Police Brutality in Greece

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Ombudsman and all people who allowed me to conduct this research by providing me with valuable information about excessive force and ensuing disciplinary and criminal proceedings. Ordinary people, presspersons, attorneys and lawmakers joined their efforts to bring to light the systemic roots of this longstanding phenomenon. Probably because hope is the last to die.

I also thank heartfully the two jurists who provided me with precious advice over this draft.

Introduction

‘Archangel Michael also holds a sword to defend against demons. He does not carry flowers’,¹ stated in Parliament conservative Prime Minister Georgios Rallis (Staveris 2013) following the killing of Iakovos Koumis and Stamatina Kanellopoulou, beaten to death by riot police during a commemorative march in Athens, on 16 November 1980. In the same vein, on 13 November 2019, in the aftermath of successive police brutality incidents,² conservative Minister for the Interior Makis Voridis³ stated:

We would wish law enforcement to be carried out by rose-offering. This has not been possible. Law enforcement comprises forcibility elements. I say this softly. Beating is a forcibility element. […] Police only resort to lawful use of force. We will certainly continue. We will keep on doing it. (News24/7 2019b)

In taking a radically different approach in the above-mentioned 1980 Parliament debate, lawmaker and leader of the Union of Democratic Centre party Ioannis Zigdis stated:

Main liability lies with the government that maintains in action disgraceful riot police. They are not police officers, they are SS squads, they are worse than torturers under dictatorship, they are criminals; they were not born criminals, they are trained to become criminals. […] They are incompatible with democratic ruling. (Staveris 2013)

Whereas the government put the blame for the killing of Koumis and Kanellopoulou on ‘organized anarchist and extremist elements’ (Alfavita 2020), lawmaker and leader of the Socialist party Andreas Papandreou considered that ‘small groups of thoughtless people and agents provocateurs of unknown and shady origin caused regretful violent incidents’ to condemn ‘the instigators and the agents of these sorrowful events’ (Stoukas 2017).

These statements sum up many of the issues addressed by this research in that they illustrate both persistence of and government support to police brutality as well as its dubious background, inherent cruelty and undemocratic nature. Before however going further, there are some points to be specified regarding the causal link between policing and brutality. Admitting both Walter Benjamin’s thesis (1996) about the founding violence of regulatory law and the Foucauldian one that the police are a security apparatus that represents the raison d’état and, therefore, is a pillar of governmentality, should not imply that the use of force is entangled with policing in contemporary liberal democracies. Michel Foucault is right when he considers that the police deal with living, and ‘more than just living’ (2007: 326), to affirm that they hold a key position in governmentality in that their tasks aim at disciplining and managing population: ‘sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management [form a triangle], which has population as its main target and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism’ (2007: 107–8).

However, present forms of police work make clear that the Foucauldian ‘one-dimensional analysis fails to account fully for modern police techniques’ (Johnson 2014: 19). In his analysis of contemporary police work, Peter Waddington (1999b) shows that policing covers a vast array of tasks, ranging from law enforcement to underenforcement and from peacekeeping to care and assistance. Besides, given the broad range of agencies that provide nowadays policing and security services, the police have turned to be ‘only one of the providers of policing and one among many agencies that contribute to public safety and security’ (Guittet et al. 2022: 13). Nonetheless, in this expanding internal security field the police hold an outstanding position due to their right to use force and, consequently, curtail liberties. This authority is consubstantial with state authority but, at the same time, discretion in both decision-making and execution of police tasks renders them to a significant extent autonomous because they exceed state control. In fact, more often than not police work is ‘unsupervised and unsupervisable’ for supervision and control occur after the event (Crawshaw et al. 1998: 24), which in turn highlights the upmost importance of oversight and accountability. Police brutality in liberal democracies is therefore only one of the aspects of police work. As it expresses an extreme form of the exercise of state power over the community, its handling by the government and the judiciary is by definition intertwined with various political, social and cultural variables and, hence, should be seen as an everchanging outcome of a mutual balance of power within the frame of the rule of law.

Police brutality is narrower than police misconduct. The latter includes unlawful or inappropriate acts or omissions committed by police officers on duty that either do not always imply the use of force or may only impact on police staff. Police brutality encompasses acts, omissions or speech that involve community-oriented violence, be it physical, verbal or psychological, that cannot be accounted for under the auspices of the necessary use of force.