New Orleans police brutality. posted by Richard Seymour

Take a look at this:



I confess that when I saw the pictures on the news, I immediately confused the story with this one. The story is similar: an innocent, unarmed man being beaten cruelly and relentlessly by a gaggle of uniformed police. The difference is that one was a young political activist being targeted by an authoritarian and brutal state; the other was a 64 year old drunk black man having the life beaten out of him by some cops. It's like the Rodney King beating in some ways - they don't look like they're trying to kill him, but rather to humiliate him, to use his state of drunkenness and rub it in his face, to exert obscene power over him.

To add insult to the copious injuries they left the man with, the cops actually charged him with "public intoxication, resisting arrest, battery on a police officer and public intimidation".

America is a society in which police brutality is meted out with ferocious regularity, against gays, black people, Latinos and protesters.

The extraordinarily high prisoner numbers are another manifestation of the repressiveness of the US state, which seems to treat jails as a very efficient means of combatting unemployment. Out of a world total of 9 million prisoners, 2 million are in the US. The United States has the highest numerical prison population of any reporting world nation, 686 per 100,000. The prison population in China was 111 per 100,000 in 2001. They are divided on racial lines in obvious ways. About 12 percent of all black males in the United States between the ages of 20 and 39 were in prison, compared to 4 percent of Hispanic males and 1.6 percent of white males.

This particular episode, however, may owe itself somewhat to the extraordinary climate of racism that was built up over Katrina - the vicious slurs, rumours, second-hand reports of rapes, stabbings and child molestation: all to justify a military takeover of the city to quell an 'insurgency' and reduce the place to 'a little Somalia'. The comment from the cop to the journalist who filmed the beating was telling:

A fifth officer told the APTN crew to stop filming. As one held up his ID, the officer grabbed him, leaned him backward over a car, jabbed him and started yelling.

"I've been here for six weeks trying to keep my (expletive) self alive and you (expletives) want to come and (expletive) up my city. Go home," an officer, who identified himself as S.M. Smith, told him.

The world of a policeman in a city notorious for police brutality, where disaster has struck, and in which the calamity afterwards has seen his force melt away under the pressure, in an atmosphere polluted by the vilest racist nonsense - this is a world in which one can beat the living daylights out of an inebriated sixty-four year old man and then imagine it has something to do with a desperate struggle for survival on your part.