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FREEDOMWAYS FIRST QUARTER 1986

against a New York City policeman. Although three white, middle-aged witnesses who live in the same neighborhood supported the young man’s word against that of a white policeman, the presiding judge ruled that he believed the policeman’s story. The judge found the Negro lad guilty and sentenced the youth to a 10-day suspended sentence.

Evidence unearthed by eye witnesses, CORE and other local civil rights groups generally is unavailing because the police, the newspapers, the major magazines have all tried to deny or camouflage the issues of inequality.

The issues of police mistreatment or the inequality of law enforcement popularity called police brutality force the consideration of more basic questions. What kind of government would permit such inequality in law enforcement? to deny the existence of police brutality is an attempt to deny the existence of racism and discrimination. For police brutality is merely the popular way of acknowledging the existence of discrimination in law enforcement. Police brutality is rooted in the cultural order and derives its main influence from the society.

The importance of the police brutality issue is not frequency or occurrence of police mistreatment. Police brutality is just one kind of brutality that black adults receive after they have received their brutalization in schools as children and at the same time that they are made brutal by all facets of society.

From the cradle to the grave then, the black people varying degrees are brutalized by a system which speaks in high sounding terms about democracy to hide its despicable reality. The system is one of pronounced racial inequality and exploitation which degrades and dehumanizes victims and perpetrators alike.

That this system of brutalization should trigger the kind of black retaliatory destruction should surprise no one. If continually degraded, dehumanized and brutalized by the system and its legal machinery, the words of the late Langston Hughes should be a firm warning:

“Negroes-sweet and docile, meek, humble, and kind
Beware the day they change their minds.”