The Cultural Dimension of Violence as a Reasonable, Legiti­mate, or Effective Response to Public Offenses

The really fundamental sine qua non of law in any society—primitive or civilized—is the legitimate use or physical coercion by a socially authorized agent. Truly, as Jhering emphasized,...

The systematic and impersonal application of force in the maintenance of individual rights and in the public interest is the central substance of law... (Redfield 1967: 14).

Most discussions in this country about the legitimate use of force by persons who ex­ercise police powers really have to do with examples where the violence used as a means of coercion is an acceptable form inappropriately or excessively applied. Allegations of physical torture involving police officers and the use of unacceptable means of violence appear to be relatively rare. The usual terms employed are unnecessary force, excessive force, police brutality, and, on occasion, physical or psychological torture. Their terms have somewhat different meanings and different people may use the same term with very different meanings. To understand how “normal” or legitimate police violence is cultur­ally shaped and defined, it is useful first to distinguish the types of violence that are ac­ceptable and formal/informal rules, if any, defining the types of person and circum­stances against whom various forms of violence can be used. Although all societies seem to have rules, there is clearly much cross-cultural variability on what kinds of violence are acceptable and what the rules for proper violence are, as the following examples at­tempt to show.

There was once a strong “lawless” man among the Ellery Creek band of Australian aborigines. He intimidated everyone and nobody individually dared to confront him with his crimes. According to Hoebel (1972: 305):

It was not until the warriors of three communities (one his own) were convened under a leader who got them together that action was taken. They agreed on his death. But even with this mustering of force it was not done by them directly. The women were “ordered” to lure him into the bush, engage him in intercourse, seize him, and kill him. They did it with a vengeance. His own mother-in-law snared him in the sexual embrace. Then he was pounced on by the rest of the females who attacked him with their digging sticks. (from here Hoebel quotes Roheim, 1942)

“First they pushed his eyes out and then they poked the heavy sticks right through his body, through his nostrils, through his head, etc., until they killed him.”

As gruesome as that may sound, much more “civilized” peoples can be much more “savage”:

More primitive prison systems employed more obviously barbaric methods. Torture was common practice in the Far East, and to extract admissions from suspects Indian and Oriental police used a variety of methods, including the use of hot oil in the ears and nose, slivers of bamboo pushed under the nails, the use of the bastinado to break knee and ankle joints, and confinement in a cell containing quicklime (Symons 1966: 31).

And, also suggestive of cultural continuity despite increasing modernity is the fol­lowing:

In 1980, officers in Bhagalpur police station in India held as many as 30 suspected dacoits (bandits) on the floor and put out their eyes with sharpened bicycle spokes and acid....The incident was confirmed by the chief minister of the Bihar state, as well as by the prime minister...who publicly promised a thorough investigation (Bayley 1995: 262).

The thorough investigation was in all likelihood intended to pleasure adherents of of­ficial ideology, much of which is imported and of recent Western vintage, and it proba­bly concluded without practical issue, because:

...the public may excuse in the police what it would excuse in itself.

“Primitive” and “barbaric” used to describe means of legitimate coercion used by other peoples, both today and in earlier times, invoke moral and/or evolutionary assump­tions that are themselves products of particular times, cultures, and societies. What these and several following examples indicate is only that the types of violence employed are limited by the physical/technical means available, and, as regards, an increasing number of potential of means, by preferences for or against different ways of inflicting bodily harm. It is difficult to provide an objective basis for thinking that jabbing sticks through a person's body is somehow less reasonable or primitive or barbaric than pouring hot oil in one's nose or ears, or that it is less reasonable or more primitive or barbaric than putting out one's eyes with bicycle spokes and acid.

Inuit (Eskimo) traditionally limited legitimate use of force in the settlement of all but the most egregious public offenses to boxing or wrestling contests, or song duels, carried out by the disputants in the company of onlookers; although death might result from the wrestling matches, it doesn't seem to have been an expected outcome (Hoebel 1972: 92­93). The only violence exercised by a privileged party is that involving lethal force, usu­ally but not always in response to multiple homicides, and the methods of choice seem limited to “steel, thong, or shot” (Hoebel 1972: 89). A case is reported where a man known to have killed many other Inuit was taken into custody by white traders:

The man had been publicly whipped by the whaling captains at Herschel on injunction of the local missionary, because he had exposed a baby to die. All the Eskimos had reacted with disgust to such unheard-of punishment, for, to their mind, “to whip a man does not cure him” (Hoebel 1972: 89­90).

