* British Bobbys Not: Police in New Haven, the U.S.of A.

Abner Louima in 1991 after New York City Police sodomized him with a plunger handle.

Today’s New York Times features an article about excessive force and foul language used on and against Yale students by New Haven Police conducting a late night raid for liquor violations on a New Haven Night Club boastfully named “Elevate”, as if getting “higher” was the mission statement.


I was amazed at the “wet-behind-the-ears” quality of the Yale students, not only in the Times’ report, but in the videos offered on The Yale Daily News website itself. It is as if the last fifty-years of current events in America had been erased and we were beginning over again fresh with this 20-year-old generation.

“Police are brutal? UNBELIEVABLE”, the Yale students seem to stammer.


This is the country where Ohio males in law enforcement uniforms murdered four unarmed white students on a university campus in May, 1970; where three weeks later in Mississippi, sheriffs murdered two black university students ; where in Los Angeles, in 1991, police beat the African American Rodney King unconscious after he was stopped for possible arrest; where in New York City police sodomized the Haitian, Abner Louima*, with a plunger handle in 1997.


Why are Yale students so amazed that the police are “brutal”?


Most American police officers and even National Guardsmen, have not had the luxury of a liberal arts college education which opens their eyes to the values of freedom of speech and freedom of expression. They are, by and large, inarticulate capsules of male hormones, trapped in bodies trained to respond with physical force, unable to express themselves in subordinate clauses but agile with grunts of profanity. Add to this combination the glamour of a uniform and badge and the “clubbiness” of belonging to a well honed group whose chief default is the “power” of armed weapons, and you have the recipe for brutality.


C’mon Yale students. Open your eyes.


Paul Keane
M. Div. ‘80
M.A., M.Ed.






From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Abner Louima (b. 1966 in Thomassin, Haiti) is a Haitian who was assaulted, brutalized and forcibly sodomized with the handle of a bathroom plunger by New York City police officers after being arrested outside a Brooklyn nightclub in 1997.