In an ideal world, war is declared but no-one turns up. In the same utopia, police forces refuse orders to arrest, torture and kill, but in Myanmar, Minsk, Moscow and Hong Kong, men in police uniforms are complying with orders.
If significant numbers of police refused to obey, dictatorships could not operate and left to gather in unguarded streets, protesters would have no-one to oppose.
Do the police forces in those countries have no choice?
As authoritarianism flourishes, references to state security become the justification for oppression, even democracies face the fatalism that the times favour suppression of dissent.
The ‘no choice’ question needs answers about police staffing, whether violence reflects already existing traits, whether it displays macho behaviour by men expecting and even enjoying suppression of other citizens. Are these ordinary men who have been socialized to act violently, or did they already display sociopathic tendencies before being recruited and trained?
Within police forces, the culture of oppressive regimes contributes to in-group solidarity. For example, police support for national socialism in the run-up to the Holocaust now appears matched by Hong Kong police supporting the Beijing regime against supporters of democracy.
Recruits receive jobs, income, status, perhaps relief from poverty. Their socialization produces polarization between us and them, between state interests and opponents even if the latter include members of the families of serving police.
Explaining Compliance
Explanations of police compliance have been revealed in several studies. In 1950, Theodor Adorno identified The Authoritarian Personality, someone who displayed rigid adherence to conventional norms, aggressiveness to outgroups and little evidence of introspection, reflection, or creativity.
In 1983, in a simulated prison experiment, Philip Zimbardo divided a ‘normal’ homogenous sample into guards and prisoners. He made the distressing observation about the ease with which sadistic behaviour was elicited from groups who were not sadistic types.
In his 1974 study Obedience to Authority, Stanley Milgram’s testing of individuals’ ability to resist authority showed a deeply ingrained tendency to comply with those higher in a hierarchy. Two-thirds of Milgram’s subjects were obedient to the point of inflicting extreme pain.
Authority may be respected but why the conformity?
Educated during authoritarian regimes, the police may be subject to a barrage of insidious ideas: control or be controlled, stand firm against an enemy, stigmatize dissidents as unworthy and therefore as easy targets.
Within every social collective, a peer group usually exerts pressure on behaviour and sets moral standards. For example, as though there was an unchallengeable norm to admit what they had done and what they should talk about, members of a WWII German police battalion in occupied Poland would list how many Jews they had arrested and killed.
The influence of misogynous attitudes is apparent from reports about the conduct of police in Myanmar. Protesters have been stringing up women’s clothes on account of the tradition that walking beneath women’s apparel is considered bad luck for men. Videos on social media show police taking down lines of clothes before crossing them. Walking beneath garments designed to cover women’s private parts is considered not only bad luck but emasculating for men.
In police operations against protesters, a sense of macabre theatre prevails. Laden with the latest paraphernalia of modern warfare, Hong Kong police look like creatures from another world. In the US, military equipment for police forces is taken for granted, and Belarus police are permitted to use lethal weapons.
In Minsk and Moscow, the colour black dominates. Men with black belts and batons, in masks and balaclavas, drag protesters dressed in black to unmarked black vans.
Are These Ordinary Men?
Human beings can hide within uniforms. Dragooned into conformity, officially applauded for their loyalty to an authoritarian system, but never interviewed about their motives, they may appear to be unusual but could be ordinary men?
To address that question, I refer to Christopher Browning’s 1992 book Ordinary Men, a study of the operations of a German reserve police battalion in occupied Poland in the 1940s. As part of the ‘final solution’, these men participated in the murders of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children. Browning concluded, ‘Ultimately, the Holocaust took place because at the most basic level, individual human beings killed other human beings in large numbers over an extended period.’
Members of this police battalion were largely middle-aged family men of working and lower-middle-class background from Hamburg. Most were raw recruits with no previous experience of violent police operations. Although a few asked to be excused from murdering women and children, almost all carried out their orders to kill or deport Jewish inhabitants of Polish villages.
Brown the historian agreed with psychologists that evil arose out of ordinary thinking and was committed by ordinary people because ‘cruelty is social in its origin much more than it is characterological.’
The exception to the rule is the rare individual who resists authority and exerts moral autonomy, but Brown concluded that once the training and socialization of recruits took effect, ordinary people committed atrocities. Compliance with an initial command to murder Jews became routine and made killing progressively easier.
Focus on police culture must not conceal the well-staffed, efficient bureaucracies which make police operations possible. At best there are invisible administrators who may be unaware of the consequences of their paperwork. At worst, at least in Nazi Germany, there were desk murderers, the operatives who ensured that orders to kill and deport were given, that gas chamber trains ran on time.
In many countries, the bureaucratization of daily life sees thousands of administrators in unknown, inaccessible offices facilitating decisions about people’s lives, such staff protected by their invisibility, never held accountable for their actions.
Abusive Power in Australia
We may look in dismay at events in Belarus, Hong Kong and Myanmar but could such behaviour happen in a supposed fair go, alleged human rights-respecting democracy?
Comparisons to contemporary Australia are easy to find. Officially sanctioned, oppressive and cruel policies persist, albeit with social justice groups expressing outrage.
