US police protect property not people: Analyst

Press TV has interviewed John Steppling, an author and playwright, to discuss police violence in the United States.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: We pretty much acknowledge the fact that police brutality exists in the United States, it has been increasing over the past few years. In your opinion where is it stemming from?

Steppling: Well what has increased is an awareness of it. It has always been this way. The police are there to protect property and not people and that has always been true from colonial times until today. The first police departments were organized to track down runaway slaves.

So they essentially form and have always formed a kind of occupational army in neighborhoods, poor neighborhoods, especially black neighborhoods. One of the things that has changed is that they are more heavily armed today, more militarized but they are completely unaccountable. I was just glancing at some numbers; I think 76 unarmed people were shot in 2015. That does not even take into account people who died in custody and so forth.

You look at cases like Freddie Gray’s, the police claimed he died while handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser but in fact the autopsy revealed he had a snap spinal cord. You cannot snap your own spinal cord. So this is just egregious excess of violence and the police essentially have impunity, I mean almost no police officer has been charged in any of these deaths but I think if you talk to people in poor neighborhoods especially black Native American, they will tell you thus it has always been and there is a huge class divide. People in rich neighborhoods do not suffer police violence. You do not see the police depicted this way in Hollywood, in mainstream media. Police are depicted as heroic protectors of the innocent and so forth and it is not just true. I mean it is not just true and it never really has been true and you also have to look at incarceration rates and you see a whole pattern of social violence... Remember this is a country founded, built by slaves, founded on slavery.

So there is a whole fabric here and at the base of it is the people who are the descendants of slaves that built the country are the ones who are most vulnerable and most abused.

Press TV: You quite frankly put it that police brutality has always existed in the United States, what’s increased now is awareness with regards to what is happening. With increasing of that awareness, would you say that the American public’s faith in law enforcement has also reduced?

Steppling: Yes, I think perhaps it has. The Black Lives Matter movement and many of the activists involved in anti-death penalty movements and prison reforms, so forth, they have worked very hard and they have had an effect.

I think the general public is aware there are real questions now and the ability to videotape by cell phone should not be minimized. It is a little hard to argue like in the case of Eric Garner for example, it is hard to argue when you are watching a video tape of somebody being shot.

So yes, there is a number of ways in which public awareness has increased but there is also an intensification of class antagonism, class oppression, income inequality. There is a reason that a history of 500 years of social violence and oppression has resulted in a certain pathologized psyche in really poor neighborhoods. I mean people have nothing to lose.

So these are complex questions and if you look at the candidacy of Donald Trump, well for that matter Hillary Clinton too, you see the affluent, educated, white class tending to sort of willfully ignore, I think, the social injustice in this country.

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