Inhumane images of students/ No responsibility for police mistreatment
The scandalous images that were published on Thursday evening, where some young protesters appeared bound in a brutal manner and lying on the floor, while several police officers stood around them, were passed over with a banal justification by the State Police. No responsibility and no punishment for the police officers who had the idea to lay the young people on the ground, in scenes reminiscent of the methods of the most brutal regimes in the world, where detainees are humiliated and desecrated in the most inhumane ways.
The footage shows humiliating treatment, where neutralized people are kept lying on the floor, in conditions that can hardly be reconciled with the most basic standards of respect for human dignity.
Regardless of the actions they may be suspected or accused of, these people enjoy rights that cannot be denied by the blue uniforms. Neutralizing a person who poses a threat is one thing, while the way they are treated after being brought under control is quite another.
"The people shown in the video published in the media are not in the escort rooms at the police station or in the security block rooms, but are at the first moment of being neutralized in flagrante delicto by the Police services, in one of the state institutions where they were attempting to enter and where they were attacking Police officers," the official Police response states.
By explaining that the arrested young men were not at the police station, police leaders attempted to justify the way they were treated. But this explanation, instead of responding to the main concern raised by the video regarding the mistreatment of the arrested, focuses on the location of the individuals.
The problem was not where the detainees were, but that the police violated their obligation to respect human dignity from the moment an arrestee is placed under the control of law enforcement.
To date, the protest has been managed in a scandalous manner by the State Police, which has responded to the violence of the young protesters with animal violence, beatings in the streets, kidnappings reminiscent of the methods of Latin American militias, and stone-pelting of protesters. As if this were not enough, Police Chief Skënder Hita has also brought out civilians in hoods, armed with sticks, who have entered the crowd to beat and kidnap the young people.
What police leaders need to understand is that no state position gives them the right to misuse the police as an instrument of oppression against young protesters. Even more so when Edi Rama has shown that one of the most perverse ways he treats his police officers is to first misuse them for the interests of power and then spit them out like pieces of a squeezed lemon./Lapsi.al
