The Ritual Call for Investigations Predictably, the latest outbreak of police vio-lence has inspired calls for "investigations." The President has reportedly tapped the FBI. But that agency has traditionally stood in the relation of an indulgent Elder Brother to local police jurisdictions-and it is hard for an indulgent relative to discipline a spoiled child. Self-investigation often deteriorates into self-exoneration and a search for facts to bury or whitewash. Ungoverned, virtually unmonitored, police and security agencies have become ungovernable.
A Silent Epidemic One symptom of the endemic is persistence. Civilian deaths and injuries at police hands are rising faster than citizens' misgivings. Attempts to control violence have hardly progressed beyond accidental detection. The age of prevention has not yet dawned because police lobbies have largely succeeded in strangling it before birth.
They succeed by distracting our attention. Consider the alarm sounded by Adam Walinsky, in bold face on the front cover of the July 1995 Atlantic Monthly:
We have fled our cities
We have permitted the spread of wastelands
ruled by merciless killers.
We have abandoned millions of our fellow citizens to every kind of danger and degraded assault.
And now a demographic surge is about
to make everything worse.Walinsky's solution? Hiring five million police officers at a cost of scores of billions of dollars.
A Violent Response to an Exaggerated Menace? Walinsky's remedy comes very close to mimicking the disease. Almost without exception, riots and other large scale minority threats to public order are precipitated by police misconduct. Moreover, the most harmful excesses are committed by police in over-reaction to the very disorder which they provoked. And it is virtually a rule of thumb that rushing large force to the scene disrupts discipline, escalating loss of self-control. Beyond a certain size, a police group becomes a mob-sometimes a lynch mob.
Alternatively, a small but sensitive police presence can keep the peace more effectively. During the riots which swept the country after King's assassination in 1968, San Francisco remained calm. Most of us close to the scene agreed that major credit belonged to the police department's tiny Community Relations Division, led by a one-man peace-keeping army named Sergeant Dante Andeotti. His achievement infuriated those who insist that order can be preserved only by the Los Angeles style of repression. His reward was dismissal by his Chief.
The myths that feed on the fears which fuel our racism are moving us insidiously into the arms of a police state. There is, indeed, a crisis of public disorder. But it is rooted in our disordered perceptions. And it will take a transformation of opinion to recall us to rationality. That recovering will, I think, require:
A powerful Congressional Commission, chaired by influential Senators and Congresspersons, advised by the most astute staff and consultants, capable of crossing over both geographical and ideological boundaries. It will need to be courageous enough to take the nation's sacred cows to market. Its goal would be to set the agenda and the climate for new legislative options.
And having sown the wind, it will have to be ready to stand against the whirlwind. It would do well to study the patriots of old Rome, who learned how hard it was to protect their republic from its armed servitors. The descendants of the praetorian Guard are stalking us still, in business suits, with digitalized software instead of trumpets.
Transcending Conformable Platitudes The last thing we need is a collection of venerable figureheads exchanging platitudes. The bland cannot lead the blind. It would be important to dispense with fashionable icons. Figures acceptable to all will not risk offending any. Instead of the strong medicine that may be required, they will prescribe placebos.
All parties to the problems should participate. Lobbyists from Police Benevolent Associations should be invited, and so should Civil Rights leaders. Proponents of police rigor should jostle citizens alleging police brutality. Police Chiefs should testify and so should the whistle-blowers they fired. The adversarial process should prevail. Let all contenders have their moment in the sun. Let the citizens see what and who they are. Then let a previously disinformed public, exposed to the full diversity of opinion, deliver itself from a one-track mentality that would lead it to an American Auschwitz.
Watching a Snuff Film
In the dirty little world of television pornography, the undisputed king of cheap thrills is the "snuff" film. For a fee a viewer can watch the deliberate killing of a human being. Those who pay to view these films are only a little less vile than those who perpetrate the actual homicides. Their complicity is real: without the demand exerted by their money, the killings would not be profitable.
