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CCNY Prof Focuses on the Men in Blue

By Hank Williams

Police Brutality, a collection of essays edited by Jill Nelson, is more than a book; it's a tool to be used as a force for social change. Nelson writes in the introduction that it "should be read as a challenge to each of us to change the way we think about the issue and an inspiration for each of us to take action."

The strong point of Police Brutality is that it offers a full overview of the basis of the subject. To understand the nature of police violence, one must first look at what the roots are of crime and the role of police in a capitalist society.

Nelson, a Journalism Professor here at CCNY, notes that "there's no real commitment (in the US) to looking at the historical, political, economic, class-based social justice issues that have been issues since the founding of the republic."

The role of police has been from the beginning to protect property and-as a corollary-to protect the ruling class. That generally means keeping the status quo in place. As a result, maintaining social order means keeping systems of exploitation as they are. It was easy to tell the allegiance of police at the large Amadou Diallo rally down Fifth Avenue: they conspicuously stood in front of fashionable retail stores just to make sure nothing got out of hand.

The problem is that the structural problems of society that create crime are not dealt with. Instead of investing in schools, good housing, and health care, hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on prisons and paramilitary police agencies, such as New York's Street Crimes Unit. "It's one reason we are on this treadmill of dealing with the same problems, the same issues, generation after generation," Nelson explains. "It's the nature of our capitalist, consumer culture."

The essay format of the book is both its strong and weak point. It provides a variety of voices on different perspectives surrounding the issue. The history, politics, and resistance to the police are all investigated.
It is at times repetitive, as, one reads over and over about police harassment of black citizens for no reason-or due, in many cases, to outright racism. The essays, however, also serve to reinforce the point that the problem is systemic and not simply a case of a few bad apples or isolated incidents.

As with many anthologies, some essays are better than others and readers will agree with some viewpoints more than others.

The book has an impressive array of writers, including such well-known names as Ron Daniels, Patricia J. Williams, and Robin D. G. Kelley. Some of the better essays were provided by the less-familiar names, such as Flores Forbes. Forbes provides a chilling look at police repression of the Black Panthers, who were essentially wiped out by the FBI and CIA in a process Noam Chomsky has referred to as "outright political assassination."

The book's reception has been lukewarm, Nelson says. "White readers, I think, generally don't see this as an issue that affects them," she adds. It also suffered from the failure of the mainstream media in the US to cover issues in a substantive way. Nelson reports that her publicist at Norton had marginal success with press people who figured that they were done with police brutality after the Diallo protests died down.

Ironically, Nelson, a columnist for both USA Today and MSNBC.com, does not see media coverage as the entire solution to the problem. The media "doesn't build movements: people build movements," she says. "We've become manipulated and addicted to media validation. The struggle on the local level for social justice and for change is the way you build movements. And those movements-people's movements-should overwhelm the status quo and the larger culture and take them by surprise, not look to them for validation."

What Police Brutality does well is to provide grist for an open discussion of the real issues involved, and arms people with the information to go out and start working for change.

"We need to become daily activists," Nelson says. The book leads toward the conclusion that the power of the people is what will curb police violence, and the way for that to happen is rebuilding society in a way where justice and human need come before profits and corporate greed.

The way toward that goal? "Just like Public Enemy says: fight the power."

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