Recommended Books Week
Posted by
KTK
I love the “Inspector Montalbano” mystery novels, set in Sicily, by Andrea Camilleri. They’re police procedurals, Italian-style (very little procedure and an unusal emphasis on how to cook seafood), but written in a charming and literary style, even in translation. I just started the latest, Rounding the Mark (written in 2003, but only translated this year), and was struck by the experience one always has in confronting the difference between European and American sensibilities.
The books are fictional, of course, but written by a Sicilian. And keep in mind that this is Italy, where corruption and government instability are a way of life, and Sicily, no less, home of the Mafia. And on the first page of the latest book, Camilleri’s police inspector faces a crisis:
Stinking, treacherous night. Thrashing and turning, twisting and drifting off one minute, jolting awake and then lying back down - and it wasn’t from having scarfed down too much octopus a strascinasali or sardines a beccafico the evening before. . . . It had all started when dark thoughts assailed him after he’d seen a story on the national evening news. When it rains it pours - all’ annigatu, petri di ‘ncoddru - or, “rocks on a drowned man’s back”, as Sicilians call an unrelenting string of bad breaks that drag a poor stiff down. . . . [T]hat news had been like a big rock thrown right at him, at his head, in fact, knocking him out . . . .
Wow. And what could cause so much anguish?
With an air of utter indifference, the anchorwoman had announced, in reference to the police raid of the Diaz School during the G8 meetings in Genoa, that the public procecutor’s office of that city concluded that the two Molotov cocktails found inside the school had been planted there by the policemen themselves, to justify the raid. This finding, continued the anchorwoman, came after the discovery that an officer who claimed to have been the victim of an attempted stabbing by an antiglobalist during the same raid had, in fact, been lying. . . . After hearing this news, Montalbano had sat there in his armchair for a good half-hour, unable to think, shaking with rage and shame, drenched in sweat. . . .
The truth of the matter was that Montalbano’s malaise had set in a while back, when the television had first shown the prime minister strolling up and down the narrow streets of Genoa . . . while his interior minister was adopting security measures more suited for an imminent civil war than for a meeting of heads of state: setting up wire fences . . . soldering shut manholes, sealing the country’s borders, closing certain railroad stations . . . . This was such an excessive display of defense, thought the inspector, that it became a kind of provocation. Then what happened, happened: one of the demonstrators got killed, of course, but perhaps the worst of it was that certain police units had thought it best to fire tear gas at the most peaceable demonstrators . . . . Then came the ugly episode at the Diaz School, which resembled not so much a police operation as a wicked and violent abuse of power with the sole purpose of venting a repressed lust for revenge.
How’s that? One out-of-control dissent-squelching police raid, one incident of planted evidence, and one perjured cop - and this guy’s ready to resign? After that record, on the New York force, all the rest of the cops would have been disciplined for not trying hard enough.
He’s complaining about behavior that is almost negligible beside the standard tactics of US authorities. Welding sewer covers closed is standard procedure wherever the President travels. Snipers on rooftops, machine-pistol-toting guards, dogs, crowd barriers, blockades, warrantless searches, helicopters, and special-weapons units are everyday occurrences whenever anything out of the ordinary goes down anywhere in the country - ordinary to the point that no one notices they’re the very substance of a police state.
Beyond this, there is widespread domestic surveillance, an openly-discussed, deliberate trend toward systematic tactics and infrastructure aimed at prohibiting dissent, and repressive tactics at public events, including confining peaceful citizens to police-barricaded pens, use of horses and other intimidation tactics, and blockading VIP neighborhoods to protect the privileged and squelch protest, such as at the 2003 anti-war demonstrations in New York, and the 2004 political conventions. And these are just the legal tactics.
Planted evidence, perjured testimony, and baseless assaults on dissenters are also standard practice:
Seven months after the mass arrests of over 1,800 protesters at the Republican Convention in New York City last summer, 91 percent of the nearly 1,700 cases that have been concluded have resulted in acquittals or the dismissal of charges. Four hundred cases were dismissed after video recordings made by volunteer observers and others showed that there was no reason for the arrests, the New York Times reported last week. Some of the videos also exposed false testimony by the police.
In the case of Dennis Kyne, arrested on the steps of the New York Public Library last August, police officer Matthew Wohl testified at trial last December that “we picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed. I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own.”
Wohl’s colorful description was apparently made up. Kyne’s attorney showed the court a videotape showing his client walking down the steps of the library, not being carried and not kicking. The tape in addition showed that Wohl, who also signed complaints against four other protesters arrested at the time, was not present during any of the arrests. The charges against Kyne were immediately dropped. Four months later, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office now says it is reviewing Wohl’s account, but the cop is not expected to face any penalty for his false testimony, which in all likelihood is part of the police department’s modus operandi in cases of mass arrests. . . .
New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) president Donna Lieberman said that videotape evidence had led to the dropping of charges against 227 people arrested at an August 31 demonstration at the World Trade Center site. “The camera is a powerful tool that has enabled us not just to exonerate individuals, but hold police accountable and document serious wrongdoings,” said Lieberman. . . .
As far as New York City’s billionaire Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly are concerned, however, the latest revelations are no cause for embarrassment. Bloomberg told the press that the police “did a spectacular job…We had seven or eight hundred thousand people marching and only a few hundred got arrested.”
In the Italian Diaz School incident mentioned in the book, independent reporters gathering evidence were beaten by the police and then falsely charged with crimes - but this was just one among many more such incidents, mostly in the US. The use of police infiltrators and provocateurs is also commonplace.
And almost nothing gets said about this. It was perfectly OK with the public for the police to arrest thousands of people for no reason at all during the anti-war and anti-GOP convention rallies, refuse to process them for trial as required by law, and then simply release them when they felt like it. It is perfectly OK for citizens to be barricaded into pens they cannot leave - on the public streets! - for hours at a time if the police feel like doing so. And nothing is ever done about the continual harassment, perjury, and railroading that goes on on a daily basis. The police even have names for their own corruption: “blue wall of silence”, referring to the refusal of police to report misbehavior by other police, and “testilying”, meaning extensively perjured testimony to secure a false conviction - and these are openly held up by the police as virtues for other cops to emulate. These things cut at the foundation of our civilization - they are what a decent nation cannot allow itself to abide - but they go unremarked.
And now we are told - fictionally, perhaps - that a police inspector in Italy would resign in protest at finding his fellow officers had submitted false evidence in one or two cases during a political rally. The New York City police committed over a thousand cases of perjury and false evidence during a rally, were caught on videotape, forced to openly admit they had done it, and nothing whatseover was said about it; the officers were caught were never disciplined - you can bet none of them resigned out of shame. When Frank Serpico - an Italian-American cop in New York - testified to the extensive, organized system of payoffs and shakedowns that pervaded the entire NYPD up through the 1970s, the brass ignored him and his life was threatened by other officers. We’re supposed to believe an Italian cop in Italy would object to the same thing (or, at least, that his creator thought he could put that into a contemporary book and get away with it)?
I hope and suspect he would. However bad things are elsewhere, I hope and suspect they’re not this bad. But then why do Americans seem so complacent about behavior that would be shocking elsewhere? How have we come to believe that rampant corruption, falsehood, and oppression are the ordinary way of things while citizens of less self-congratulatory countries refuse to put up with them, or at least still have the clarity to perceive them as wrong? How can one incident of corruption - in a country not unfamiliar with corruption - be shocking, and the daily encroachments we are subject to here be unnoticeable?
Living in a country whose government could not hope to aspire to the level of honesty, rectitude, and transparency of . . . Italy, seems kind of embarrassing. How did we get this way?
