I wasn’t at the March 3 riot that followed our victory over Duke. My house, however, is across Route 1, down by the College Park Metro station. A couple of my friends were over, and a few hours after the violence on Route 1 subsided, I walked with them back toward the campus. The highway was eerily quiet. Twenty or so police officers, decked out in full riot gear, stood in the intersection of Knox Road and Route 1.
The riot police were a chilling sight. Black boots, black pants, black vests, black helmets. Anyone who came too close to the intersection was warned off, as officers menacingly clacked their long batons against their huge shields.
Monday, The Washington Post posted a video from that night on its website. A student, John James McKenna, is shown standing on Knox Road, by the wall directly in front of Knox Towers. He walks toward two mounted officers. The horses nose him against a wall. Without warning, an officer on foot runs full speed at the student, slamming him against the wall with his shield. As the student drops to the ground, another officer runs up and strikes the student in the legs with his baton. The officer proceeds to hit the student six times. The strikes come tomahawk-style, as the officer winds up above his head before landing each blow. In the video, McKenna appears to have simply been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Based on this evidence, these police officers are guilty of brutality. McKenna’s attorney also argues the video completely contradicts the officers’ account of the events; they claimed McKenna attacked mounted officers and their horses and was only injured when a horse kicked him. Prince George’s County Police Chief Roberto Hylton told The Washington Post in response to the recording, “I’m outraged. … I’m very disappointed on the conduct of my officers that I viewed on the videotape.”
The situation was simply primed for a violent abuse of power. Philip Zimbardo, a social psychologist best known for his Stanford Prison Experiment, has elsewhere described “de-individuation of self (anonymity)” as one of the seven social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil. It has been proven that wearing uniforms makes people more prone to engage in violence by instilling a sense of collectivity and individual anonymity. Riot uniforms are designed to maximize anonymity. “They aren’t even people,” one of my friends remarked as she surveyed the officers posted on Route 1.
I very much appreciate the work police officers do — not in an abstract sense, either. One night, a man banged on my door in my neighborhood in Baltimore at about 1 a.m., insisting my mother open the door, claiming she owed him money for “cleaning your gutters.” My mother called the police, and an officer came by within minutes.
And while it in no way allays individual responsibility for unwarranted violence, it’s easy to imagine the stress of the situation, marching into a mass of hundreds of drunken, shouting students.
Neither students nor administrators should be satisfied by the resolution of a single instance of police brutality. The Terps will win more big games in the future, and celebrating students will crowd Route 1. The university and the police have a plan for dispersing the crowd; there needs to be a plan to do so in a way that does a far better job of discouraging violence.
Mardy Shualy is a senior government and politics major. He can be reached at shualy at umdbk dot com.
