Wednesday
That Breonna Taylor’s family is receiving a $12 million settlement and the promise of police reform following her wrongful shooting by Louisville police is in part a testimony to Black Lives Matters protests and other instances of public pressure. Without them, we might not even know her name. With that in mind, I return to last week’s post about Terry Pratchett and police brutality.
The fantasy author shows that even a good cop like Commander Vimes occasionally feels the urge to abuse his authority. While applauding Patchett’s popular character for resisting “the Summoning Dark,” I omitted mentioning the role that concerned citizens and his own colleagues play in keeping him on the straight and narrow (to borrow an image from Pilgrim’s Progress).
Vimes is trying to maintain peace between his city’s trolls and dwarfs, who have an enmity stretching back centuries. At one point, as he starts to solve a set of dwarf murders, he gets so close to the truth that the dwarfs responsible set out to kill his wife and child. No longer capable of balanced judgment, he starts hearing from his darkest impulses.
Pratchett conveys this through switching to italics in the midst of Vimes’s interior monologues. Earlier we encounter the Summoning Darkness’ point of view in italics, so whenever we encounter these italics, we have a sense of the commander’s interior battle. You’ll see what I mean in a moment.
First, here’s the world seen from the vantage point of Vimes’s dark side. At the moment, his inner urge towards violence is encountering resistance from his ethical center:
It was still nighttime in the city of endless rain. It was never not nighttime. No sun rose here.
The creature lay coiled in its alley.
Something was seriously wrong. It had expected resistance. There was always resistance, and it always overcame it. But even now, when the invisible bustle of the city had slowed, there was no way iin. Time and again it’d be sure that it had found a point of control, some tide of rage it could use, and time and again it’d be slammed back here, into this dark alley where the gutters overflowed.
That was not the usual kind of mind. The creature struggled. But no mind had ever beaten it yet. There was always a way.
And here is Vimes right after having saved his wife and son (with the help of his wife’s pet dragons) from the homicidal dwarfs—who, because they ingest slow-working poison before taking on their mission, resemble suicide bombers. Note how he prays for any excuse to use homicidal force in return:
Could they have been that stupid? he wondered. A dead wife? A dead child? Could they think that would mean for one moment that I’d stop? As it is, when I catch up with whoever ordered this, and I will, I hope there’s someone there to hold me back.
They will burn for what they did.
And a little later:
They shall bur—no! They shall be hunted down to any hole they hide in and brought back to face justice. Unless (oh please!) they resist arrest…
Fortunately for Vimes, his society has enlightened citizens like the dwarf Brag Bashfullsson, who insists on being present when Vimes questions a suspect. He wants to make sure that Vimes doesn’t descend into barbarism, as America did when it waterboarded terrorism suspects following 9-11. Bashfullsson provides a healthy check on Vimes’s interrogations and, because he is there the entire time, he can clear Vimes of suspicion when the suspect dies of a (non-police caused) heart attack:
Commander Vimes, I will swear that Helmclever was treated with nothing but concern and courtesy while he was here. And perhaps with more kindness from you than a dwarf might have a right to expect. His death is not on your hands.
Bashfullsson also draws a distinction between the religion of the dwarfs and the fanatics who espouse it;
“You know, your religion really messes people up,” said Vimes.
“Not in comparison to what they do to one another,” said Bashfullsson, calmly folding the dead dwarf’s hands across his chest. “And it is not a religion, Commander. Tak wrote the World and the Laws, and then He left us. He does not require that we think of Him, only that we think.
Vimes is not out of the woods yet, however. When he finally confronts the dwarfs who ordered the raid on his home, he is filled with righteous fury and is on the verge of killing every one of them. While it’s one thing to kill the guards who are trying to kill him, however, the four old men he encounters are a different matter.
If he refrains from butchering them, it is partly because his internal checks kick in and partly because a fellow cop (a werewolf, who must struggle to overcome her own savage tendencies) jumps on him. The two of them process it afterwards:
All that anger, all that red-hot rage, had flowed out of him in a torrent, without thought. “I killed those damn soldiers…”
“Most of them, sir,” said Angua cheerfully. “And there’s a couple of miners who got in the way who’ll be aching for months.”…It was all coming back to Vimes now. He wished it wasn’t…
“I remember those old dwarfs,” he said. They were cowering like little maggots. I wanted to smash them…”
“You resisted for almost four seconds, sir, and then I brought you down,” said Angua.
“And that was a good thing, was it?” said Vimes.
“Oh, yes. It’s why you’re still here, Commander,” said Bashfullsson, appearing from behind a stalagmite. “I’m glad to see you up and about again. This is a historical day! And you still have a soul, it appears! Isn’t that nice?”
The soul is at stake when police are tempted by their dark urges. And because even the most responsible can succumb, they need protocols, body cameras, transparency, and accountability. They need civilian oversight (like Bashfullsson’s) and timely intervention by fellow cops (like Angua’s), who themselves must be trained to step forward and then be protected if a colleague crosses the line. If Derek Chauvin’s follow cops had brought him down, George Floyd would be alive today.
Unfortunately, in America right now we have far too many police who regard people of color the way that Discworld police see dwarfs and trolls. It used to be worse, just as, in Pratchett’s earlier novel Night Watch, there are the Irregulars, a secret service that routinely tortures those who come into its hands. Vimes, sent back in time, helps clean that up, but Thud! lets us know there is still work to be done.
Of course, exacerbating our situation is a president who cheers on the Summoning Darkness while undermining the rule of law. In Donald Trump’s mind, if checks are abandoned and chaos is unleashed, those with privilege and power can reassert their domination.
It’s a story as old as humankind.
Further thought: Although, in many ways, Pratchett is an anti-Tolkien (he celebrates urban diversity and finds good in trolls and goblins), Vimes’s struggle with the Summoning Darkness is very much like Frodo’s struggle with the ring. Vimes’s humanity saves him in the final showdown–had he slain the four old dwarfs in his fury, he might never have recovered–and Frodo’s former humanity toward Gollum pays off in the final battle.
