Is Paris burning?” Adolf Hitler wanted to know when in 1944, with Paris on the verge of liberation by the allies, he had asked Gen Dietrich Von Choltitz to burn down the city of lights as German soldiers began readying to depart it. The military commander did not follow Hitler’s orders, and he became, we are told, a pariah in Germany for the rest of his life. “Is America burning?” or some variation of it is the more anxious question that friends and family in India have been asking me these past few days, following the murder of a black man, George Floyd, by a white police officer in the city of Minneapolis. Abetting the murder were three other police officers who held the legs of George Floyd even as the policeman, Derek Chauvin, pinned the neck of Floyd to the ground with his knee for nearly nine minutes, till Floyd lay there on the ground lifeless.

Watching the video of the murder (for to call it anything but a murder is a travesty) sends chills down our spine and tightens the knot in our stomachs till we get really, really angry at this brutality which is masked as justice in this ‘land of the free’ where many are still bound. But then, the Police Officers’ Federation of Minneapolis promptly stepped in with their boilerplate statement: Don’t rush to judgment, they said, “before all video can be reviewed and a medical examiner’s report is released”.

However, there is finally some sense beginning to dawn upon the police forces in this country, and they better acknowledge that there is something rotten in their ranks. The president of the National Fraternal Order of the Police, Patrick Yoes said penitently, “The fact that he was a suspect in custody is immaterial — police officers should at all times render aid to those who need it. Police officers need to treat all of our citizens with respect and understanding and should be held to the very highest standards for their conduct.” A news update now reminds us that the charge of third-degree murder on officer Chauvin has been changed to second-degree murder — unpremeditated intentional killing of another — that can bring anywhere from a 15-year to life sentence.

This particularly murderous act by a policeman was captured on video and so the authorities in Minneapolis had to fire Derek Chauvin and the three fellow policemen — Thomas Lane, Tou Thao, and J Alexander Kueng. Going by their last names, Lane is a white policeman, Thao is either Vietnamese/Chinese/Pacific Islander, and Kueng is similarly of Vietnamese/Chinese background. It means that this act of racial violence is not merely the result of a black-white confrontation. When in 2015, in the city of Baltimore, Freddie Gray, a black man was arrested, and taken in a van bound, but unbelted to a seat, fell into a coma and died later, six police officers were suspended. Later their case went to trial. Three of the six police officers were black.

So, despite the obvious black victim-white police officer example plays out in this instance, why the police behave in this manner, and why there are so many police in the United States, goes all the way back to its founding. That the police force has increased manifold, and that the police have become militarised should not come as a surprise. The US has already been labelled a police state. In an article in the Foreign Policy Journal, the author’s first example of police excess is that of a black police officer throwing down a white woman teacher to the ground, handcuffing her, arresting her, and hauling her away. This act of police highhandedness and violence did not get much traction in the media because it was not the stereotypical black-white confrontation. As the author asserts, “There are many things to be learned from this school board meeting atrocity. First, it is not just white cops who assault black people. Cops, whether black or white or rainbow in colour, assault the general public, white, black, brown, the young, the elderly, cripples in wheelchairs, the family dog. The cops, irrespective of race brutalise the public. There is no race safety. The police are a brutal force whose only function is to suppress all dissent against the bosses. All lives matter, not just black lives. The police actually kill more white people than they kill black people.”

Let us remember the 6 February 2015 incident when the elderly Sureshbhai Patel, visiting his son in the town of Madison, Alabama, was thrown down to the ground by a policeman. Sureshbhai, not fluent in English, could not properly answer policemen who were called to the scene by suspicious white neighbours. One of the police officers, Eric Sloan Parker, lifted up Sureshbhai and slammed him to the ground, leaving Sureshbhai paralysed. What did the jury say about it? “Sorry, we don’t have enough evidence to convict Parker of the use of excessive force,” they said. The story did not get much traction, there were no protests, and there was no looting and burning.

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I remember my first experience with the police in this country some 35 years ago when I arrived in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to pursue a graduate degree in communication studies. A few months after my arrival, a fellow Indian graduate student, who had a car, asked some of us if we were willing to go with him to Houston to visit the recently opened Meenakshi Temple on the outskirts of the city. We went, had a wonderful darshan, went to the Astrodome and experienced the first rollercoaster ride, and late in the evening began our drive back to Hattiesburg. We had not had dinner, and so stopped at a Pizza Hut. We ordered a pizza with veggie toppings, and as we began hungrily wolfing down the pizza slices, a friend noticed pieces of bacon in it. We stopped. Went to the counter and told the young black woman there that we had ordered a veggie pizza but found meat in it. We had only consumed small pieces of the pizza, and we expected the restaurant to make good and give us a fresh veggie pizza. We were asked to wait. Ten minutes later, we went back to the counter to check. We were asked to wait. And suddenly, as we sat at our table talking, a black police officer arrived. He asked us to leave. He did not ask any questions. Just asked us to leave. I, not knowing anything about the culture of the country, thought that I needed to explain to the police officer what happened. The officer looked coldly at me. My friends hustled me out.

