Remember Abner Louima? Argentina's cops do!

Somehow the lesson learned is always more "How to" than "Fucking why the hell are you even thinking about this sick stuff?"

Cops the world over abuse people in their custody. It’s not unique to the NYPD or the USA. We’ve had several examples in the news lately, including Navalny’s death in prison in Russia (like anyone believes that wasn’t a state-sanctioned murder) and the Rankin County, Mississippi “Goon Squad” terrorism case. (The federal case against the Goon Squad also ended with long sentences.) What is rare is the punishment of law enforcement for abuse, torture, or terrorism targeting people detained or jailed and thus wholly within the power of authorities.

Justin Volpe grossly claimed he has “nothing but love” for Abner Louima last April in his first public statement after he was released to a halfway house having served 24 years of a 30 year sentence. It was 24 years, and people can change in much less time, but our prison system isn’t conducive to fostering growth, and I find myself doubting someone who showed so much rage and hatred knows the meaning of the word love.

The night he violently raped Louima, Volpe was hit or bumped during a chaotic situation outside a nightclub popular with Haitian immigrants with two women fighting each other while some bystanders watched and yelled and others tried to intervene. There was no immediate evidence that the person who hit or bumped him was even one of the nightclub’s customers — it could easily have been another officer — or that it was intentional if it was a customer. Nonetheless, Volpe grabbed Louima, a security guard attempting to control the crowd, and told others that he had been assaulted by this man with no criminal record. Video footage would later show that whoever made contact with Volpe, Louima was not close enough to him to have been that person.

Volpe repeatedly lied during the course of the incident, asserting to his fellow officers that Louima had attacked him and to hospital staff that Louima’s injuries were a result of consensual sex (presumably not with Volpe?), and repeated those lies personally and through his attorney for years afterward. For quite some time it seemed that he was certain that he would receive no punishment, and the number and willingness of his co-conspirators shows that had Louima’s injuries been less extreme, he very well might have.

When I think of police entitlement to commit crimes, it’s still that case that stands out for me. Yes, there are many others involving on-duty and off-duty law enforcement that show contempt for oversight, but the crimes of Volpe still stand out for their horror, their brutality, and for the crime’s commission inside the police precinct itself with any number of other officers sworn to arrest people who engage in exactly this type of behaviour.

Now Argentina has a case that may very well serve as a similar example (English translation via Google). On April 11th of last year, Sofia Fernández was found dead in a holding cell. She was there having been accused of burglary in hopping a neighbour’s garden wall. The resident said that she confronted Sofia who then assaulted the resident before hopping back over the wall. She called the emergency line saying that she believed Sofia had intended to steal from her home and later repeated that in a complaint to officers at the station.

Fernández had no criminal history and her friends and family can’t believe she attempted burglary, though given her death we will likely never know what else could have been happening or whether the identification could have been erroneous. What we do know is that Fernández was trans in a country that has a large number of citizens and people in power with a serious hate on for trans people. We know that access to her holding cell was limited. We know that she had moved forward with government recognition of her gender and toward gender affirming medical care. We know that she had choked on a chicken bone and been taken to hospital just a week before, telling her sister that the experience had been horrible. “I have just that audio where she tells me what happened and that she was afraid. When you hear it, you will see that she was far from killing herself,” TN.com quotes her sister saying about the choking incident.

All of this makes it exceedingly unlikely that she was killed by another detainee or that she killed herself, particularly by choking. Yet that’s exactly what the local police alleged both before and after an autopsy revealed that Fernández’s own thong panties had been pushed into her throat, past the nasopharynx at the back of the mouth and into her descending throat. Along with a piece of foam from her cell’s mattress also found in her throat, her own underwear cut off the oxygen to her lungs, killing her in exactly the manner she desperately and narrowly escaped the week prior. The absolute terror of such a death is beyond my ability to imagine.

Ten police officers have now been charged in relation to her death, according to the LA Blade, three with the actual killing and seven more for participation in the coverup. There is no detail on any potential sexual assault, but the autopsy recorded no external injuries. Still, her own thong was used to suffocate her, so the idea that the cops did not assault her sexually is far fetched, and the idea that stripping an MtF trans person of her underwear and using that to suffocate her to death was not a cissexist hate crime is more so.

We might have known more, but the commander of the precinct house where the murder took place reported that the internal security cameras were not operating. (It is hard for me to tell whether there was an alleged malfunction or not, but does it really matter?) This is but one example of the barriers to justice in this case. A prosecutor was also removed for bias of a sort I’m not particularly equipped to judge, but which some people are saying was specifically anti-trans. And yet, somehow, the case is now official, presented to the criminal justice system, and appears to be headed… somewhere. I’m no expert on Argentinian law or the workings of its courts, but it feels similar to the Louima case not only in the initial presumption of impunity that empowered the police to commit such a heinous murder and such blatant crimes after the fact (e.g. obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence), but also in the fact that once a death this horrific gains the combination of public attention with a foothold in the legal system, a momentum can build that leads to unexpected accountability.

