No. This is a matter of top-down policy, politics, money, impunity, and a culture sanctioned from the top. Policy, like "broken windows" and "zero tolerance" policing, preemptive surveillance, the use of SWAT teams tens of thousands of times a year across the country, the militarization of the police that has also borrowed from the military the philosophy of overwhelming force and viewing all citizens as potential enemy. Politics, as in elected leaders and appointed officials going along to get along, fearful of challenging these policies even if they wanted to. Money, as in the enormous budgets these policies justify, and the measurement of "performance" by the likes of CompStat and arrest totals, the data-driven assumption that arrests must be kept at a certain level. Culture, as in for the cops, the "blue wall of silence" and automatic rallying around the bad apples, the feeling they are besieged; and among the people, the constant promotion of fear and exaggeration of the threats of crime and "terrorism." And impunity, of course. The NYPD just announced that, contrary to the video evidence and the coroner's report (which ruled a homicide), no chokehold was used against Garner. Think of all those administrative non-punishments and juries (in the rare cases when cases come to trial) letting off cops in the most egregious of cases, like Diallo. All this happens to privilege the presumably small percentage of particularly brutal cops, but also serves to make them more brutal, to sanction brutality. A great deal of it is stomp-your-door-in business as usual, a system at work.
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