Papua New Guinea’s police commissioner, David Manning, addressing the International Women’s Day celebrations this week, let it be known that violence against women is becoming a serious disease.

Yes, we agree. It is a growing threat to women and children, family unity and community harmony.

On the same token Sir, may we also point out that some of the women and children that suffer from this disease actually live in the confines of police, army and correctional service barracks.

• READ MORE: Other reports on PNG police violence

The wives of soldiers, cops and warders are not immune to this disease. Most, if not for Tik Tok, suffer silently.

It is a national disease that needs to be addressed at all levels in our country. And the country’s security forces better start taking this message seriously. Violence against police wives must stop, must desist against army wives, and cease against CS wives.

Peace and family harmony must be restored in your homes before you go out and deal with the bigger picture in the community. You might think your uniform gives you ultimate power over your wife but your wives are the custodians of your homes and children.

Respect your wife and treat her well. If your home is safe and secure, your commitment and focus on delivering law and order to all corners of the country will be fulfilled peacefully.

Expressing disgust at thuggery
This week, we join the public in expressing our disgust at continued violence and thuggery by police against members of the public.

This in itself is another serious disease that you mister commissioner, need to stamp out. When violence continues unabated, it goes to show that something is wrong, some of the practices and procedures you are putting in place, are weak and unworkable.

A young man, the son of a cop, in the prime of his life, almost had his life snuffed out by three allegedly drunk cops on February 27.

These Fox Unit policemen were arrested on Wednesday and charged with the cowardly attack on schoolboy Samuel Naraboi that left the 20-year-old in a coma at the Intensive Care Unit at the Port Moresby General Hospital for a week.

Realising they were wrong and there is no escape for them, they surrendered to their commander and were brought in and processed.

As the NCD and Central Divisional Commander Anthony Wagambie Jr lamented: “For this incident, whatever the circumstances were, the level of injury inflicted on the young man is not warranted at all and this is way beyond.

“I would also like to make it known that this does not reflect the majority of hardworking police personnel. Police have been constantly reminded about ethical conduct and performing duties within the rule of law.

‘Rebuilding public confidence’
“We are trying our best to rebuild public confidence in the Constabulary, and such action by individuals only hinders the progress.”

The last sentence catches our eyes and ears and we agree with your commander Wagambie Jr. A few rotten apples are dragging down the police force.

The majority of sworn-to-oath hardworking policemen and women are getting the flack for the bad deeds of a few rotten cops.

You need to put your big foot down Commissioner. We suggest, you sack every violent rotten cop who doesn’t understand their roles and responsibilities in policing, law and order.

They are the ones bringing the force into disrepute.

This PNG Post-Courier editorial was published on 10 March 2022. The original title was Violence in any form is a serious disease. Republished with permission.

The unprecedented conviction of police officer Derek Chauvin in the United States for the murder and manslaughter of George Floyd is testament to the hard work of Black Lives Matter organisers and protesters.

It might seem as though someone who spent nine minutes and 29 seconds pressing his weight through his knee into another man’s neck – all captured on video – would be a slam dunk for a conviction. But history shows us otherwise.

Thirty years ago, blurry footage taken with a home camcorder from an apartment balcony showed the world four white police officers beating Rodney King, an African American man on his knees. The police used batons, between 53 and 56 times.

• READ MORE: The racist roots of American policing: From slave patrols to traffic stops
• Justice for George Floyd: Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdicts must result in fundamental changes to policing

Those officers were charged with excessive force and assault. Their lawyers argued they could not get a fair hearing in Los Angeles, so the trial was moved to a conservative county with a higher proportion of white residents – reflected in the makeup of the jury.

Their lawyers also argued, successfully, that the audio on the recording be omitted because it would prejudice the jury. Instead, they screened it frame by frame.

Without the sounds of the blows striking King and the screams of bystanders urging the police to stop, the video persuaded jurors of the defence lawyers’ arguments that the officers were acting in self-defence.

