***
In my experience, something many people either do not know or forget, is
that police have two roles. Firstly, enforcement of law, and there are
problems with that - such as unconscious bias (being fought well by some police forces),
reliance on predictive techniques rather than evidence, and militarised
enforcement; but the second part, enforcement of ORDER is where we
really get major problems because:(a) the worldview of too many police is way behind society's expectation - decades behind, in some cases (centuries, if we consider racist behaviours);The combination of all that is too many dinosaurs who are fixed in their belief that being a dinosaur is OK. Add in the militarised (technically, "para"-military) structure of police forces, and those who are decent human beings may be unwilling or unable to do anything about that - and the film "Serpico" is a fair indication of the potential problems for those who try.
(b) police necessarily are fairly fixed in their thinking - necessarily, as they have to (or should) resist bribes and other temptations (including the temptation to be unprofessional) in their work.
Now, one of the concerns here is when police try to enforce compliance - including compliance to being sexually assaulted by police, or killed by police.
Extreme? No: the victims of strip searches have the same symptoms as victims of sexual assaults, and when someone is being strangled, the body interprets that as an attempt at being killed - as far as the body is concerned, it is being murdered.
When that happens, no matter how much the mind wishes to be compliant, the body is going to, though a whole stack of automatic responses that nature put into our biology so we would survive, struggle - until it loses consciousness.
Apart from reading, I also know this from someone trying - in a past DV situation - to strangle me. I've been on the receiving end, and I know the body tries to survive (not always successfully, the strangler is physically stronger than you, as happened in my case - the drunk just decided to stop).
When police choke someone, they are triggering the body's survival mechanism. If they do not know that, they are incompetent as police - "unprofessional", if you want a softer word.
When police choke someone into unconsciousness, they are sadistic (especially if they smirk) thugs and incompetent as human beings, as well as being incompetent as police.
When they kill someone that way, they are verging on evil, just as anyone else who takes another life for no reason (there are circumstances when taking a life - to save others' lives, for instance, when there is no other option) is.
When police act in a way that is discriminatory, whether that is sexist/misogynistic, homophobic/transphobic, or racist, they are unquestionably acting in a way that is, because of their exceptional powers, evil.
In the USA, we are currently seeing the outcome of that sort of evil being delivered - from social structures as well as police - for centuries. We are seeing a group of people who have been victimised to the point of their survival being at risk reacting the way a body being strangled to the point where it's survival is at risk does - struggle - do-anything-in-the-hope-it-will-work struggle.
And the response of society and the police has largely been to lean on the throat of that group of people more.
There have been some exceptions.
Firstly, there have also been exemplary instances of behaviour by the protestors, such as protecting a police officer who was isolated from his unit (and that terminology straight away shows the sort of thinking that is a problem). The protests are actually largely peaceful - and, when police are not destroying personal property in the form of water bottles, protestors are showing the signs of being prepared and thoughtful, such as stockpiling water to attend to those harmed by tear gas.
Also, some police are listening, others are taking off their militarised robo-cop style armour and walking with and protecting the human beings who are saying "enough! I want us to survive too".
Sadly, they appear, from news reports, to be a minority.
Worse than sadly, an Australian journalist has been shown to be an idiot with no conception of this nation's history and current experience of active racism - including the death of an Indigenous person by impaired breathing in similar circumstances to that which was the trigger in the USA for the current protests.
One comment I read (and have not tried to check as yet) pointed out that both the USA and Australia have around 30% of jail populations being Indigenous/black people. And yet, in Australia Indigenous people are around 3% of the total population, as compared to 12% in the USA, making our rates of Indigenous incarceration FAR worse, despite having held a Royal Commission into Indigenous deaths in custody and investigations into incarceration rates.
This problem afflicts many places in the world - even one is too many.
A final point. When police attack journalists - mostly the black journalists, it would appear, in the current struggles in the USA - they are no longer the police of a democratic society, they are a Gestapo.
Black lives matter.
