Happy slapping police
It’s an endless list: «Unfortunate, isolated incidents,» in which police violence makes a mockery of the law and words of remorse are habitually rehashed by the relevant officials. Migrants who are humiliated, students and workers who are beaten in the streets and at police stations, gypsies who are treated as punchbags, people who leave police stations with serious injuries only to be slapped with a lawsuit for «resisting authority.» The picture gets grimmer if we add those who died from a «stray» bullet fired by some officer in the line of duty. The number of incidents reported to Amnesty International and other human rights organizations increases yearly. But the accusations do not seem to faze Vyron Polydoras, Greece’s public order minister. In fact, less than one in 10 of such cases ever proceeds beyond the accusation simply because there is no recorded evidence. The punishment usually imposed on transgressing officers (a transfer to a nearby police station or a brief suspension) hardly convinces victims that they will receive justice. As a result, the minister’s calls for «order, cleanliness and politeness» are all too often interpreted by officers as calls for «harassment, bullying, barbarity.» Mimicking the sadistic acts of the US soldiers at Abu Ghraib who brutalized Iraqi inmates while capturing their abhorrent torture on tape, the Greek officers made the detainees slap each other while they recorded the beating on a mobile phone. «It was just a bit of fun,» they said. And so it remains to be seen whether government statements about an «insult to the country’s culture» and «exemplary punishment» were also made for fun. If the minister cannot free himself from the sentence he is serving, maybe the prime minister could give him a hand. Or does he fear leaving his team without a right winger.