In a very powerful and poignant gesture on June 8, legislators of the United States Democratic party led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knelt for a total of 526 seconds to “observe the pain” of George Floyd who died on May 25 under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.
The duration, 8 minutes and 46 seconds, was the time that Floyd, an African-American man, was pinned under the knee of the white police officer even as he pleaded that he "could not breathe" - a cry that resonated with pain both within the USA and across the world. However, the victim, who was declared dead during ‘police arrest’, did not become one more addition to the vast number of citizens in the USA who lose their lives during arrest/pre-trial detention. Floyd’s death triggered a nationwide protest under the banner ‘Black Lives Matter’ that soon spread across the world.
The Justice in Policing Act 2020 bill introduced on Monday by leading US Democratic party legislators included Senators Chuck Schumer and Kamala Harris and many members of the Congressional Black Caucus. It recommends sweeping changes that will enable US law to reduce the scope for police brutality and make the law enforcers more accountable for their transgressions against vulnerable demography—in this case the ‘black’ American.
However, given the deeply polarised political situation in the US—with the Senate controlled by the Republican party and President Donald Trump's loyalists and the House with the Democrats—it appears unlikely that the police reforms bill, as it now stands, will be quickly approved by the lawmakers.
However, what is significant both for the USA and democracies world over is the manner in which citizen outrage has catalysed the elected representatives to review and redress the law in relation to the police and the use of force against the citizens. The old dictum that the accused or a suspect is deemed to be innocent till proven guilty through due process of law has been stood on its head in recent decades and each country has its own history of police excesses and the targeting of certain minorities.
In another radical development, the Minneapolis city council has pledged to completely disband the police force and replace it with a more empathetic and "transformative new model of public safety"—but this is still a work in progress. Bringing about a transformation in an institution like the police is complex and contested and the larger socio-cultural ecosystem and deeply embedded power structures will have to be revisited with appropriate political resolve. These conditions do not exist in a Trump-led USA where stoking white supremacy and race bigotry has become an electoral tool.
The American experience has been particularly traumatic for the black citizen subjected to a history of slavery and related subjugation and this has been evocatively captured by American novelist James Baldwin ( 1924 - 87) who dwells with searing honesty on the plight of the "American negro born in that glittering republic": “The moment you were born, since you don't know any better, every stick and stone, every face is white, and since you have not seen a mirror, you suppose that you are too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5 or 6 or 7 to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians—when you were rooting for Gary Cooper—that the Indians were you! It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace, and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you."
Race relations have been deeply troubled in the USA and despite the valiant efforts of the liberal spectrum to reject racism and discrimination on the basis of colour and ethnicity, white privilege is an existential reality in American society in as much as elite groups are similarly enabled universally—from ancient times to the current moment in Minneapolis.
The transmutation of the US police is an institutional characteristic, wherein the primary tasking of the local police in the American south, prior to the Civil War, was to apprehend slaves who had escaped and return them to their owners—or shoot them if they fled. Thus, the racism on display in the George Floyd case was not an exception but a Pavlovian reflex, where the African American is more likely to be subjected to police intimidation than the white peer. To extend the Baldwin formulation, there was no equitable place in US society prior to the civil rights movement for the "nigger"—except as being inferior to the white majority.
The latter servitude imposed on certain communities and the inequities heaped on them by state and society is a reality that the Indian subcontinent is more than familiar with both in a historical and modern context and this can be extended to the policing domain as well.
The Indian police mantle has been inherited from the colonial period (1857 - 1947) where there were no citizens but ‘subjects’—subjugated to advance the imperial interest by a white minority through a workforce of Indians who had been co-opted in different domains. The local thanedar/darogah ensured compliance through intimidation and fear and this trait remains deeply ingrained in the institutional psyche. India is in urgent need of its own police reforms and the Prakash Singh advocacy is highly laudable but, alas, remains ignored.
A former director general (DG) of the Uttar Pradesh police, Prakash Singh moved the Supreme Court through a public interest litigation (PIL) to bring about radical police reforms, and a 2006 ruling directed state governments to set up new institutions that would protect the integrity of the khaki force and improve their working conditions even while insulating them from political interference. However, these have not been implemented in letter and spirit and both the quality of the HR inducted in the police, their training and infrastructure support and institutional orientation remains below the median.
Loyalty to the political masters, especially in relation to state police is the more dominant strand than abiding by the spirit of the law and this was noted as far back as 1979 in the National Police Commission report that observed: “The relationship that existed between the police and the foreign power before Independence was allowed to continue with the only change that the foreign power was substituted by the political party in power.” Four decades later, Prakash Singh noted in a 2019 comment with anguish: “Are the police today really protecting the people or they are still obsessed with protecting the rulers and safeguarding their interests?”
India regrettably has remained indifferent to its Floyd moments and related law enforcement inadequacies for decades, despite the earnest efforts of many resolute citizens. Ask Prakash Singh, MP Nathanael and others of this persuasion.
Specific to the current US situation, Baldwin points to the way ahead. In his writings, this impassioned author cum activist noted: "What white people have to do is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place. Because I am not a nigger. I'm a man. If I'm not the nigger here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why (emphasis added). And the future of the country depends on that. Whether or not it is able to ask that question."
To their credit, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues have asked that question. Do black lives really matter? The American people have to decide on the answer–in the November polls.
(The author is Director, Society for Policy Studies, New Delhi. Views expressed are personal.)
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