Reflecting On Police Brutality

It was the spring of ‘74 when my student peers and I were on the tail end of a group excursion through southern Spain, across Gibraltar’s Strait and into the exotic northern tip of Africa. I remember lots of greenery and mountains and the fascinating sights and sounds inside Tangier, but one small thing that happened somewhere between the time we viewed the landscape we traversed and our time inside our destination city stands out in my mind forevermore. Our bus had briefly stopped on the street of a town. I was looking out the window when I glimpsed a child, looking poor and ragged, not so old. He ran down the block with an orange in his hand, an older man behind him in pursuit. Quickly I observed that the man was a type of law enforcement officer, for he wielded a long strong stick which he proceeded to use on the unfortunate lad once he had caught up to him. The event was very near our bus, so I could watch with growing horror as this country’s version of a cop unleashed brutality on a fellow human being, a boy who was no doubt simply starved for food. I saw the heavy stick fall repeatedly till it struck the boy’s ear and blood gushed out. . . I would later view ornate gold buildings in Tangier, see colorful hand-crafted clothes and rugs, and smell the aromas of strange delightful foods, but beneath all that wonder was the singular event that stayed inside my brain. I think of my own country - free, so very free, with laws against “this kind of thing” that had appalled me; a land so free that gangs of filthy evil men, even sometimes with the help of the police, had in days of yore lynched the black man for crimes as meager as the taking of that orange, or worse, for no crime at all! Hateful mobs had beat and hanged men and women, even children, In the midst of the beauty of fragrant magnolia trees . . . Civil Rights has done a lot to eradicate these horrors, yet even now, a remnant of the Ku Klux Klan mentality exists inside the minds of some, and even in the minds of some we trust to uphold the law. I cannot know the thoughts that enter the minds of law enforcers who think they are confronting a person who they’ve deemed a criminal. I cannot know their fear when they see, perhaps, what they suppose to be a weapon. We cannot know their backgrounds or if they harbor prejudice against another color or against the lower class. The court and the jury decide the fate of those who have used what our society may see as undue force. God alone will judge them in the end. We, as citizens of all the world, must be aware that violence can be used when the threat of it against themselves is perceived by our police. How sad to think that some of those who serve to offer us protection , whether out of ignorance, fear, or prejudice, are using brutality so haphazardly. Those in my own country who have seen or even experienced police brutality must have felt the same horror I felt the day I saw a child beaten in a foreign land. Who am I to judge another country when mine is also mired still in sin? God help us all to fight against the inane and unjust cruelty of those who practice police brutality.