As terrible both the absolutely brutal assaults against both Louima and Fernández indisputably were, there’s something else apparently common to both that I think we should talk about. In NYC, Louima as both a Black man and an immigrant represented an object of police contempt and a class of people that NYPD had historically abused. While this combination is incredibly dangerous and I’m sure Louima himself would have preferred that Volpe and his peers never assaulted him, it is the very combination of towering contempt with a long history of committing other crimes against similar subjects without consequences for the criminals that led to the extreme brutality, the evil that seems so grandiose and pure that it caricatures itself.

In La Plata, Argentina the circumstances for transfeminine people seems similar. Compared to the United States, trans communities in Latin America have been consistently visible for a longer period of time. The result has been more political organization of more people for a longer period of time — resulting in successes yet to be reached in the USA — with a more organized and longer-standing backlash. Both of these are exemplified in the Los Angeles Blade’s story about recent mass firings of trans Argentinians from government jobs. The 85 or more firings from mid to late April were only possible because of previous victories in anti-discrimination legislation, and they were met with much larger protests than we see in the USA against similarly-scaled government attacks (e.g. Florida’s passage of a Don’t Say Gay bill which resulted in a torrent of bad press, but fewer people taking to the streets).

As with the United States, Argentina and other nations in South and Central Americas have long had problems with excessive police violence. Particularly common targets are indigenous persons — witness the violent anti-indigenous movement under (thankfully) now ex-Presdent Bolsonaro in Brazil — and MtF trans persons and drag performers. The killing of Fernández shows the characteristic flagrant evil and contempt of police who have every confidence in their impunity and every certainty in their moral superiority. Any observer will see the same in the Mississippi Goon Squad’s crimes and those of NYPD’s 70th precinct.

For the majority not generally subject to anything resembling this level of contempt, dehumanization, and violence, such crimes can seem surreal. Consider this excerpt from WNYC’s attempt to find the meaning and legacy of the assault on Louima 20 years after the crime:

At first, the story seemed too sadistic and violent to have been carried out by officers sworn to uphold the law. And the police union staunchly defended the officers accused of the attack. Marvyn Kornberg, the attorney for Volpe, even outrageously claimed Louima's injuries were caused by rough gay sex in a nightclub.

But many people of color found the story all too believable.

The stories of these crimes, long overdue, serve as a necessary shock to corrupt and violent systems. While it is sadly typical for cops and corrections officers to arrange for the rape of a prisoner even when they do not commit the rape themselves, the impunity officers feel, especially when combined with moral hubris and such outrageous contempt for a particular community, become the weaknesses of a system which otherwise prevents accountability. The certainty that no matter how an officer violates a person that no punishment is deserved or forthcoming allows the most despicable officers to give free reign to their most evil impulses, to their most excessive fantasies of violent power.

The corrupt system encourages those feelings by deflecting accountability as if police actions were morally justified even when they are clearly not, as if police are good persons even when they are clearly not, and as if the lives of the marginalized are worthless even when they are clearly not. But those feelings inevitably lead to such spectacles of evil that those who do not normally pay attention to police corruption and violence somehow do.

Do not mistake me for saying that Breonna Taylor’s death somehow benefits society through the exposure of corrupt cops who lied on search warrants and deliberately sought to execute searches in the most violent, threatening, and frightening ways possible. Taylor’s life, even an ordinary life of a person secure from violence but otherwise unexceptional, would have benefited society far more because as much as some would object to the notion Taylor is even today part of our society. Had she been killed by a meteor while in a boat off at sea and never found and never missed, still the loss of her individual life would have been a loss to society.

The point here is not that there is a silver lining to police violence and corruption in its inevitable tendency to go too far and spark backlash and, occasionally, even change. The point here is that the majority remains comfortable with a given level of police violence, and that the same majority reacts only when forced to react by police who are only engaging in exactly what society has taught them is acceptable. The reaction to Fernández’s murder might result in protection for some trans people in Argentina as Louima’s rape might have resulted in somewhat scaled back violence against Black men immigrants in New York City. But let’s not forget that 18 months after Louima’s rape NYPD killed Amadou Diallo with 41 bullets for following one of the many contradictory police instructions in attempting to pull out his ID.

The sad truth is that police impunity escalates in a town or city or state until we hear a story like that of Jon Burge in Chicago, and then official action against corrupt and violent police shakes up that sense of impunity just enough so that it never threatens the majority. Rather than relieving the targeted community, the ongoing story of police violence around the world persists to such a degree that I argue police violence is never undone. It is only refocussed onto only the most marginalized, the most despised and reformed into acts of violence that lend themselves to more easy excuse. The stories of Louima and Fernández and countless others serve not as weapons with the power to end police impunity, but rather as reminders of its limits. The lawyer posthumously representing Fernández and her family, Ignacio Fernández (but no relation to Sofia), hopes that in fighting for Sofia, the family “will set a precedent in the fight against transphobic violence and impunity in Argentina.”

But history instead tells us that any precedent will not be used to eradicate violence or establish accountability. It will only fence off an “8th Amendment zone,” if you will, similar to George Bush’s 1st Amendment zones. It does not teach police not to assault or not to kill. Rather it reminds police that they must be careful whom they kill, whom they violate, and how.

The stories of the violation of the marginalized serve to protect the majority far more than they will ever protect the marginalized ourselves.