We share this article from Comrades in Norway:
On Tuesday, NRK wrote that police have arrested ten youths in Bogerud in Oslo after an alleged fight.
As usual, there were a number of articles where the police and media agitated against proletarian youth, especially those with immigrant-backgrounds who were singled out by acting Deputy Police Chief Johan Fredriksen.
Minister of Justice Jørgen Kallmyr has shown his fascistic tendencies and in response demands more “discipline” in schools while standing by the statements made by the aforementioned Deputy Police Chief.
In the same article, a witness is quoted saying:
If you have a poor relation to police from before and you have the police up in your face, yelling and shouting at you, it is not so easy to just turn and walk away. The police ought to understand this.
Eventually, a video of police rounding up several youth up against a wall has surfaced, where police act threateningly with batons over their shoulders.
The video of the incident can be seen below:
Keeping this video in mind, it becomes especially noteworthy that some of the youth have been charged for not complying with police demands. In practice, this entails the police showing their desire to encircle youth as if they were animals in order to prosecute them for not being able to handle such treatment.
On Thursday, a video surfaced showing a police officer attacking peaceful demonstrators with batons while shouting at them.
This video can be viewed here:
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10156789721768640&id=699738639
In fear that this places police in a poor light, the Deputy Police Chief claims, in a statement made to NRK, that it is normal to edit videos from such encounters to put police in a poor light. And he claims that it has to do with “marking territory”.
In other words, we see that police answer criticism regarding their treatment of youth by describing youth as animals in order to justify treating them as such.
Only when more people have spoken up against the police and persecution in the media have the youth and the local population been included in the media. Despite this, it must be mentioned that the first article from NRK took the police claims at their word without raising critical questions or regarding any other voices. This is typical practice for the bourgeois media: politicians and large companies almost always have the opportunity to defend themselves in the media. But when the “credible source”, the police themselves, harass immigrants and proletarians, those exposed to police violence are rarely offered the same space.
