As people who’ve been reading this blog for years already know, I have been writing about “pain compliance” for years, specifically in terms of tasers. Torture, in other words. This story out of Louisiana about a cop who used “pain compliance” (beating a citizens with a flashlight) shows how torture is used by police in many different ways:
“I’m not resisting! I’m not resisting!” Aaron Larry Bowman can be heard screaming between blows on the footage obtained by The Associated Press. The May 2019 beating following a traffic stop left him with a broken jaw, three broken ribs, a broken wrist and a gash to his head that required six staples to close. . . .
On the night Bowman was pulled over for a traffic violation, [Trooper Jacob] Brown came upon the scene after deputies had forcibly removed Bowman from his vehicle and taken him to the ground. The trooper later told investigators he “was in the area and was trying to get involved.”
Wielding an 8-inch aluminum flashlight reinforced with a pointed end to shatter car glass, Brown jumped out of his state police vehicle and began bashing Bowman on his head and body within two seconds of “initial contact” — unleashing 18 strikes in 24 seconds, detectives wrote in an investigative report.
“Give me your f—— hands!” the trooper shouted. “I ain’t messing with you.”
Bowman tried to explain several times that he was a dialysis patient, had done nothing wrong and wasn’t resisting, saying, “I’m not fighting you, you’re fighting me.”
Brown responded with: “Shut the f—- up!” and “You ain’t listening.” . . .
Brown, 31, later said Bowman had struck a deputy and that the blows were “pain compliance” intended to get Bowman into handcuffs. . . .
Bowman, 46, denied hitting anyone and is not seen on the video being violent with officers. But he still faces a list of charges, including battery of a police officer, resisting an officer and the traffic violation for which he was initially stopped, improper lane usage.
Jonathan V. Last looks at all the “layers of rot” in this behavior:
So this is all bad enough. “Bad” doesn’t even begin to cover it. But the violence and assault is just the first layer of corruption. The rot goes much deeper. Because what’s wrong in law enforcement isn’t just that there are bad cops. It’s that institutions protect and cover these bad cops, rather than rooting them out and punishing them.
Let’s move through the different layers of rot.
The second layer, following Trooper Brown’s assault, came in the official report he filed:
Brown not only failed to report his use of force but mislabeled his footage as a “citizen encounter” . . .
The third layer is that the Louisiana State Police refused to even investigate the assault for almost two years—and didn’t do so until their hand was forced by a civil lawsuit:
State police didn’t investigate the attack on Bowman until 536 days after it occurred — even though it was captured on body camera — and only did so weeks after Bowman brought a civil lawsuit.
The fourth layer is that even with the investigation and the lawsuit, the State Police refused to release the body cam footage to the public. We’re only seeing it now because the Associated Press did journalism and uncovered it.
The fifth layer is that Trooper Brown probably shouldn’t have been employed at the time of the assault because he had 23 use-of-force incidents between 2015 and 2019. (And those are just the ones we know about. Given his self-report of the assault on Bowman as a “citizen encounter,” there may well be others.)
And the sixth layer is that other officers knew that Brown was a psychopath and did nothing about it:
He also faces state charges in two other violent arrests of Black motorists, including one he boasted about last year in a group chat with other troopers, saying the suspect is “gonna be sore” and “it warms my heart knowing we could educate that young man.”
Who talks like that? I mean, aside from the Southern KKK cop villain in a movie. If you heard a work colleague talking like that, would you just chuckle and move on with your day? I doubt it.
There will always be bad cops—just as there are always bad doctors, bad priests, bad teachers, and bad journalists. The goal of police reform isn’t to change human nature so that only good people work in law enforcement.
No, the goal is to change the institutions so that police departments and prosecutors are incentivized to discover, remove, and prosecute bad actors within their ranks.
Last lays out some good ideas if you want to click over.
But first we need to recognize that law enforcement commonly uses torture to gain compliance and we need to decide, as a society, whether or not we are going to tolerate it. Obviously, we cannot continue to allow police to continue to shoot unarmed Black men all the time. That’s straight up murder. But torture is part of the problem as well and I am afraid that we are in the process of rationalizing it as somehow better because it stops short of killing people — most of the time.
You can see the beating video here, if you can stomach it.