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Norway’s Rodney King Moment

Written by Geirmund Knutsen
Tuesday, 09 December 2008 00:00

Remember Rodney King? The African American who was stopped in his car and beaten up by members of the Los Angeles Police Department; the incident that sparked the 1992 LA riots? In the summer of 2007, Norway had something akin to her own “Rodney King moment” when a badly-injured Ali Farah was denied transport by a local ambulance service.

Early evening on the 6th of august 2007, in a public park, in the capital, Oslo, a father asked a group of people playing football to move. In his opinion, they were a little too near his newborn daughter. Their reply was delivered by a single blow to the face that knocked him to the ground and left him unconscious from the fall. Some 6,000 news articles later, a picture of the bleeding father received an award for press photo of the year; the partner of the father, and mother of the child, has been made Norwegian of the year; and three separate government inquiries into the incident have all concluded that the father’s civil rights were breached that evening in the park.

Although no riots ensued during this incident, similarities with the King episode can be found both on the day of the event and in the reactions since.

The charge

The intersection of an individual’s rights with the duties of his or her state is manifested most clearly by the conduct of public services like the police, the school and the hospital. This is where need begins, shortcomings are most easily exposed and injustice most acutely felt. In the case of King, the police service was charged with failing their duty by their physical assault; In the case of Ali Farah, the ambulance service was charged with failing their duty by neglect.

The ambulance reached the park within six minutes of being called and left, empty, seven minutes later. According to the ambulance team, a Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) assessment was conducted and no sign of a serious head injury was found. Witnesses, on the other hand, claim this did not take place as there was no physical contact between the patient and the ambulance staff. Six months later, an inquiry by the state’s health authority (Statens Helsetilsyn) resulted in a formal warning to the ambulance staff for “improper care”, but concluded in their favour as regards having carried out their “general duties”.

The retort

Laws of confidentiality strictly limit the ability public services have to defend their actions. Bound by chains of command, management speak on behalf of their muted staff before relevant authorities, if required, are called on to investigate such incidents. The beating that followed the high-speed chase of King was deemed necessary by the police due to his “violently resisting arrest”. The denial of ambulance transport for Farah was due to his alleged disorderly conduct.

When the ambulance arrived, the patient was helped up on his feet. He then started urinating, first on the ground in front of the ambulance driver, then on the driver’s shoes and trousers, and finally, after a few uncertain steps, on the ambulance itself. This was taken to be a deliberate act, and the decision was made to leave the transport of the patient to the police, who were also present. Farah was eventually taken in a taxi to the nearest A&E where the serious nature of his injuries was established before a further stand-off took place. A request for ambulance transport to the local hospital was challenged by the Emergency Communications Centre (AMK) on the grounds of risk to the ambulance staff. They eventually accepted and Farah was taken in an ambulance to Ullevål hospital. It was late evening before a life-threatening brain haemorrhage was discovered. The patient was put under a medically-induced coma and immediately operated on.

The reaction

A consequence of the balance of immediate explanatory power (rightly) resting with the individual is speculation. Media will rapidly increase (or decrease) this advantage by drawing on witness accounts. The violence of the assault on King was filmed by an onlooker and broadcast around the world. The neglect of Farah was captured by several photographers and conversations were recorded both on emergency calls and on the ambulance service’s own voice recording system.

Claims of racism and neglect were made on emergency calls even before the patient left the park. By the next morning, the media reported that Farah had been called a “fucking pig” and that the ambulance service was not just guilty of neglect, but that the incident had racist overtones. Within two days, the force of this possibility – institutional racism – had government ministers running for their socially-acceptable lives. The health minister (Sylvia Brustad) said the incident was “totally unacceptable, if as reported”. The finance minister (Kristin Halvorsen) disassociated herself further by asking, “Could this have happened if it was a white father? Probably not.” The former minister of justice, now novelist, (Anne Holt) made her sweeping judgement on Norwegian society by suggesting that there was no coincidence in this neglect. The ambulance staff only saw “a black guy with piss in his trousers” and equated that with danger. By this point the population of Oslo was already showing its disgust by obstructing ambulances on emergency call-outs and offering them their middle fingers as opinion.

The verdict

The conduct and demographic of the individual at the centre of a public service incident being adjudicated is crucially important. Both King and Farah had to endure scrutiny of their characters and attempts at their denigration. In King’s case, a claim of PCP drug abuse was made by the defendant (LAPD). This, they argued, would leave him impervious to pain and thus justify the level of physical force required for his arrest. Tests on King, however, were negative. In Farah’s case, intoxication by a drug (THC) was established by blood tests. The defence for the 23-year-old male who hit Farah in the park raised this during the trial. Farah admitted to smoking cannabis the weekend before, but the court dismissed it as irrelevant as regards his behaviour in the park the following Monday.

The weight of possible racial injustice lay heavily on both incidents, and the outcomes of the respective verdicts evidence this. In the King case, the officers were all acquitted by a jury consisting of 10 whites, one Latino and one Asian. It was only a year later that the LA riots began. In the Farah case, three inquires found in his favour. They resulted in fines, formal warnings and suspensions for the ambulance staff, but the charge of racism was never substantiated.

The revision

Since 1992, the King story has been revised somewhat by historians, journalists and by King’s own increasingly criminal conduct. According to Washington Post writer Lou Cannon, the LAPD acted correctly at the beginning of the night, but the first edit of the broadcast video left out this part. Cannon does not exonerate the LAPD, but argues that the beating did not have a racial motivation. Since the summer of 2007, both the ambulance driver and Farah have had their views aired in public. Erik Schjenken, portrayed in a feature article, has admitted to making a mistake that day, but is weighed down mentally by a racist label he believes is unjust. Farah, in his response to the portrait, showed no compassion for the depressed ambulance driver, and has instead taken his fight to the establishment, challenging colonial injustices in general. One is seeking a just future history for himself; the other is demanding a historically just future for subjugated peoples.

So, was Norway’s Rodney King moment racist? I don’t know. But the reason it is a “moment” is that the racist fault-lines in Norway were glaringly exposed. Some commentators have suggested that the strong current of anti-racism is itself a form of racism. This, I believe, is stretching the term too far. What it may be, however, is an indicator of the Norwegian national psyche. Taking a leaf out of social deviance theories, such a terminal fear of being labelled a racist, either as an individual or as a nation, would then be a symptom of a condition created by Norwegian society itself. Perhaps the ‘collective guilt’ explanation is an appropriate approach for identifying and remedying this condition. This idea emerged again most recently when trying to understand how the lives of Austrians Josef Fritzl and Natascha Kampusch went uncovered for so long. The full force of this argument suggests that the Austrian society has been conditioned to look the other way ever since the Anschluss of Austria by Hitler’s Germany in 1938, and through the horrors of WWII. But were this approach chosen to help understand racism in Norway, the nation would have to be educated in, and come to terms with, its historical mistreatment of minorities like the Kvens, the Sami people and Gypsies.