Baltimore police trial resumes after Freddie Gray arrest video draws tears
Source: Reuters
The trial of a Baltimore police officer charged with manslaughter in the death of a young black man is due to resume on Friday, a day after prosecutors showed a video of his arrest that reduced his family to tears.
Officer William Porter has also been charged with second-degree assault and misconduct in the April death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray.
On Thursday, Gray's mother and other relatives wept as a cellphone video, taken by bystander Kevin Moore, showed Gray screaming as he was arrested and people yelling at police.
Gray died a week after being taken into custody for fleeing from an officer and possessing a knife.
Porter, 26, is one of three black officers charged in the case. He could be sentenced to more than 25 years in prison if convicted on all counts.
He is the first of six officers to go on trial in Baltimore City Circuit Court in connection with Gray's death, which triggered riots and intensified a U.S. debate on the use of excessive force by police, especially against black men.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-baltimore-police-idUSKBN0TN12F20151204#JfBJzfAlQzOoWJmS.97
"People Who Become Cops Tend to Have Authoritarian Personality Characteristics
Research shows a correlation between police behavior and authoritarianism.
There have been many articles written about the political personality types of the police. One of the most influential is the 1972 work, The Police Personality: Fact or Fiction by Robert Balch. He explores several questions in an effort to crystallize the various arguments in the research on police psychology: are authoritarian personality types more likely to choose police work as a profession? Are police more or less likely to have authoritarian personality types than the general public? Does being a police officer exacerbate authoritarian impulses?
On the topic of authoritarianism and police, Balch summarized one of the main veins of thinking from the literature at that time:
a. Conventionalism: rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values.
b. Authoritarian Submission: submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the ingroup.
c. Authoritarian Aggression: tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values.
d. Anti-intraception: opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded.
e. Superstition and Stereotypy: the belief in mystical determinants of the individual's fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories.
f. Power and "toughness": preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness.
g. Destructiveness and Cynicism: generalized hostility, vilification of the human.
h. Projectivity: The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.
i. Sex: Exaggerated concern with sexual "goings on." "
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/people-who-become-cops-tend-have-authoritarian-personality-characteristics
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