Tim Black outlines the Dominique Strauss-Kahn media drama, and explains the origin of the “perp walk”:
The whole tawdry affair looks to be petering out to a rather murky conclusion. Still, whatever else DSK might or might not have done, he has undoubtedly performed one vital function. That of the scapegoat. Historically, scapegoating referred to the ritual of investing an animal, a goat say, with the sins of the village, and then casting the burdened animal out. DSK, so-called, seems to have served a similar function. Strauss-Kahn was to be symbolically sent out of the community, taking the sins of men, especially French political ones, with him.
Nowhere was this strangely modern ritual more apparent than in the so-called perp walk. Introduced by FBI director Edgar Hoover in the 1920s to bolster public support for prosecutions, and used most famously with mobsters Alvin Karpis and Harry Campbell, it involves tipping off the press that the accused is about to be moved from one location to another. So as the ‘perp’ is walking between, for example, the jail and the police station, photographers appear to snap the accused in all their humiliation and shame. Yet although the perp walk has a long, ignoble, not to mention justice-thwarting history, it only really came into its own under then US attorney Rudolph Giuliani (a future mayor of New York) who, during the 1980s Wall Street-insider trading scandals, transformed it into a deliberately unceremonious ceremony. For example, in February 1987, handcuffed trader Richard Wigton was photographed weeping as he was marched from the trading floor of Kidder, Peabody & Co.
The purpose of the perp walk is worryingly clear. From the handcuffs to the embarrassment induced in the accused, we are encouraged to see the guilt before it has been proved. It is a spectacle designed to elicit condemnation — regardless of whether that condemnation is deserved or not. Strauss-Kahn’s perp walk was no exception. Snapped in all his handcuffed, unshaven and fallen-faced infamy as he was taken to a police station to be charged, the watching world was invited to see him as guilty, his sullen shame writ large in every defensive stride.
It would seem that the only defence against this deliberate perversion of proper decorum on the part of the “justice” system is simply to refuse to walk.
This is not resisting arrest. That requires actually, well, physically resisting the arresting officer. Sitting down and remaining immobile may be non-compliance, but it is not physical resistance.
So force the bastards to carry you. Or drag you. Or find a wheel-chair. But put the onus on THEM, and see who ends up embarrassed.
Comment by Lord of the Fleas — August 24, 2011 @ 23:48
Most people, even when they’re aware that this sort of thing is a possibility, don’t realize it’s happening until they’re already in the baleful glare of the cameras. After you’ve been told you’re “under arrest”, any form of refusal to move can-and-will be interpreted as “resistance”.
And we’ve all heard what happens to even (especially?) innocent people who “resist”.
Comment by Nicholas — August 25, 2011 @ 08:52