Even as police in Ferguson, Missouri, continued to face a barrage of criticism for the August 9 shooting of unarmed African-American Michael Brown (18) and the subsequent armed crackdown against largely peaceful protestors in that town, a senior Indian-American law enforcement official has defended the police’s use of lethal force in a variety of situations, prompting further controversy on social and other media.
Sunil Dutta, who serves with the Los Angeles Police Department and is a Professor of homeland security at Colorado Technical University, said in a Washington Post article, “Here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you.”
Alluding to the killing of Mr. Brown, Mr. Dutta said, “A teenager is fatally shot by a police officer; the police are accused of being bloodthirsty, trigger-happy murderers; riots erupt. This, we are led to believe, is the way of things in America. It is also a terrible calumny; cops are not murderers.”
However, Glen Greenwald, who worked with whistleblower Edward Snowden to publish articles concerning surveillance programmes of the National Security Agency, hit out at Mr. Dutta’s apparent support for the use of lethal force, saying on Twitter, “In a healthily functioning country, any police officer who admitted to thinking this way would be instantly fired.”
Similarly writer Joanna Rothkopf said in a critical article on Salon , “The problem with institutionalised positions of authority is exactly what Mr. Dutta accidentally demonstrated — individuals in dominant social positions think that they are absolved of any criminal or otherwise malevolent impulse just because of their title.”
In his article, Mr. Dutta did admit that some police were “corrupt and bully cops exist..[and] that some officers engage in unprofessional and arrogant behaviour; sometimes they behave like criminals themselves.”
Yet his critics pointed out that in addition to the Brown case that is currently rocking Ferguson and causing a nationwide furore, U.S. police officers have been linked in the past to a long list of deadly attacks on unarmed civilians including the 2011 pepper spray attack against peaceful student protestors at the University of California, Davis, the police chokehold on Eric Garner (43) of New York, who subsequently died, and the 2013 killing of >Miriam Carey (34) driving around Capitol Hill with her child in the car.
