Police abuse is government-sponsored terror.
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Police homicide and abuse of citizens while in police custody has skyrocketed since the release in 2006 of the abuse photos from Abu Ghirab.
While this correlation is strictly anecdotal at this time, I have seen and observed the "piling on" phenomenon that occurs among humans when they are exposed to violence against designated "others". The need to belong and be "part of" a movement that is larger than one's self overrides the critical faculties of the mammalian brain under certain types of social stress and strife.
Plenty of research exists in the media violence literature to suggest that exposure to gratuituous violence has some, but very limited effects, on violent, aggressive human behavior. Forensic archaelogists studying the rates of violence from ancient times to the present day clearly show a pattern of decreasing, not increasing, violence from ancient to modern times.
Yet the research goes on and the nagging, intuitive questioning continues.
Violation of one's perceived self -- one's perceived identity either socially or individually -- represents trauma of a specific kind. Once trauma occurs, it seems that the human animal overrides its impulse to be kind or compassionate towards others, instead becoming violent, aggressive and predisposed to attack the targets identified through social and situational messaging.
All this being said, one must not overlook the kind of training that members of the military and the police endure that is designed to, "save lives." This training is by its very nature traumatic and forces the individual to re-identify themselves as a human being under certain situations. If no training, poor training or no memory exists to deal with a traumatic situation at hand, the human being will default into impulsive, aggressive and potentially lethal violence in order to save their "identity" from the obvious threat occuring in real time.
PTSD sufferers understand my point here, but most people do not suffer from any sort of identifiable symptoms of PTSD and those that do, particularly those who have been "trained" (i.e., "programmed," or "brainwashed") enter into a state of profound denial as to the nature of what it is they are doing and why they are doing it.
Police are trained to protect and serve the public, or so we have been told. The incidents in Greece and most recently in Oakland suggest that "service to the public" has been supplanted with a very different message: "control the suspect." In this new paradigm, the police become militarized and every citizen becomes a potential suspect.
Continued>>>
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