When 57-year-old Sureshbhai Patel decided to take a walk across the quiet suburban neighbourhood in Madison, Alabama, where he had been staying with his son last week, he might not have expected to be lying in a hospital bed partially paralysed from spinal column injuries a few hours later after a violent encounter with the local police.
Yet this was precisely what happened after Eric Parker, a Madison police officer, who has now been arrested and faces suspension from the force for his unprovoked aggression toward a harmless individual, decided that smashing Mr. Patel’s face into the asphalt during a routine stop-and-frisk was the appropriate course of action under the circumstances.
The incident, whose disturbing violence was captured in the “dash-cam” video of the police officer’s car, resulted in justified outrage not only within the Indian-American community, but also elicited a sharp reaction from India’s Ministry of External Affairs, whose spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin made a direct reference to the use of “excessive force” by police.
Prejudice towards minorities The episode begs two questions. First, how often are Indians thus victimised by local law enforcement agencies in the U.S.? Second, “Excessive compared to what?”
The short answer to the first question is: not as frequently as other minorities such as African-Americans but often enough to suggest a similar prejudice.
The most recent, notable case of an Indian national left to the mercies of American law enforcement rule books was Devyani Khobragade, whose diplomatic credentials could not save her from an invasive strip search by the U.S. Marshals.
The former Deputy Consul General was not even the highest-ranking diplomatic officer to be handled in a manner that could be considered beyond the realm of normal protocol.
In December 2010 former Indian Ambassador to the U.S., Meera Shankar, was pulled out of a passenger security line and subjected to an intimate pat-down at Jackson-Evers International Airport in Mississippi, an incident that once again fomented anger in New Delhi.
In February 2011 Krittika Biswas, daughter of the Indian Vice-Consul in New York, was handcuffed publicly in her school, wrongfully arrested and detained with criminals overnight on allegations that she had sent obscene e-mails to a teacher, which were ultimately proven false.
In 2010, Vijay Kumar, an Indian filmmaker, was jailed for 20 days after he was arrested in Houston International Airport for carrying “Jihadi literature” in his baggage even though, ironically, the material was intended for a lecture he was set to deliver to the Hindu Congress of America on an interfaith discussion between Hindus and Muslims.
These and numerous other instances of law enforcement excesses against persons of South Asian origin, which have occurred since 9/11, arguably reflect deep prejudices linking the community to terrorists, to outsourcers who steal American jobs, or just plain outsiders to white Anglo-Saxon culture, the “purest” form of racial bias based on skin colour.
No protection Whatever the motivation of the law enforcement officials involved in each case, the cause for greatest alarm stems from the fact that local law enforcement in the U.S., whether the police, the Transportation Security Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service, or a similar entity, is in some senses a law unto itself and the federal government can be powerless to intervene in the process, even in the interest of bilateral harmony.
In the Patel case a State Department spokesperson meekly deferred to local investigators while extending an apology from the Secretary of State.
“ Any lasting effort to bring down the level of anti-minority violence will have to address the historical prejudices concerning minority communities in the U.S. ”
The fear for visitors such as Mr. Patel and Mr. Kumar, or residents such as Ms. Khobragade and Ms. Biswas, is that even where remedies and recourse exist in law for compensatory and punitive damages, there is far less to protect them from the actual acts of violence being inflicted in the first place, and that is a profound difference.
This brings us to the second question of “Excessive compared to what?”
If the bloodied nose that the frail Indian grandfather ended up with thanks to the judo-style throw-down by Parker is compared to the killing of unarmed and innocent African-American Akai Gurley by a New York police officer, then it was not excessive.
If the spinal column injury received by Mr. Patel is compared to the six bullet wounds of unarmed Michael Brown in a lethal encounter with white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, then it was not excessive.
If the trauma inflicted upon Mr. Patel by the police is compared to the shooting dead of Miriam Carey, Trayvon Martin or Eric Garner , all African-Americans who were unarmed when they died, then it was not excessive.
Yet excessive it was, and in some ways Mr. Patel may have been more fortunate than many African-Americans who have found themselves in a similar situation.
Indeed, it is possible that an even worse fate could have befallen Mr. Patel had he not clearly said “India” several times in reply to the police officers advancing menacingly upon him, even as he tried to explain “No English.”
That the police initially believed he might be African-American could not be ruled out since the 9-1-1 call alerting authorities to a “suspicious” Mr. Patel complained of a “skinny black guy” peering into neighbourhood garages.
Mr. Patel may have also had a lucky escape when he reached into his pocket at some point to pull out a handkerchief, an action that would in many a case have resulted in instant death by gunfire in the land where the right to bear arms is enshrined in the constitution.
Excessive force So what is it that drives police officers across this country to attack first and ask questions later? Is it simply the belief that the use of excess force is their prerogative? What about giving room for the possibility that the police’s instructions are sometimes not understood owing to cultural or language background of the person they are threatening?
In the wake of the attack on Mr. Patel community organisations called for a review of police training procedures with respect to interacting with South Asians of limited English proficiency and immigrants and to disclose the criteria used by police to determine and respond to tips of “suspicious” activity.
While this may be a good place to start, it is disconcerting that law enforcement agencies do not collect and publish comprehensive and exhaustive annual data on the use of excessive force by police, as they are required to do by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.
Any lasting effort to bring down the level of anti-minority violence by law enforcement agencies will have to address both the historical prejudices concerning minority communities and the threshold for the use of violence against them, especially in situations where there may be a sociocultural chasm.
narayan@thehindu.co.in
