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"Police brutality" - or are we actually talking about our own violent non-communication with our outcasts?

Chapter 61

 

 

  

The crime of the poor - like the exploitation by the rich - is almost impossible to photograph. You can take pictures of the result, but rarely of the process itself. One junkie in the act of burglarizing almost stabbed me in the stomach with his "blade" and it took me a whole night afterwards to make him trust me.

  

  

Usually I would be with criminals for days before photographing them. In order to survive among them it was a deadly necessity that I always had faith in their inner goodness, directing myself toward the human being inside and away from the role the system normally forced them to model their lives on.

  

  

By photographing their shady activities I was relating more to their environmental side and thus betraying the trust they had given me. I always wanted to photograph crime as seen from the point of view of the criminal, but to photograph I had to set myself at a distance and so was no longer "one of them." Recording the system's violence was easier than photographing its counter-violence.

  

  

Here I was caught in a shoot-out between police and criminals in Harlem. A policeman rushed over and used my doorway as a firing position whereby I suddenly found myself photographically on the side of the police.

  

  

On such occasions I began to understand the brutal but all-too-human re-actions of the police. Their racist attitudes and lack of understanding of the reactions bred by our outside oppression is one of the reasons for the angry charges of police brutality. Society has trained the police to expect the worst instead of communicating with the good in people. Therefore they shoot before they question.

  

  

In general I find it to be an act of violence to carry weapons into a ghetto, since this shows that you have no faith in the people of the ghetto, which breeds counter-violence. The police build on the negative in people and thereby promote it. If they instead like British police arrived unarmed with open faces they would have a chance to foster the positive sides I always managed to find in even the worst types "who will kill for a dollar" or a camera. The police build up a climate of fear on both sides which makes brutality inevitable.

  

  

Much of it is sanctioned by white authorities. Many states passed laws authorizing the police to break into people's homes without knocking. Many innocent people have been killed in this way which I give sad example of in the following story.

  

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