As a public defender, many of my clients have been the victims of police abuses, from being subjected to public humiliation to being shot—unarmed—by the police. In late 2015, while in the West Bank working with the International Legal Foundation and local Palestinian public defenders, part of my assignment was to attend roundtable meetings with representatives from the Palestinian Public Prosecution and the police force, among others. I had never engaged with police officers in this way, and the intimacy of understanding brought on by rounds of dialogue was initially disorienting. However, the local public defenders leading these meetings strove to understand the officers while never softening their stance against police abuses. These lawyers maintained that the officers, like our clients, had to be understood as a matter of principle.
The question of whether activists should engage by attempting to understand state perpetrators of violence is very different from the question of whether activists should engage by collaborating with them. It may be that, in the end, the answer to one is yes while the other is no. But to maintain a position that activists should not attempt to understand perpetrators of state violence is untenable from an activist perspective. As Rachel Wahl eloquently puts it, “An irony persists when those who affirm universal human dignity cast some people as beyond understanding.” Understanding and engaging with security officers is useful, especially with the goal of disrupting groupthink and harmful norms. More important, however, is that engaging with such perpetrators is right. As human rights advocates we cannot hold anyone to be beyond worthy of understanding, even as we proclaim their actions to be so.
Being a public defender means acknowledging the inherent dignity of every human being.
