Elder Abuse and Police Brutality

I learned something today that I did not know before about elder abuse, especially as it occurs in privately run assisted living facilities:  the inappropriate use of physical restraints for punishment or for the convenience of the staff is prosecutable as “elder abuse.”

In other words, the mere act of physically retraining a resident – be it by locking them in their room or raising the guard rails to keep them from getting out of bed – not even because the staff wishes to punish that resident or to hurt the resident, but just because doing so makes life easier for the facility’s staff, is considered to be a crime.

Instantly, I flashed on the increasingly common use by cops of non-lethal force such as pepper spray or tasers as a convenient means of coercing citizens to comply with police orders.  From the infamous John Pike’s pepper-spraying of protesting college students at UC-Davis for refusing his order to disperse, to this story involving a middle-aged alumni couple being tazed for sitting in the wrong seats at a college football game, it seems increasingly clear that the police routinely employ physically abusive and quite painful practices simply because doing so makes the cops’ jobs more “convenient.”  Why bother actually talking to and calming down an irate or confused citizen when you can simply tazer them into instant submission?

And yet somehow almost nobody in American society seems to have a problem with the cops’ use of such force.  That really needs to change.

America's Tacit Approval of Police Brutality

Updated Below

Via Angry Black Lady at Balloon Juice comes this story about Occupy Davis (UC-Davis), where “a police officer approached a group of students sitting in a line peacefully on the ground, walked up and down the line and pepper-sprayed them directly in the face – as one would spray pesticide on weeds.”  If you click over to ABL’s post you can watch the 8 minute YouTube of the incident, and here is a photo:

(h/t Atrios)

My first thought, when I spotted that photo at Eschaton, was the same as ABL’s:  anger at the cops’ decision to deal with these student protesters in such a casually cruel way.  “They’re treating people like things,” I thought to myself, “nothing more than an impersonal nuisance to be dispersed.”

But, upon reflection, I don’t think my initial impression was correct.  The truth is, the cops were not dealing with these students as mere things, but definitely as people.  And while the decision to pepper spray them directly in the face seems from the photo and the video to have been casually made, I’ll bet it wasn’t. 

The Over/Under on Further Police Brutality

Charlie Pierce writes about the Occupy Wall Street backlash that’s brewing as a result of the nationwide protests beginning to actively inconvenience – not the banks – but the individual people who run the banks and who bear direct responsibility for our current mess.  Pierce writes: 

It was only a matter of time before the human emotions of guilt and shame began to demonstrate their power.  And guilt and shame do not necessarily manifest themselves in contrition and a resolve to amend oneself.  Sometimes, they manifest themselves in anger and violence, and sometimes, the people who are overcome by the power of guilt and shame have police forces at their disposal.  They lash out, or they subcontract the job.  That seems to be part of what’s happening now.

The future belongs to the country beyond Zuccotti Park and the docks in Oakland.  If the country decides it would rather have order than justice, then what’s coming next could be very dark and very terrible.  If the country decides that, yes, this whole thing has been a nuisance, but a minor nuisance compared to an ongoing recession, near double-digit unemployment, a wave of foreclosures, and the continued corruption of the democratic institutions by the money powers, then somebody outside the park is going to have to stand up and lead the next phase.

I think this is mostly correct.  I have argued before that it is the terror that they may finally be called to account that has the banksters now traveling with bodyguards and L’il Mikey Bloomberg overreacting.  In a way this is a good thing, because it drives sympathy for OWS and keeps media attention on a movement that will suffocate unless the nation is reminded over and over again that nothing forces us to meekly accept what has been done to us in the name of the 1%.

Where I think Pierce goes astray is when he suggests that it is the opinion of “the country beyond Zuccotti Park” that will determine what form the inevitable backlash takes.  This is incorrect, and it is incorrect very much for the reason OWS is necessary in the first place:  The people who decide such things don’t care about the opinions of anyone other than the 1%.

L’il Mikey Bloomberg isn’t judiciously weighing how to respond to an increasingly inconvenient protest movement based on how he thinks it will go over with “the nation” – at least, not “the nation” as you, I and Charlie Pierce conceive it to be.  L’il Mikey is part of the 1%, answers to the 1%, and is concerned only about the 1% -- that is his “nation.”  Anyone having any doubts about this should click over and read Matt Taibbi’s takedown of Mike Bloomberg’s Marie Antoinette Moment, in which he excoriates L’il Mikey for peddling once again the oft-debunked, zombie lie that it was Congress and Fannie and Freddie that cause the housing crisis.  L’il Mikey is going to react in precisely the manner the 1% – out of their own guilt, shame, arrogance and terror – tell him to react.  Badly.

For what it’s worth, I think that would be a political miscalculation on his part.  OWS’s success at drawing attention to itself has always proceeded from its mistreatment by authority figures, whether that manifests as pepper spraying peaceful protesters, firing tear gas canisters at the head of a war veteran, or tossing flash-bang grenades at people attempting to help that veteran after his skull was fractured.  Opening up on these protesters with truncheons and rubber bullets will – I think – only strengthen the nation’s general support for the cause.

But if we’re weighing the likelihood of only two possible scenarios – further police brutality or a diffident ignoring of the protest – I’d say the odds favor the former.

The Up Side of Police Brutality

So Occupy Wall Street had a massive march last night – 15,000 to 20,000 people – that apparently featured a good deal of police violence.  It may seem counter-intuitive, but that is probably a good thing – for Occupy Wall Street.

As I’ve mentioned before, “OWS started attracting national attention because some animals in the NYPD decided to mace a couple of women and got caught on video doing it.”  Right now OWS has captured the nation’s attention, and the NYPD’s abuse of protesters only makes the movement more sympathetic.

It seems cruel to say this, but if The Powers That Be continue to react to peaceful protests against the existing pluto-/corporatocracy in this way, and the movement itself remains defiant but non-violent, then its continuing success is almost assured.

I’ll leave you with a passage from Hamden Rice’s magnificent and moving essay, “Most of You Have No Idea What Martin Luther King Actually Did”:

They told us:  -- whatever you are most afraid of doing vis a vis white people, go do it.

[snip]

And you know what?  The worst of the worst wasn’t that bad.

Once people had been beaten, had dogs sicced on them, had fire hoses sprayed on them, and been thrown in jail, you know what happened?

These magnificent young black people began singing freedom songs in jail.

That, my friends, is what ended the terrorism of the South.  Confronting your worst fears, living through it, and breaking out in a deep throated freedom song.  The jailers knew they had lost when they beat the crap out of these young Negroes and the jailed, beaten young people began to sing joyously, first in one town and then in another.  This is what the writer James Baldwin captured like no other writer of the era.

Please let this sink in.  It wasn’t marches or speeches.  It was taking a severe beating, surviving, and realizing that our fears were mostly illusory and that we were free.