way of theoretical interest (although the shocking
practices they document may make painful yet compelling reading.) ChevignyÆs
book, by contrast, is far more ambitious than the ordinary human rights
report. By reviewing and analyzing police violence and its control in Los
Angeles and New York, as well as in Latin America and the Caribbean -- in
Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Jamaica and Mexico City -- Chevigny is, in effect,
making a formidable claim: that a human rights focus can be infused with
enough coherence and theoretical insight to make a useful, if not major,
contribution to the literature on policing. Amazingly enough, he convinces
this skeptical reader that there is a coherent comparability among the
cities; and that the underlying comparability can be the grounding for a
fine contribution to our larger understanding of the police and politics.
Chevigny recognizes that the places he considers are distinct societies,
differing from policing in the United States as the societies differ from
one another. Yet they are joined first, he argues, by common problems of
immigration, colonialism, social dislocation and mobility. Nevertheless, he
admits that a comparison between cities in the United States and other
societies in the Americas seemed unlikely, indeed he could not imagine one,
until the Rodney King episode. Then he understood that what also joined the
cities was police violence in response to the now familiar crime of
"contempt of cop." (xi) That raised the issue for him of how police use
violence as a means of repression and social control. The understanding and
explanation of DEFIANCE OF POLICE is thus a focal concept joining the
cities. Finally, and perhaps even more fundamentally, Chevigny maintains
that policing is a political undertaking. As public fear of crime has become
widespread and growing everywhere in the Americas (if not the world) crime
has been -- and will -- escalate as a major political issue. As that
happens, especially in societies marked by increasing social distance
between the have and the have-nots, it is almost inevitable that the police
and politics become tightly twined. But is the concept "political" so
grandly abstract as to obscure critical differences in police misconduct?
For example, in Argentina the police were recruited during the military
regime to employ torture against social and ideological enemies. That is not
simply defiance of police. U. S. police have employed "Red Squads" to
counter political enemies, but I have never heard of them using torture and
killing to destroy and intimidate these foes. The most serious political
crimes one can accuse U. S. police of are perjury, invasion of privacy and,
in labor wars and other forms of collective protest -- such as the 1968
Democratic Convention -- brutality in the streets, which could accurately be
labeled as political violence. ShouldnÆt the idea of the kidnapping,
torturing and murdering of political rivals be considered such a difference
in kind, such a different order of "politics," as to make comparisons
between the New York Police and those in Buenos Aires theoretically
untenable? Especially in his chapter on Buenos Aires, Chevigny makes the
case for such comparisons. He reproduces a lucid and powerful indictment of
the police by Guillermo Ledesma, a distinguished Argentinean jurist, and a
judge at the trials of the dictatorshipÆs discredited commanders -- which,
Chevigny says, could be read to describe the problems afflicting the police
in Sao Paulo as well as Buenos Aires. LedesmaÆs sketch begins by noting that
"The police tend to look for easy ways to fight crime. During the military
regime it was torture. Later it was trigger happiness and the pretense of
confrontation...Today in police circles there is a sense that crime must be
combated by very tough methods, not strictly within the confines of the
law..."(181) Consequently, in a theme that pervades the volume, crime
fighting is viewed by Chevigny as the commonality that joins police together
across the Americas as a POLITICAL institution. Thus, in Jamaica and Mexico
political leaders expect support from the police against the opposition. In
many cities in the United States, the police are also a powerful political
force. Historically, they were tied to machine politics. Today, the New York
City PolicemanÆs Benevolent Association is probably the most powerful lobby
in New York State legislature, influencing every aspect of criminal justice
policy from substantive criminal law and sentencing to the construction of
prisons. And the P.B AÆs support for candidate Rudolph Giuliani played no
small part in his election to Mayor. In sum, the police are always in or on
the edge of politics. They donÆt carry out their political mandates the same
way everywhere. But everywhere their connection to politics arises from the
fact of rising crime and fear of crime -- and the need to use the police to
control crime. Chevigny first analyzed the roots of police violence for his
classic 1969 book POLICE POWER (from which he quotes in a headnote.) There,
explicating the theme of defiance, he adduced a "truly iron and inflexible
rule" governing police misconduct against citizens. (59) The precipitating
incident is always challenge of the cop, who will impose legal sanctions,
from a summons to the use of firearms. Three factors were said to determine
the imposed sanction: the officerÆs character, where the encounter happened,
and with whom. Chevigny concluded that police are most likely to further
abuse anyone who is poor, or who belongs to an outcast group. Today, he
finds that in every city he studied defiance of the police still gives rise
to a sanction. However, when viewed across the spectrum of the Americas,
sanctions tend to be predictably heavier in Latin America. Thus, he says
that in Sao Paolo, police might shoot a fleeing suspect, while in Los
Angeles they might beat or slap him -- although shooting is also a
possibility. In considering that observation I was of course reminded of the
videotaped beating of Rodney King. To me what was most significant about the
assault was not just what tended to draw public attention -- repetitive
blows inflicted on a human body -- but the fact that a dozen or so officers
were watching. It meant that those inflicting the beating understood that
they could count on the onlookers to back up any story they might tell
higher ups, and that the higher ups would believe those accounts against
those of any civilian witnesses. In part, that shows that police violence is
rarely, if ever, an isolated incident. It also shows how internal review
processes can be shaped and distorted by a subcultural cover-up. If police
violence varies by department, it also varies by society, in an even larger
context -- as a way of "reproducing" the normative order of a society, a
point made in different ways by generations of police scholars, but most
recently and clearly by Richard Ericson. Look at it this way: a cop always
has a conception of what is "normal" for a place or a person -- who should
be in a certain neighborhood, driving what kind of car, with whom.
Violations of the normal always make police suspicious. How police act out
these suspicions marks the line between acceptable and sometimes violent
police conduct. Here, where he moves beyond the explicit documentation of
abuse, Chevigny makes his more lasting contribution to police and political
scholarship. Drawing on Norbert EliasÆs theory of "civilization," Chevigny
maintains that both police violence and personal vigilantism are negatively
correlated with societal revulsion toward brutal and public punishment.
Thus, the more fearful and barbarous the society, the more likely are the
police to employ violence. Everywhere, from New York to Buenos Aires,
Chevigny says, the dilemma of civil society is that the police are both
essential and mistrusted, because they enjoy the power of exercising force.
In one of his most prescient observations in this unfailingly well written
and thoughtful book, Chevigny notes that "civil society has limited the
legal powers of the police precisely because people mistrust and sometimes
fear them." (144) At the same time, society must ask those whom we fear to
protect us against criminals. That dilemma sets a challenge to a civil,
liberal and democratic order. To achieve public safety we must offer the
police instruments of violence. But we also need to develop institutions of
accountability to limit inevitable abuses of legal authority, which will
vary depending on the social order that we of the larger polity expect
police to reproduce. REFERENCE Elias, Norbert. 1982. THE CIVILIZING PROCESS,
Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press.