Back at the other end of the scale of social complexity, “torture” by Japanese police authorities is said to have:

...included prolonged isolation, lack or privacy, interrupted sleep, complete dependence on custodial staff, even for permission to wash or lie down, lights kept on all night, and irregular and unannounced interrogations. Force seems rarely to have been applied, but it was often threatened (Bayley 1995: 263).

The point of the examples thus far is to show that the forms legitimate violence can take are numerous and not necessarily associated with any developmental or moral con­tinuum. Much of the force used in the examples cited above would today be called cruel and unusual or “torture,” by most Western Europeans and North Americans, but even that definition, we have suggested, is quirky, historically and culturally contingent, and so subject to changes that could go either way. Consider the transformation going on in Britain, for example, in light of the thirty-year-old statement by Banton (in Skolnick 1996):

In Edinburgh...violence means to a policeman, I suspect, either fists or stones, or at the worst, assault with sticks or iron bars. It does not mean guns or knives.

British police generally did not escalate to the means of violence and even their abuse of force followed Banton’s description:

Richard Culley, a seventeen-year-old black youth, was attending the Putney Common fun-fair with his sister in May 1983 when British police officers grabbed him and took him between two trailers where he was thrown on the ground and beaten. His allegations were denied by the police until a man came forward with photos... (Bayley 1995: 261).

But times and police responses had changed sufficiently such that two years later it was clear that police expectations going into an incident were very different from 1966:

In Britain, five-year-old John Shorthouse was shot by a West Midland’s police officer during an armed raid in 1985 on his parents’ home.

In England, then, shooting has gone from being a form of intragroup violence con­sidered by nearly everyone to be beyond the pale to one that is increasingly, albeit reluc­tantly, used in response to changing social conditions, including cultural diversity through large scale immigration, and normative standards.

Like most Western police violence we hear of, the abuses and changes in British force remains constrained and is limited to fire arms, club, or other impact weapons, chemical aerosols, or bodily force involving hands and feet. In the case of the Rodney King beating, for example, there was considerable dispute about whether or not the kinds and extent of force used was legitimate. Note that the much-viewed use of the electric stun device was often portrayed as something verging on, if not in fact being, torture. Had police poured boiling oil into his nose and ears, or even used a cutting instrument, there can be no doubt that even the original Simi Valley jury would have overwhelm­ingly found the officers guilty of excessive force and worse, regardless of what King might have done. So, the issue wasn't so much whether specific means of inflicting pain were acceptable, but rather whether they were used in an appropriate manner at a reason­able level. Even in Western societies, broadly defined, what constitutes an appropriate manner of applying acceptable force differs considerably between and within societies.

Analysis of data collected in Jamaica, Brazil, and Argentina suggests that police shootings are being used as a form of “social control”... So common are shootings by the police in Brazil that some officers are identified in the media as the “Pistoleiros.” In addition, Brazil's notorious “death squads,” in which off-duty police are believed to participate, have operated for years, their presumed intent being to deter criminal activity by repeat offenders (Bayley 1995: 264).

At best, it seems that condemnation of such actions occurs only after particularly bru­tal killings, such as those of children or nuns, and it is difficult to find convincing evi­dence that such behavior by police is broadly unacceptable to most people in most socio­economic strata, as policy, except on a case-by-case basis.

San Francisco is a volatile city when it comes to issues of police violence. Over the past quarter century the authors have observed firsthand a number of marked changes in how the public and various branches of government generally react to police cases in­volving the use of force. The changes are politically controversial at every level of soci­ety and government. Behind these changes are newsworthy incidents, where police mis­conduct is the immediate issue, and a host of political and legal maneuvers that follow. The differing sides can interpret the same events to be victories for human, civil, or group rights or harbingers of social disintegration and catastrophe. The positions of ac­tual people cover a broader spectrum of possibilities, but from the imagery and action one knows there is a real social unrest and political venom involved. The literature on police violence documents an entrenched social problem that has existed since the 1960s (e.g., Lipset 1974; Locke 1995: 133).

