THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 3, 1996 TAG: 9601030046
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL ANFT
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
IF THERE IS anything at all of value to come out of the O.J. Simpson trial/fiasco - and admittedly, it is doubtful - it could be a resurgence of interest in police practices. The Mark Fuhrmans of the world, who intimidate and brutalize in the name of order, are not as exceptional, at least in some quarters, as we would like to believe.
In fact, as the Simpson trial showed, the Los Angeles Police Department's abuses are systematic, the product of a department that has long eschewed basic due process in favor of racism, violence and results at all costs.
None of which particularly surprises New York University law professor Paul Chevigny. His 1965 study, ``Police Power,'' was one of the first outside analytical peeks into the usually walled-off realm of police brutality (and has since served as a primer on the subject for both criminologists and activists).
Chevigny's latest glimpse behind the badge, ``Edge of the Knife'' (The New Press, 273 pp., $25) confirms the obvious: Bad cops are still with us. And their victims tend to be those on the socioeconomic margins.
``The police not only keep order,'' Chevigny writes, ``they also `reproduce order.'. . . When the police decide to stop an expensive car because the driver is of the `wrong' race or class, they are reading the car and its driver as (being) `out of order.' The police put such people in their proper places, letting them know that they do not meet the standards of the respectable.''
Although Chevigny spills much ink during a compare-and-contrast discussion of the police departments of Los Angeles and New York (the subject of ``Police Power''), his examination is global - or at least hemispheric. The author explores the administrative makeup, social history and police approaches of the forces in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Mexico City; and Kingston, Jamaica, and finds that the poor fare poorly with the authorities in all places, but not necessarily for the same reasons.
In crowded Sao Paulo, for example, torture has long been accepted as a means of ``cleansing'' ghettoes of potential troublemakers. Chevigny ties this to Brazil's long modern history of military dictatorship and the feared ``PM,'' or military police, as well as the duality in due process that protects the middle and upper classes and all but damns the lower ones. The cumulative effect of the PM's attitudes and policies resulted in 1,470 civilian killings by the police in 1992, nearly four per day. Police accounted for one in every six homicides.
Less shocking but still outrageous are the workings of urban police in neighboring Argentina. Torture and police-chase murders still occur. Again, Chevigny asserts, modern history plays a role. ``(Historians) trace the use of torture in the 20th century to the onset of the modern dictatorships in 1930,'' he writes. Although Buenos Aires' gendarmes account for a much lower number of killings than Sao Paulo's, one in 10 homicides in Buenos Aires was committed by the police.
Mexico City, meanwhile, is helped by a stronger democratic tradition. Even though suspected dissidents in the 1980s and narcotics fugitives in the '90s were strong-armed and sometimes killed (while street-level corruption is still endemic), the city's judicial police have toned down their formerly aggressive nature at the behest of the federal government, which sees the behavior of its police force as a test of its own legitimacy.
Closer to home, Chevigny is unsparing of the LAPD's institutional condoning of police violence. Noting that the city pays between $17 million and $20 million annually to settle brutality cases ``as a way of doing business,'' the author adds that stratification by class and discrimination by ethnicity have long been part of the LAPD's unwritten manual.
Despite all of the bleak evidence, Chevigny gives reason for hope. Police homicides and anecdotal accounts of brutality are notably down in the six cities studied here. Chevigny credits international human rights organizations, local neighborhood groups and imperfect-but-helpful civilian review boards (as in New York) with helping to change police behavior. Kinder and gentler ``community policing'' appears to have seized the day among enlightened administrators. MEMO: Michael Anft is a Baltimore-based writer and critic. by CNB