Police Brutality is a Global Issue: How Can Legal History Help Us Solve It? -- EmmanuelOsayande - 19 Apr 2024

Similar incidents of police brutality and resulting protests across three continents offer us lessons to move forward.

On the evening of May 25, 2020, a Minneapolis police officer fatally suffocated George Floyd, an African-American man, whom officers had already handcuffed and arrested. This was regardless of Floyd’s desperate pleas that he could not breathe because of the officer’s knee pressed firmly upon his neck. The following day and thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean, a similar incident of police brutality occurred in Lagos, Nigeria. Two police officers callously shot into a public gathering while trying to apprehend a commercial mini-bus (danfo) driver who had allegedly violated a government-imposed curfew. This act of extremity came at a high cost, as one of the bullets eventually killed Tina Ezekwe, a 16-year-old girl from a poor family. As if to complete a triad of tragedy three years later, a police officer in Paris, France, fatally shot another unarmed minor of North African descent named Nahel M. during a traffic stop on June 27, 2023.

These incidents sparked massive antipolice protests in the United States, Nigeria, and France. Some of the campaigns degenerated into riots with police crackdowns and protester resistance leading to more injuries, death, and chaos.

Accordingly, these cases demonstrate that police brutality, as a form of state-sanctioned violence, is a global phenomenon with transatlantic connections that traverse three continents- North America, Africa, and Europe. They raise important questions about law enforcement, specifically how officers violated a fundamental human right: the right to life and liberty, and they illustrate a blatant disregard for the legal tenet of "innocent until proven guilty." When you belong to the 'wrong' race, class, or ethnicity, it seems one is guilty until proven innocent. Neither Floyd nor the mini-bus driver nor Nahel whom officers restrained with deadly force had been proven guilty of an offense at the time of their arrest.

What is more, these instances are just some of the presumably few that digital technology, including cameras and social media platforms such as X (formerly known as Twitter), has largely popularized. It goes to say that they are not isolated incidents but representations of larger systemic problems and structures of coercion.

These structures emanate from a long history of state repression against targeted, dissenting groups including persons of color, the urban poor, and ethnic minorities. Under French colonialism, for instance, colonial administrators developed an extralegal system of sanctions called the indigénat. It was a way through which they specifically punished minority groups and colonial subjects through high-handed methods such as torture, which contravened French law. Britain, the imperial neighbor of France, executed a similar approach in their colonies by killing unarmed anticolonial agitators. To illustrate, in late 1949, colonial police violently quelled a strike protest by coalmine workers in Enugu, British Nigeria. This led to a massacre of tens of unarmed workers, in a grim incident historians refer to as the Enugu colliery shooting. In the United States, the long history of slavery and segregationist ‘Jim Crow’ laws in the U.S. South, and the role of law enforcement in protecting what were once legal institutions, are well known. This overwhelming need to crush dissent and maintain public order meant that the armed forces, particularly the police and the army, was one establishment that colonial administrators and government officials best developed.

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