Despite sustained public protest, refugees are contained on remote islands and to show macho politicians unwilling to bend, let alone respect the rules of international law, powerless people are told they’ll never be allowed to come to Australia.
In the same vein, for almost three years, a Tamil family including two little girls now five and three, remain in detention on remote Christmas Island. It is a bizarre exercise in which discretion which allows exception to the rule so seminal to policymaking is ignored so that government can display consistency and strength, their Christian convictions coupled to cruelty.
Only recently, and from a handful of Federal politicians, led by the principled Andrew Wilkie, has there been any opposition to the imprisonment of Australian citizen Julian Assange. Victimized and prosecuted for revealing mass murder by US forces, this courageous citizen shows the dangers of non-compliance. He faces the prospect of 175 years in a US maximum-security prison.
In response to Assange’s imprisonment, Australian establishment interests mouth respect for human rights but cooperate with vengeful US and UK justice systems.
On June 26, 2020, with encouragement from shock jock journalists on Sky News and Radio 2GB, forty Australian Federal police appeared at the home of NSW Labor MP Shaoquett Moselmane. Presumably, under orders from Minister Dutton and Attorney-General Porter, the police alerted the media about their plans and in shifts of twenty each, raided the politician’s home, traumatized members of his family yet informed Mr Moselmane that he was not suspected of any offence. They nevertheless trashed his reputation and forced his suspension from the Labor Party.
To date, there is no acknowledgement of wrongdoing by the police and no apology from the leader of the State Labor Party let alone from the radio, TV and print journalists who consider derision part of their trade.
Conditions that set the stage for police brutality in Belarus, Russia, Myanmar, and Hong Kong may appear to be extreme, but if these events show ordinary men thinking they have no choice but to comply with authority, violence and suppression could happen anywhere.
A culture that encourages surveillance and control also cultivates fear and recommends that compliance with those in power provides security, that it is best not to think let alone question authority. Once that view is accepted, so is the belief that ordinary Australians could never behave like the uniformed gangsters operating as violent police in other countries.
Stuart Rees AM is Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney & recipient of the Jerusalem (Al Quds) Peace Prize.
Comments
19 responses to “Police compliance with cruelty: will Australia follow Moscow, Minsk and Myanmar?”
There is an important conversation here about police cruelty in Australia: consider every police officer since the Rum Corp to this day who has murdered or grievously bodily harmed an Indigenous person is protected by racist impunity. Consider the apartheid police dismissal of civilian murders of Indigenous children..20 years plus families still demanding investigations. Last year, there were aggressive cops photographed at protests who made the white supremacist sign that was passed off as an OK gesture, or consider the offensive police strip searches at public concerts, or the violent taser killing of the young Brazilian man in the Sydney CBD. Why when we have peaceful protests were thousands of dollars wasted on getting a water cannon? Ask Peter Fox about the Catholic police mafia coverups of priest pedophilia, or discuss police lack of due process regarding women’s complaints of sexual assault – Katherine Thornton is only one recent example. The NSW Police Force was changed to Police Service then changed back to ‘Force’. Hmmm.
Absolutely the majority of police members are decent men and women who are dedicated to serving and protecting the public at a risk to their lives, nevertheless there’s a disturbing authoritarian trend to be addressed.
Its definitely not only those in uniform who are “Dragooned into conformity, officially applauded for their loyalty to an authoritarian system” – how about those who vote for the LNP and ALP that wield cruel (also lethal) policies like the NT Intervention, the humiliating Indue Card, prisons that torture Indigenous kids and get away with deaths in prison custody, policies that illegally detain offshore for 8 years men women children who have fled persecution, policies for decades that have neglected our aged parents, grandparents and those that have entrenched discrimination against women, that inflict economic torture on the unemployed with Robodebt and third world welfare compounded by Michaelia Cash’s dob-in line turning neighbours, family, friends into informers simulating the old Iron Curtain era.
PS While some points in the comments below are valid, ALL missed the key issue: No need to point over there beyond our borders.
Cruelty is much more likely when there is an hierarchy and a sense of us and them.
The Rich rarely need to fear the police. White collar crime is an industry.
Australian media generally, not this one, accept the need for authority. They reinforce the conditioning.
Hi, personally the closest experience I have had with police brutality was in Sydney (when the G20 was held there many years ago). I had taken some photos of the police at Hilton Hotel. A police saw me, took my camera, and deleted them.
When considering whether police behaved violently or not we must not forget to consider the context, and when it comes to Moscow it is only the context that matters. Not only were the protest rallies not authorised – partly because of COVID restrictions as is the case in most countries – but because the actual reason for the protests was quite illegitimate. Mr Navalny chose “of his own accord” – assisted by Western intelligence agencies – to return to Russia despite warnings he would face court action if he did so, and despite the claims that “Putin” had tried to poison him with Novichok, and failed. No impartial observer could see this farce as anything other than as it was – and act of cyber/hybrid war against Moscow, connected with geopolitical manoeuverings in Germany and Europe, directed by the US and UK.