During the entire time, it has been acknowledged that social and political problems related to acts of police coercion are tied to several other intractable issues. Frequently the literature presents a case for declining legitimacy, where civil authority in general and police authority in particular are no longer accepted by broad segments of the citizenry.

The anthropological concepts of ethnocentrism and cultural relativity are used by an­thropologists in such settings, it seems, mostly to identify sources of cultural misunder­standing and conflict that result in physical violence. This is similar to the way it is used in the domestic literature by non-anthropologists. We take a different approach here in order to look at culture as something that shapes police violence and shapes public per­ception of the “legitimacy” of such acts. In the police brutality genre, significant work has been done by sociologists on the troublesome normative dimension of laws, includ­ing analyses of the normative assumptions contained in statutes governing police use of physical coercion (e.g., Chambliss and Seidman 1971: 275-276). But typically the focus in most recent research avoids qualitative and holistic styles of inquiry in order to achieve tightly focused, fundable, hypothesis-testing approaches.

Ethnocentrism and cultural relativity are used in the literature as “root causes” of so­cially patterned intolerance and misunderstanding, but are not often employed as analyti­cal concepts per se. The lack of well-developed ethnographic and comparative traditions limits the concepts' use, partly because culture-based concepts seem almost to require an ethnographic or “community study” type approach to yield thick descriptions rather than superficial or very narrow spectrum data on cultural systems. The other major empirical schools in police violence research have nevertheless demonstrated beyond dispute that it is socially and culturally patterned and linked to other important and emotionally charged issues, i.e., problems associated with race, ethnicity, and gender in particular, and those involving human and civil rights and the philosophy of multiculturalism in general.

Our discussion has bounced between macro- and micro-level considerations, because the issue of police violence is intimately bound up with these and other events occurring in the United States and abroad. In the United States, issues of race, ethnicity, multicul­turalism, and institutional legitimacy are paramount. This has not always been the case in America and, today, while many other countries have the same problems, their impor­tance is often eclipsed by other issues that are relatively less pressing for us—such as es­tablishing the basic institutions necessary to create a civil order and securing a social and political environment where considerations of basic human and civil rights can begin.

References

Bayley, David. (1995). Police brutality abroad. In And Justice for All: Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of Force, edited by David Geller and Hans Toch. Washington, D.C.: Police Executive Research Forum.

Bohannan, Paul. (1967). The differing realms of the law. In Law and Warfare, edited by Paul Bohannan. Garden City: Natural History Press.

Chambliss, William J., and Robert B. Seidman. (1971). Law, Order, and Power. Read­ing: Addison Wesley.

Davis, Kenneth Culp. (1975). Police Discretion. St. Paul: West Publishing Company. Glendon, Mary, Michael Gordon, and Christopher Osakwe. (1982). Comparative Legal Traditions. St. Paul: West Publishing Company.

Gouldner, Alvin. (1964). Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. New York: The Free Press. Green, Vera M. (1981). Blacks in the United States: The creation of an enduring people?

In Persistent Peoples. George Pierre Castile and Gilbert Kushner, editors, pp. xv- xxii. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Hoebel, E. Adamson. (1972/1954). The Law of Primitive Man. New York: Atheneum Press.

Kushner, Gilbert. (1973). Immigrants from India in Israel: Planned Change in an Ad­ministered Community. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press.

Lipset, Seymour M. (1974). Why cops hate liberals—and vice versa. In The Police Community, edited by Jack Goldsmith and Sharon S. Goldsmith, pp. 183-196. Pa­cific Palisades: Palisades Publishers.

Locke, Hubert G. (1995). The color of law and the issue of color: Race and the abuse of police power. In And Justice for All: Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of Force, edited by William A. Geller and Hans Toch, pp. 133-150. Washington, D.C.: Police Executive Research Forum.

Myers, David. (1993). Social Psychology. New York: McGraw Hill.

Redfield, Robert. (1967). Primitive law. In Law and Warfare, edited by Paul Bohannan. Garden City: Natural History Press.

Rothstein, Paul. (1981). Evidence. St. Paul: West Publishing Company.

Skolnick, Jerome. (1966). Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Soci­ety. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Spicer, Edward. (1980). The American Indians. London: Belknap Press.

Symons, Julian. (1966). A Pictorial History of Crime. New York: Bonanza Books.

Weber, Max. (1964/1947). The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, edited by Talcott Parsons. New York: Macmillan Free Press.