Sgt. Pepper’s Loney Heart’s Club Spray

November 23rd, 2011

This is my contribution to the ”Casually Spraying” Meme that’s been appearing all over the Internet in response to the   of Police Lieutenant John Pike pepper spraying a group of OccupyDavis Occupants last Friday. Public outrage has been widespread and intense, but frankly if you’ve been paying any attention in the last ten years this should have come as no surprise. 

In fact, compare the now famous photo of John Pike to this photo from the WTO Ministerian Conference in Seattle Washington.


Looks just about exactly the same doesn’t it? How quickly we forget. You can’t even say “Everything changed on 9/11” because this photo occurred on November 30, 1999. So, either you’re going to have to come up with some other thought terminating cliche or you’ll just have to admit that this is normal, and it has been for quite some time.

But it goes deeper than that. This kind of behaviour should not only come as no surprise, but it should be completely predictable to anyone even remotely familiar with the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted in 1971. By running a prison simulation with participants randomly assigned as either “prisoner” or “guard” Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo was able to show that otherwise stable and psychologically healthy people, if placed in a position of arbitrary power will completely internalize a sadistic personality in less than 36 hours. The experiment was intended to run for two weeks, but had to be halted in just six days when he realized that his judgement had been compromised by being sucked in to his role as “Prison Superintendent” and allowed abuse to continue that could be considered torture.

People are now calling for disciplinary measures against John Pike or his superiors, which I support. But what many may not realize is that it is the role itself, not the officer, that produces this behavior. Human nature is not good or evil. It is adaptive. And if you place an otherwise good person in a position that incentivizes evil they will adapt to those incentives. If we wish to prevent this behavior in the future we need to reexamine the role of law enforcement itself.

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About the Author: Davi Barker

In grade school Davi refused to recite the pledge of allegiance because he didn't understand what it meant. He was ordered to do as he was told. In college he spent hours scouring through the congressional record trying to understand this strange machine. That's where he discovered Dr. Ron Paul. In 2007 he joined the End The Fed movement and found a political home with the libertarians. The Declaration of Independence claims that the government derives its power “from the consent of the governed." He does not consent.

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