I find it most unfortunate and rather sinister that Stuart Rees has fallen in behind the Atlantic Council’s vision of Peace, just as Biden and Johnson are launching this new and dangerous offensive against Russia and her allies, and as the only governments actually pursuing peaceful relations and resolution of conflicts are now centred around Moscow, Tehran, Damascus and Beijing.
Reading between the lines aka thinking for one’s self, is a rare thing: GBS said only 2% think but another 3% can be educated to do so.
Most merely react, recalling a memory of the usual line….
Gangsters have one overriding attribute: they join gangs.
Police Unions are the gang of choice for police officers. They know what their force is actually about.
Let us loosen the binds by openeing up the functions to encompass all aspects of public service and stop the indoctrination by uniform gangster approaches that divide and rule?
QPS are supposedly not a Force but a Service. Yet the locals make QPS afraid, so much so that officers now patrol in pairs, since their training makes them a target when alone. The officers have been forced into an ‘us and them’ attitude.
To defuse this we should diffuse them amongs others dedicated to public service. Social workers, nurses all should be part of the ‘Police’. Pairs by all means, but only one with a lethal weapon.
The illusion of democracy….
We are living in a country that is mostly owned by very few familes, exercising their power via corporations. The police are there to allow that control to increase. They are like all the corporations except that those they target are the main persons paying their salaries! The state is controlled by the rich. The hierarchies allow refining of appointees until the scum floats to the top or to the positions which actually make the force effective.
Police are taught to stand while firing ‘their’ weapon. They make a bigger target that way. They are less accurate that way. They are too stupid, as an institution, hierarchy, to change that.
Eventually, they will be pushed too far and then issues will arise. But the temperature of the water can rise slowly until then.
So – evidence to support assertions by
Stuart Rees of police brutality in Moscow and Minsk ,of torture and killings of street protesters whom they arrest ? No, he has not such evidence. So clever juxtapositions of sentences with sentences about Nazis will do . And the real cases of police brutality in France and US are not mentioned at all . The truth is that police in Moscow and Minsk have been photographed using minimal force where necessary to arrest provocateurs who were determined to be arrested in ways that could be filmed by fellow protesters as alleged police violence. The films rely on auto-suggestion and misleading voice-overs.
As to uniforms and equipment , many police forces around the world seem to look like Star Wars troopers these days . But what counts is how they behave . Moscow and Minsk come out better than most, in my observation . Rees needs to watch more closely .
Destroy the hierarchy by promoting no one. Those who join do the same job while they are fit to do so. Later, they take on the role of social workers etc. Before they get PTSD and swallow their weapon.
Longer service rewarded by increases in pay, even to the extent that some outstanding officers may earn more than the Commissioner. Have public committees controlling the Commissioner and her staff. Appoint ‘outsiders’ to supervisory posts. Three levels. Workers, bosses and those at Commission level, who are the grease between public control on policy eg non enforcement of unpopular laws (!) and their Service.
I suspect legalization of substances may not be needed when these reforms are adopted!?
The “warrior class” of some kind or other seems to have always been a component of any society.
It’s how they are managed and regulated, what laws they must observe, what the expectations of their non combatant compatriots are that’s important.
Correct. The ancient world wide civilization was based on the idea that people have membership of only a certain number of classes. This has been perverted into a caste system based on inheritance, not proclivity. This helps those families who are at the top, of course.
Time to reorganize?
I’m not sure why Stuart has limited police brutality to a select four countries. There are numerous countries where police brutality is a problem, such as the US and France. The footage of French police brutality against the Yellow Jacket protestors is horrific. How many people have lost their sight due to rubber bullets being fired by police at protestors in the US and France?
It concerns me the dress of modern day police forces and the message that it sends. Queensland police officers look like storm troopers about to go into combat. Is this really necessary for a beat police officer?
It is necessary to stop public organization.
Democracy is a bad idea and it is certainly an enemy of those who are corrupt or who own more than they deserve.
you seem to buy into the idea that we need protection from one another! You have been successfully divided and ruled.
Also, in Hong Kong, under the most extreme provocations, there were none, zero, killed by the Hong Kong police. If it were the US or France, dozens would have been killed. I think Stuart has been misled to an extent by the very biased reporting of the Hong Kong riots.
Perhaps the point of his article is not the content it’s the headline?
In good journalism, the headline is a truthful indication, even a summary of the topic, however its becoming more and more common to use click bait headlines that perform two functions, they get people to read it and/ or they demonise the usual political suspects in the readers mind whether they read the whole piece or not. Either way it’s not honest journalism. Or perhaps at the very least is lazy journalism.
Beyond the headline, the content of this piece is actually quite fair, citing police violence in the US and here in Australia. So why such a blatantly bigoted headline Mr Rees?
I do suggest that as founder of the Sydney Peace foundation, you find out exactly who is responsible for most of the violence on the planet right now. It is not Moscow, Minsk or Myanmar.
Police violence only follows national military brutality.
The worst brutes currently on the world stage are: the US, UK, France, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Australia, Canada and many other so called post colonial powers that are in fact still controlling the resources of our world through aggressive military and police action.
If all police wore powder blue or pink uniforms a large proportion of today’s officers would resign.
The point is that a police force is chosen by the citizens to help, not to dominate.