And with the Occupy Movement, it's really ironic how the police come as representatives and enforcers of the powers that be, even though the people in the Occupy Movement are really on their side - not in terms of their behavior, but in terms of their economic status, in terms of who the police are in society and how much they're paid, and if you boil it down to the economics of it, the police should be out there marching with the Occupy Movement.
Oren MovermanI think you can blame certain police officers for certain behavior, you can blame certain departments for certain behavior, and power and so forth, but, ultimately, I'd say it's about us, and it's about society, and I say - even if its sounds a little controversial - put the police aside for a second. It's really not about them. It's about the game that's been created to keep the status quo going and to let the people who own it all gain from the game.
Oren MovermanIf you look at it that way, then you start thinking about the basic things, which are jobs not jails, and education not incarceration.
Oren MovermanFirst of all, we occupied Afghanistan and Iraq and I'm not even talking about the past occupation of them, I'm just talking about currently. And we all know that occupations, in military terms, comes down basically to policing, so you have an army basically functioning as a police force in these foreign territories as part of foreign policy. I'm not knocking that down, I'm just observing.
Oren MovermanI mean, you always hope to have a part on every level, on every layer. For us it was very much a conversation about power and sexuality and brutality. And really all the issues that are in that world, in that space, come down to one word, which is "masculinity.
Oren MovermanThere's no solutions to prevent corruption because it's the same thing as putting soldiers in an occupation in a foreign territory - there's too much that's gonna go wrong. There's too much human behavior that's going to get in the way. So you're gonna have to start thinking about it in a different direction, and the different direction is: what is wrong with society?
Oren MovermanSo the only problem that you have is actually switch things in the department, changing things, controlling things, putting it maybe under federal supervision, and if you fix the department, you'll fix the problems - with police corruption, with brutality, with evidence tampering, all those things.
Oren Moverman