We are all raised in normative society to view the police as the good guys, as protection. The consistent message bombarding us from public schools and from prime-time entertainment—which is inordinately obsessed with the cop drama—is that police officers are the defenders of social order against all forms of deviance and harm. “To protect and to serve.”
But the reality is quite different. Without digressing into unnecessary statistics here, we all know that cops kill Black people at a bewildering rate and the trend continues unabated. Amadu Diallo, Michael Pipkens, Malice Green, Oscar Grant… and on and on. We’re talking about genocide here. A one-sided war being waged by the enforcers of an undeclared fascist police state, where a gang of uniformed thugs firing 137 shots into a car in Cleveland and killing two unarmed people is no longer an exception to the rule. It’s business as usual.
The unnecessary and shocking level of violence—employed with relish and excitement by the police—against the Occupy Movement across the country stands as another example that the mythology fed to american kids in classrooms across the nation is an absolute falsity. We are now confronted with an obvious situation where we are instructed at gunpoint to believe a constructed lie that defies our own experiences; we are virtually ordered to swallow this false indoctrination of law enforcement’s righteousness and service, and to ignore the contrary lessons that have been sprayed into our faces or fried into our flesh or pounded into our bones.
It is in this context that Ben Turk, a good friend of mine, has created an excellent medium for de-constructing the lie, not on some vast and complex scale, but in the example of just one cop and his seeming flow-of-consciousness monologue. It starts off, of course, as a defense of himself, his role, and the instution of law enforcement, but eventually devolves into a kind of confusion, one that offers an accurate glimpse into the psychology of the fascist enforcer. What we encounter in Ben Turk’s play is more than entertainment; it is the personification of the fascist pathology, the sickness not just of the individual fascist pig, but the infection that constitutes the very foundation of law enforcement as an institution, and of hierarchy itself.
By the end of this masterful deconstruction, Ben Turk’s Officer Lance Mead cannot hide the sickness from us nor from himself. He can only be understood as a human turned agent, an agent turned tool-of-violence, with all the consequences that result from such an unnatural modification of a human being.
So we are left with some interesting questions which may or may not have answers. To what degree is the cop responsible, as a volunteer, as a moral agent, for allowing the State to turn hi m into an instrument of State violence? That is, to what degree is Lance Mead responsible for his own dehumanization? And, on the flipside of that, to what degree is Lance Mead the victim of economic forces that compel him to accept a role as a fascist enforcer, in order to feed his family.
What ultimate good and what ultimate harm can we envision for society by the creation of the Lance Meads, by the programming of enforcers who cannot imagine a world beyond the fascist police state, whose minds have been mismanaged with great skill? Do we really need them?
When I had simply read Ben Turk’s brilliant work, I was left to wonder what the monologue might sound like if the police who fired 137 shots into that car in Cleveland were to speak honestly and as openly as they are capable. What would the rambling statements sound like?
Then I had the opportunity to view a performance .
The advantage of a one-man show is that it can be performed even in the plexiglass visiting cube of a supermaximum facility’s visiting room. For the purposes of the performance by default, I became the silent “suspect” that serves as Lance Mead’s sounding board, the inexpressive “other” that provokes Mead’s rambling monologue by maintaining a continued silence.
Ben Turk does not so much portray Lance Mead as he assumes the persona; seeing this up close and personal in a visitation booth, I noted the impressive details: The tremors in his voice when upset; the shaking of his hands when opening his wallet to extract a family photo; the flaring of the nostrils, curling of the lip as if involuntary, and dilation of the pupils when he’s angry. He brings the character to life.
This cop persona has a Boston accent. It would seem all dramatic portrayals of cops present one of three dominant accents – the Brooklyn accent, the Irish brogue of Sean Connery’s beat-cop in “The Untouchables” or the more-recently fashionable Boston accent of Donny Wahlberg and Matt Damon in “The Departed.” Lance Mead’s Boston accent is consistent throughout, and allows Ben to create a separation between the character and his own interaction with his audience during intermissions. A unique feature of this performance is that, as set intervals, the action pauses for discussion of relevant issues that arise from the character’s self-justifying monologue. In this way, the play creates an interesting forum for thought provoking exchange.
The character of Lance Mead, the cop with his self-serving obfuscations, confronts us. What must we do, collectively, to bring about a world where we are no longer terrorized by these armed instruments of state violence? What response to the cop and the institutions that rely upon him is just and fair and moral to save the lives of the next Oscar Grant, the next Malice Green, the next Michael Pipkins, the next Amadou Diallo? How do we bring about a cop-free world?
Perhaps the adage holds true:
Guns don’t kill people.
Cops do.
Save lives.
Kill cops.
If so, then Ben Turk’s principle contribution here serves that cop-killing process by first killing “the cop”—the mythology, the archetype, the lie imposed on us all—that occupies our own heads.
That’s a great start.
A friend recently wrote and apologized for taking so long to get back with me explaining the cause of the delay to be “psychological”and “mental health” issues. I know what that means of course. People sometimes have a sense of life being overwhelming and experience difficulties, emotional trauma and conflict. When things get bad and we have trouble coping, we understand the events as involving “psychological” and “mental health” implications.
Dear Governor Kasich,
We are working with Sean’s Lawyer to get to the bottom of the current communication black-out. We’ve been getting rather inconsistent information from the ODRC and from the Ohio State Highway Patrol. It seems clear that Trevor Clark is, as always, trying to justify repression of Sean by claiming that his free and protected speech is a threat. Currently Sean only has access to legal phone calls (Rick hopes to talk to him soon) and snail mail.
We sent Sean comments from his 
It has become clear that the ODRC is messing with Sean’s ability to communicate. This is very likely a retaliatory attempt to obstruct his ability to sue their pants off. Below find a message from him about the phone restriction. Supporters have been calling since Sunday about the Jpay email restriction. It seems both originated with Cheif Inspector Gary Croft.
Transcript of Radio Essay originally appearing on