When I peruse the news and attempt to absorb the current state of the world I am reminded, disturbingly, of Judge Dredd.
Our future?
For those of you who don’t know, Judge Dredd is a British comic which began in 1977 and is in print to this day. It focuses on the titular character who is a judge of the Justice Department; itself a paramilitary governmental and police force which controls society in a not too distant future. As a street Judge, they are empowered to arrest, convict, sentence and execute at their discretion. Each Judge is a distillation of a legal system into a single individual. Corrupted individuals are of course a possibility in the role of a judge and this possibility is dealt with in the comics. The main character of Judge Dredd is consistently depicted as a hero although many lines and distinctions are blurred as the stories progress. It is difficult to ascribe the title of hero to a member of what is essentially a futuristic Sicherheitsdienst. Many commentators draw associations between the comic’s Justice Department and the Judges with authoritarianism and fascist rule.
The atavistic return
One is reminded of Paul Verhoeven’s treatment of the government and society in his film adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers which underlies the essentially fascistic and xenophobic core of a divisive society built around a premise of an us versus them narrative (narratives like which are at constant play in our own current political climate, and are inevitable under the traditional models of policing). We find the characters in the movie attractive and wish to see them accomplish their goals and survive even though the world they live in is essentially fascistic. In a similar way, Judge Dredd follows a character which we may like and admire but the uncomfortable cloud of arbitrary street justice without right of appeal, jury or otherwise, hangs over the enjoyment, highlighting a perversity within our appreciation.
I am reminded of the Judges of that comic book whenever I see the news today where stories of police officers taking matters into their own hands with dubious cause are becoming all too frequent. It is a gruesome travesty that black men and women are habitually targeted by police for arbitrary reasons and put in a situation where they might lose their lives or be robbed of their dignity. One’s blackness can be cause enough for prejudiced eyes and it must be acknowledged that racial profiling is an institutional prejudice propagated in the very training and culture of the police. Specifically, in the recent case of Sandra Bland we see a police officer pull her over because of a so-called traffic infraction but in reality she was reacting to his tail-gaiting and because she didn’t pay this police officer the homage which they so often desire; fear and humiliating deference, he violently demanded it of her, setting off a concatenation of actions resulting in her death.
In another incident at the University of Cincinnati a police officer has been charged with the murder of Samuel Dubose, a black man, He shot him in the head after stopping him for not having a front license plate (which is a redundant requirement no longer required in many jurisdictions and certainly not offence enough for someone to be pulled over).
So many lives are lost because of trivialities and an underlying disdain for the sight of black skin. Racism is a problem that is multifaceted and ingrained within every layer of society but in one area that should be addressed, for the betterment of everybody, is in Policing. The prosecutor in the case of Dubose, Joe Deters said of the police officer: “He purposefully killed him. He should never have been a police officer.” This statement should be applied more widely; “who should be a police officer? Many people, white people in general, like to think that honest decent people are the ones who choose that line of work, people who ‘want to give back to the community’. A more cliché statement could scarcely be conjured. But what is the reality? People don’t become police officers out of altruism just as patriotism alone is rarely enough for someone to join the military.
Social order and the desire to uphold it translates into a desire to maintain social distinction, community division and economic separation; just think of the case a few months back where a pool party was reported to police and consequently brutally supressed by said police for no better reason than that there were numerous black teenagers present and the community was largely white. Even though the young white teenagers of the community invited those black children, their bigoted parents and neighbours took offence. It takes a certain kind of person to want to stalk the streets with a gun at their hip and regulate the masses. Preventing crime is rarely the function of police in this day and age, if it ever was. Police are a reactionary entity and they are fuelled just as much by sentiment and politics as they are by crime (it is no coincidence that police forces are usually politically tied to reactionary politics. Just like the military they are most often tied at the hip with republican/conservative political entities who often run ‘law and order’ campaigns). Their de facto function is putting people in their place, that place being where the police themselves think they should be, or at least where the people signing their paychecks decree, independent of ones rights or the laws of the land. This is all accomplished with a violent narcissistic sense of entitlement. Take a recent case of a passenger in a car in British Columbia being pulled over by an RCMP officer because the man protested, within the confines of the car he was in, against the police officer’s distracted driving. The RCMP constable took umbrage at the mans expression while simultaneously admitting his own fault and then harassed the driver with the threat of calling a compliance officer to make sure the vehicle they were driving was road worthy; a purely spiteful act.
Protecting and serving….who?
Is that what we expect of police, for them to have carte blanche to do as they wish during the course of their ‘work’ and do we think it only fair and just that they should be able to harass and threaten the citizenry if they aren’t given a degree of respect bordering on fanatical? We should expect greater discipline from people bearing so much responsibility. The old Spiderman adage applies, ‘with great power comes great responsibility’, and police are rarely that responsible but they are exceptionally skilled in covering each others asses.
In Judge Dredd there isn’t much overt racism from the judges toward the various citizens of Mega City One (the setting of the comics) and to be fair to them the Judges receive a degree of training which dwarfs their contemporary real world counterparts and they tolerate a much smaller margin of error among their members by and large but its still a future that none of us would wish for. Yet when we look at the world around us and compare it to Mega City One there are increasing parallels. In Mega City one, unemployment is almost universal as automation by robots has replaced virtually all traditional labour, and the robots, though largely sentient are reduced to a second class status (not unlike much of the foreign workers and immigrants who provide so much cheap labour in our economies). There is a psychological malady in the Judge Dredd comics called Future Shock when the pace of life overwhelms an individual to the point that they lose their sanity and go on killing sprees. Does this not sound incredibly and disturbingly familiar?
I like the Judge Dredd Comics but the more I read of them the more the hair on the back of my head stands up. It is not uncommon for poignant writing, especially of the science fiction variety to describe situations, which end up being a contemporary reality after it has been written but sometimes I worry about how prophetic these comics might be.
If only she could be cloned, and then everyone would not fear being pulled over or arrested because it would be Beyoncé and questions of respect would be unnecessary. Bow down bitches.
Sophia Slap 