We’ve been here before. In the first hours of 2009, police boarded a Bay Area Rapid Transit train, responding to a call about a fight. They detained … - Kristian Williams

Riots are communities defining what counts as police brutality and to set the limits of authority. It is here, not in the courts, that our rights are established.

Violence is an inherent part of policing. The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry. When persuasion, indoctrination, moral pressure and incentive measures all fail — there are the police. In the field of social control, police are specialists in violence. They are armed, trained and authorized to use force. With varying degrees of subtlety, this colors their every action. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent. Despite the official insistence to the contrary, it is clear that police organizations, as well as individual officers, hold a large share of the responsibility for the prevalence of police brutality. Police agencies are organizationally complex, and brutality may be promoted or accommodated within any (or all) of its various dimensions. Both formal and informal aspects of an organization can help create a climate in which unnecessary violence is tolerated, or even encouraged. Among the formal aspects contributing to violence are the organization’s official policies, its identified priorities, the training it offers its personnel, its allocation of resources, and its system of promotions, awards, and other incentives. When these aspects of an organization encourage violence — whether or not they do so intentionally, or even consciously — we can speak of brutality being promoted “from above.” This understanding has been well applied to the regimes of certain openly thuggish leaders —Bull Connor, Richard Daley, Frank Rizzo, Daryl Gates, Rudolph Giuliani, Joe Arpaio (to name just a few) — but it need not be so overt to have the same effect. On the other hand, when police culture and occupational norms support the use of unnecessary violence, we can describe brutality as being supported “from below.” Such informal conditions are a bit harder to pin down, but they certainly have their consequences. We may count among their elements insularity, indifference to the problem of brutality, generalized suspicion, and the intense demand for personal respect. One of the first sociologists to study the problem of police violence, William Westley, described these as “basic occupational values,” more important than any other determinant of police behavior.

Police violence is very frequently over-determined — promoted from above and supported from below. But where it is not actually encouraged, sometimes even where individuals (officers or administrators) disapprove of it, excessive and illegal force are nevertheless nearly always condoned. Among police administrators there is the persistent and well-documented refusal to discipline violent officers; and among the cops themselves, there is the “code of silence.” Police brutality does not just happen; it is allowed to happen. It is tolerated by the police themselves, those on the street and those in command. It is tolerated by prosecutors, who seldom bring charges against violent cops, and by juries, who rarely convict. It is tolerated by the civil authorities, the mayors and the city councils, who do not use their influence to challenge police abuses. But why? The answer is simple: police brutality is tolerated because it is what people with power want. [...] It is merely the normal functioning of the institution; it is just that the apparent conflict between the law and police practices may not be so important as we tend to assume. The two may, at times, be at odds, but this is of little concern so long as the interests they serve are essentially the same. The police may violate the law, as long as they do so in the pursuit of ends that people with power generally endorse, and from which such people profit.