Rough Justice

By LANCE MORROW

Every city has a kind of evil twin that looks like Beirut.

This shadow self is the city's own hypothetical disintegration, the awful promise of what will happen when the worst transpires. Civilization will come unstuck. Anarchy will break loose at last and weeds push up through the concrete, and the police will degenerate to a paramilitary tribe at war with other gangs that go howling through the wastelands like road warriors, blade runners.

The bad dream contains a few jagged particles of truth. Some American cities have come to look dangerously like their anti-selves: debts deepening, revenues inadequate, services falling apart, people sleeping in the streets, crime and drugs creating their elaborate, permanent reality.

As for the armed tribes, they have been at war for some time, though not in the better neighborhoods. They put in an appearance not long ago on a home videotape that a bystander made as the Los Angeles police were beating a motorist they had run to ground after a chase. Here was the lawlessness that the nightmare predicts: vivid, grainy, surreal.

Watching the videotape, thinking about the other police-brutality cases -- the alleged fatal choking of a suspected car thief by five of New York City's finest, for example -- Americans felt degrees of wonder, horror or, in some cases, disgust at the news media for undermining the police.

The lasting reaction, besides outrage of one kind or another, may have been a sense of being in the presence of a mystery. "Nothing human is alien to me," Terence said, but this gross, offhand brutality, dealt out by guardians of the law, seemed alien enough and disturbing on a fairly deep emotional and moral level.

The beating on the videotape goes on for long minutes, the suspect-victim unarmed, unresisting, crouched on the ground, the police not acting on some lashing impulse of the moment, but seeming desultory and methodical at the same time. Cops stroll around. It looks like an impromptu social occasion.

There is future shock and also an odd familiarity in the scene: it has some of the feel of a Southern lynching -- an American throwback migrated to La La Land.

The mystery is always this: How does a group of otherwise normal people turn into a mob capable of this kind of savagery? One of the police officers who did the beating was described as a gentle family man.

The question has dimensions that are both social and personal. In Freudian terms, the law is supposed to perform the function of the superego, policing the wild and violent id. The Beirut principle goes to work when the id takes over from the superego and puts on a blue uniform, when authority goes wild.

Most American police are decent men and women doing honorable service. It is partly for that reason that the transformation from group to mob, as in Los Angeles, is hard to understand. But the dangerous work that they do, for modest salaries, is also brutalizing. The American homicide rate has jumped from 5 per 100,000 population in 1960 to 9 per 100,000 in 1989. In big cities two-thirds of felony defendants have been arrested before, and about half of them had at least one prior conviction. Drug gangs are often armed with automatic weapons more lethal than the handguns the police carry. A career of confronting the vicious, conscienceless criminal-enemy frays the nerves. It drives police officers deeper into the solidarities of their professional tribe. There they find the support and understanding that they feel they rarely get elsewhere. The public, they think, prefers its innocence, does not really want to know the violent lengths to which cops sometimes go when trying to enforce the law.

George Kelling, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University, suggests that the terms "war on crime" and "war on drugs" encourage and even demand an all-out attack by police upon criminals -- no holding back, no quarter given. But like American soldiers in Vietnam, the police are fighting an unwinnable war, assuming large social responsibilities that belong more to politicians than to policemen; and as in Vietnam, atrocities are being committed, on both sides.

A group has a life of its own that is far more than, and bizarrely different from, the sum of the individuals in it. The group belongs to a different moral order from the individual. It has its appetites and impulses, its voice, its collective will and emotions and personality. It has a mind of its own that can be frightening and inexplicable, like a domesticated animal, a pit bull or rottweiler, that may turn unpredictably vicious, attacking the children, doing wild-animal things no one could foresee.

An individual's judgment, ordinarily sound and self-aware, may defer to the collective judgment in a group, where individual responsibility gets diffused, scattered among the many. Says R. Scott Tindale, associate professor of psychology at Chicago's Loyola University: "Under normal circumstances, when you are deciding what to do, you have internal standards to check. When you are in a group setting, when you are less self-focused, you don't check these inner standards. You are more likely to check the standards around you." It takes a strong, poised character to wade against the currents of group will. Those cops who witnessed the Los Angeles beating, not participating but not objecting either, allowed themselves to be borne passively along by the stream of violence. Something of the same process may have occurred among the teenagers who went "wilding" in New York City's Central Park two years ago.

A secret of the transformation from group to mob: a few leaders incite the rest, knotting the rope, throwing it over the limb of a tree. The others allow themselves to be carried passively by the group purpose. Lynch mobs always armor themselves with a sense of their retributive righteousness. They also mean to exert social control by exemplary doses of terror, on the conceit that violence is the only language the victim understands.

Each atrocity has its own circumstances, its own atmosphere and triggers, its tribal antipathies and peer-group expectations. It is interesting that the one police officer who expressed some objection during the Los Angeles beating was a woman -- a member of the California highway patrol, not the L.A.P.D. She was not entirely part of the men's club that was doing the pounding.