The recent rise in the reported cases of law officers’ excessive use of force on minority members of the society is nothing new. The perceived spike in such incidence is only due to the prevalence of social media and the ease with which such incidents are recorded and published in public fora. In reality, nothing has changed much as far as the actual number of incidents occurring over the years.
Many commentators have addressed this as a mainly racial issue; white or Caucasian law enforcement officers using excessive force on blacks or other minorities. The fact that these incidents continue unabated despite the outcry, means that there is something amiss in the current analysis and that the root cause of the issue has not been effectively addressed.
The issue is not one of race, but of how society treats its minority members. Minority in this sense refers to the social, political, economic and educational disadvantaged members of society. These class of minorities are usually and mostly composed of racial minorities as well, but need not be so.
It is a classic clash of societal interests. The majority likes to maintain the statusquo, while the minority strives for change that will afford them the privileges enjoyed by the majority. Historically, the majority invariably resorts to force to suppress the minority in order to maintain the statusquo. But due to the intrinsic survival instincts of humans, the majority is keenly aware that prolonged suppression will inevitably lead the minority to revolt against the rule of the majority. The majority must then find the delicate balance between suppression and liberalism that will ensure that it maintains the statusquo without triggering a revolt.
The crux of the problem is what the social, political, economic and educational majority decides to do about the minorities of these classes. In doing so, the majority has to deal with their two competing fears of the minority. Suppress the minority by force and they will eventually rebel and force out the majority by fighting force with force, or give the minority social, economic, political and educational opportunities and they will acquire the resources to rank equally with the majority.
The majority has failed to resolve the problem because it has chosen to do both, while doing neither effectively. This accounts for the cyclical nature of the problem. A period of suppression followed by a period of reforms then another period of suppression, then reforms etc. Several of the recent events compare to the events that happened in the 1960s in the period just preceding the passage of significant civil rights legislation.
Although utilizing both the carrot and the stick approach, the United States has leaned more on the stick rather than on the carrot. The majority would rather mask its fear of the minority with punishment rather than fight it with reforms. The criminal law system is based on retribution instead of rehabilitation. Amongst the developed countries, the United States has the highest number of prisoners per capita. More and more prisons are being built to house criminals despite overwhelming evidence that retributive justice has not reduced the rate of criminality or recidivism in the society.
The failure of retributive justice arises from the failure of the majority to pursue reforms as aggressively as it does punishment. The bedrock of crime is social, political and economic injustice. The civil rights legislation exist now more on paper than in reality and have progressively been whittled down, if not in law, but in fact. There are laws banning segregation but the society is more and more segregated by the years. The social, political and economic minorities live together, go to the same schools, work the same low paying jobs and suffer a general lack of social, political and economic mobility. Tokenism such as affirmative action are instituted to mask the failure of the system. Most children that grew up in the impoverished and disadvantaged part of the society are unable to take advantage of the affirmative action when they reach majority because the foundation for them to do so are lacking in the environment in which they have been raised. Giving the minority enough to survive in a situation where there is almost guaranteed failure at the end is like giving a terminally ill prisoner enough medication to keep them alive to stand trial for a capital offense that is certain to result in the imposition of the death penalty.
The minority must be given hope that they will be able to one day escape their conditions created by the majority rather than being labeled as idle, lazy and unimaginative. The majority by failing to give full implementation to social, political and economic problems that will lift the minority out of the oppressive and depressing conditions under which they live, create a criminal society that it feels compelled to keep in check by force.
Punishment has not solved the problem and so long as the vacillation between stick and carrot continues, the cycle of violence will remain. In his 1948 classic, Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Patton summarizes the phenomenon aptly when he wrote
“I say we shall always have native crime to fear until the native people of this country have worthy purposes to inspire them and worthy goals to work for. For it is only because they see neither purpose nor goal that they turn to drink and crime and prostitution. Which do we prefer, a law-abiding, industrious and purposeful native people, or a lawless, idle and purposeless people? The truth is that we do not know, for we fear them both. And so long as we vacillate, so long will we pay dearly for the dubious pleasure of not having to make up our minds. And the answer does not lie, except temporarily, in more police and more protection.”
Although written in the setting of apartheid South Africa, if we insert the word “minority” for “native” we are currently living the life painted by Alan Patton.
Suppression will and has not worked. It is time to stop the vacillation and try the alternative, which is full and effective social, political and economic liberation of the minority. The current system of giving aid to the underdog only on the premise that he or she must remain under is disingenuous. An environment must be created where a child born in the inner cities can from infancy see the possibility of escaping the circumstances under which he or she was born.
Until the majority does this, the struggle for freedom will continue and if not handled properly there is a risk that the majority will be consumed by the conflagration of volatile social forces that itself has set in motion.
Written by Ogochukwu Victor Onwaeze, an Attorney in Los Angeles.
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