One juror later told reporters she believed King was in “total control” of the event. That juror believed one of the defence lawyers, who said “there’s only one person who’s in charge of this situation and that’s Rodney Glenn King”. She was sure a Black American man presented a violent threat, even while on his knees and clearly injured.

Justified police violence
This idea – that Black bodies somehow contain coiled violence ready to be unleashed at any moment – has justified police violence for years. This is true for police perceptions of African American women, such as Breonna Taylor in her own home, as well as for African American men.

It has meant the legal test of whether the use of force is “excessive” has fallen further along the spectrum of violence when it comes to cases in which the victim is Black.

This is true in Australia, too, where more than 400 Indigenous people have died in custody since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, and not one person has been convicted of a crime.

This belief means that even when police killings are captured on video, as in the cases of Eric Garner, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, prosecutors find reasons not to indict and juries find reasons not to convict.

This belief also means that even when the victim of a police shooting is a child, like 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot by an officer previously deemed unfit for the job, no police officer was charged with a crime.

Of course, police violence that disproportionately targets African Americans long predates portable video cameras.

As many have noted since Floyd’s murder, the origins of US policing lie in the control of supposedly disorderly populations – whether of enslaved people or, after the end of slavery, an impoverished class of labourers including Black people and immigrants.

Black people the target
As African Americans migrated from the agricultural southern states to cities in the US South and North, police forces adapted accordingly. Ever since, at every stage of the “law enforcement” process, Black people are disproportionately the target.

This includes in law-writing; neighbourhood patrols; the exercise of discretion over arrest, indictment, and plea bargains at trial; jury decisions; and judges’ decisions regarding fines and sentences.

Whether it’s the so-called 1960s War on Crime or the 1980s War on Drugs, the whole of policing in the US rests on anti-black racism.

As historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad argues in his excellent book, The Condemnation of Blackness, the entire justice system itself rests on the criminalisation of Black Americans. For many, the apparent criminality of Black people is evident in the proportion of them in prison or on bail or remand or parole. It’s a vicious circle.

Reports and commissions by government, not-for-profit organisations and academics have long identified racism as the cause of the problem. This started in the 1920s with the report into the 1919 Chicago Race Riot. The 1968 Kerner Commission Report made recommendations that have been repeated reports since.

So why is the problem so intractable?

In short, profit. The “justice system” in the United States generates enormous revenue for a small group of people. Its services, ranging from public and private prisons, reform programs, well-resourced police and other legal systems, pays the salaries of literally millions more.

Policed, charged, and incarcerated
Where African-descended people were once enslaved to provide cheap labour, they are now policed, charged, indicted and incarcerated at staggering rates.

It cannot be left to police departments to reform themselves. The only reason Chauvin has been convicted is because of the extraordinary labour of activists, which has focused attention on this case.

Almost simultaneous with the verdict on the charges being read out, another African American child — this time a 15-year-old girl called Ma’Khia Bryant — was shot dead by Ohio police.

It is time, rather, that calls to abolish police be taken more seriously. To many, this campaign seems outlandish. But as the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore and others points out, democracies elsewhere in the world flourish with only a small fraction of the proportion of incarcerated people as in the United States.

Where life is precious, life is precious,” Gilmore says.

Achieving a society in which police and prisons are not necessary is no easy task, especially when those profiting from current arrangements hold so much sway. We need, as writer, Mellon Foundation president, and inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander says, the imagination and courage of Black artists.

Alexander points to Pat Ward Williams, who asked in 1986 of photographs of lynched Black people, “Can you be Black and look at this?”

In his closing statement to the jury, prosecutor Jerry Blackwell said with anguish:

You were told, for example, that Mr. Floyd died because his heart was too big […] [but] the truth of the matter is – that the reason George Floyd is dead is because Mr Chauvin’s heart was too small.

Dr Clare Corbould is associate professor, Contemporary Histories Research Group, Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.