Last year, travelling with my family in the south of France, we took a bus from Cannes to Nice. We were enjoying the leisurely, hour-long ride when, at one of the bus stops, a black man and his mother boarded the bus. Soon there were words exchanged between the driver and the black man and his mother. What I could gather from their exchange in French was that the bus driver had not stopped at the bus stop but pulled up some 50 yards ahead and the black man and his mother had boarded the bus from the middle doors on the bus instead of at the front door. There were some really loud verbal exchanges that went on for about 10 min as the bus driver got back on the road. At the next stop, three policemen boarded the bus. The bus driver must have quietly pushed some button on the panel signalling the police. After all, it was just in 2016 that a Muslim terrorist driving a truck had mowed down people on the famous boardwalk in Nice, killing 86 people and injuring some 500 others.

The surprise in the French police encounter with the two black passengers and the white bus driver was this: there were no weapons drawn; the police were completely non-threatening; they listened to both sides; no threats were made; no handcuffs were placed on anyone. Nothing. They just listened to the bus driver’s complaint and the black passengers’ complaint. In fact, from what we had observed, the black man and his mother were very angry and had been aggressively shouting at the bus driver when they first boarded the bus. The policemen just convinced the two black passengers to get off the bus at the next stop, telling them, I believe, that they could take the next bus to their destination. We were scared to think what would have happened if this incident had occurred in the US, and how many bullet-riddled bodies would have ended up on the floor of the bus or how many cop cars would have surrounded the bus with sirens blaring, messages over the megaphone for all passengers to raise their hands and get slowly off the bus, or whatever.

Yet another comparison of police forces would be in order. Travelling in Canada last year, and in our stay there for a week, just south of Calgary, we saw a police car only once. Even in the busy tourist area of the Banff National Park, we did not see police cars. Here, in the US, you have to always be on the lookout for the police. Policing has become a business, as some of my students pointed out in a discussion this week in my inter-racial communication class. The cop car in America is bristling with technology, and the sirens and the flashing lights are amped up to “scare the s***” out of people. And scaring people and maintaining law and order are police officers who are just high school graduates and who have had less training to become a policeman than a person getting trained to become a hairdresser. That these officers then have special license to use deadly force is what makes the American police officer so potent a deliverer of injustice.

But then, Americans love their guns. My neighbour owns three dozens of them. And confrontations are common in certain parts of certain sections of certain cities. Even in the town that I live in — population 1,25,000 — the number of homicides last year was 34 by the middle of November. Small business owners — Indian, Chinese, Korean, Bangladeshi, whoever — have their day-to-day experiences of shoplifting and of people walking away without paying for what they taken from their shops. So, they call the police. A student in one of my classes, who is a police officer, told us that the police are called for all sorts of things, even minor domestic disagreements. And they go in, armed to the teeth, not knowing what it is they are dealing with and who they are dealing with — who is armed waiting to trap them and who is a child brandishing a toy plastic gun.

Now, as the protests rage across the country, with people sick and tired of the litany of police highhandedness, we also worry about how these excesses lead to further violence, and how some use this pretext to loot and burn, and some want to destroy everything in fits of anarchic madness.

That this police brutality occurred in Minneapolis, which is considered a liberal stronghold, is ironic. Just before all this mayhem, the previous week, the city council of St Paul, Minnesota’s state capital, and twinned to Minneapolis, passed a resolution condemning India for what the councillors harrumphed was India’s mistreatment of minorities. The councillors ignored the arguments and the information presented by some 12,000 Indian Americans about India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). They were led to this action by the powerful Council on American-Islam Relations (CAIR) richly endowed by the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and all the other wealthy Gulf nations, and egged on by the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC). The rhetoric of Ilhan Omar, a Muslim Democratic Congressional Representative from Minneapolis, and a loud critic of India, emboldened the city council members to lecture India and Indians about how they should behave and how they should deal with minorities. Among the city councillors is Dai Thao. Whether and if he is related to one of the fired police officers, Tao Thao, is not known, but it would not come as a surprise if they are related. Yet another piece of irony in this land of immigrants. That these councillors sought to take on the mantle of the United Nations or the US State Department while their hometown prepared to sizzle and burn will be a lesson lost on them.

The United States of America is awash in anguish and anger right now. We are living in the time of a pandemic, which has put people on a rather sharp and precipitous edge. We have a president who holds a Bible aloft in front of a barricaded church signalling to his voter base that he is some kind of a Christian bulwark against some kind of heathen madness. But then, the US is majority Christian. There are no more faithful Christians than Black Christians. Alas, our ‘vulgarian’ president is clueless, and his minders unable to keep him on a leash. We may be in for a long, hot, difficult summer, and looking at a scary, dangerous political season. God save America!