A few weeks ago, we watched a man being put to death on videotape. The victim was not being formally executed, nor was he scheduled to die. And the person behind the camera had no idea that what he was shooting would eventually turn homicidal. Those who accomplished the victim's brain death were not monsters from some sleazy underworld. They were uniformed correctional officers carrying out an approved "procedure" designed to protect them against the possibility of some kind of harm while moving a person from place to place.
The person who brought us the videotape insisted on anonymity. The people who lent the tape have taken it back. They will not talk to us. They won't release the tape. But the victim's name is known, and the incident itself has been reported in the press.
The victim, Joseph Leitner, who suffered from a severe and long-standing mental illness, complicated by drug abuse, was taken to jail because of "outstanding warrants." At the jail he told the intake social worker that he was a patient on county mental health care. And he revealed that, when anxious, he tended to slap his own face. Having heard this, the social worker ordered that he be restrained and taken to a safe-cell in the jail psychiatric unit.
Despite the fact that he was cooperative, he was forced to the floor by five correctional officers. Face down, the officers placed him in a double hammer-lock position, applying pressure on shoulders and wrists in order to control him. While being stripped, he began having trouble breathing. He injured his lips and began to bleed from the mouth. Seeing the blood and apparently out of fear of AIDS, the officers threw a blanket over his head and twisted it at the neck. With his face to the ground and still in a double hammer-lock, they pulled up on his arms and legs and carried him, "suitcase style," to the Psych Unit. He bucked a few times, apparently in severe pain, during the transport. All of this was caught on the videotape.
Arrived at the Psych Unit, he was thrown onto a bed. By then he had stopped breathing, but no one, including the nurse, noticed this for four and a half minutes. Then there was an ineffectual attempt at CPR. But he had lost consciousness. He has never regained it to this day. He is now brain dead.
Have there been similar occurrences? According to the latest count reported by the ACLU, there have been 33 similar deaths of persons in custody in the state of California alone. Over Easter weekend, forty-year-old Mark Garcia died as a result of the restraint techniques used on him by the San Francisco police. Garcia was allegedly found raving, half-naked, in the middle of a street. The "usual procedure" was utilized by the police, including two doses of pepper spray. In the process he collapsed, had to be taken to the hospital, was resuscitated, and then died the next day.
Like Leitner's, these deaths were unintended. What killed them? According to the medical spokesmen of those on the scene, they were killed by a "syndrome." Its full name is "sudden in-custody death syndrome."
What causes it? Those who coined the diagnosis have an odd answer. "Sudden in-custody death" is caused by a procedure. More precisely, it is caused when the procedure is applied to persons on whom it was not prudent to apply it. Like fat people. Overexcited people. People who have taken excessive amounts of drugs.
But what about the people who apply the procedure: the police or the correctional officers? Are they blameless? Or are they perpetrators of a crime? That's the problem. There are no perpetrators. No one intended that anyone should die. The fault, the responsibility, the culpability, we are told, belongs to the Procedure. And the procedure was adopted in good faith.
What we are being asked to believe is that thirty-three people have died-not because of what was done to them by other people, but because they were vulnerable to a procedure. In other words, it is essentially their own fault that they died. They should not have gotten themselves arrested, and they should not have wound up in jail. Where does this leave us?
You, the readers, have just been informed that we, the writers, were witnesses to the brain death of Joseph Leitner, a prisoner, on July 25, 1995. The event was widely reported. What was not reported was the fact that the killing was filmed on videotape. We have been denied permission to reveal the name of the whistleblower who allowed us to view it. We have kept our agreement, and we are not happy about it. We have been witnesses to a videotaped homicide, and we have been asked to withhold evidence about the tape's existence.
Withholding information to newspaper readers is not a crime. But withholding evidence to a judge or a grand jury is. And if it happens that a district attorney is listening, and if he/she demands to know, we will tell him/her in a hot minute. And in the event that s/he would like to telephone us first, we can be reached through the Pacific News Service, whose number is (415) 243-3264.
--Contributors: Richard R. Korn, Ph.D., Terry Kupers, M.D., and Corey Weinstein, M.D.