A protest against the use of violence by the Polish police forces in Warsaw (July 23, 2023) | Dawid Dabosz / Shutterstock
Before the 2020 pro-choice protests [in Poland], the police maintained a high level of social trust despite a series of cases of excessive violence reported by the media. For instance, in 1996 the police entered a Romanian Roma camp in Warsaw at 2 a.m., demolishing it and arresting everybody they managed to find, who were then deported. Although some activists and politicians protested, public opinion supported the action: three-quarters of Warsaw residents supported the raid, and half believed it was a good idea to clear the camp in the middle of the night (kab 1996).
Not only Roma immigrants but also members of Roma communities holding Polish citizenship have experienced police brutality and police indifference, with cases of violence against them occurring on a daily basis (see, for instance, Adamski 1998). The police have continued to treat the Roma with the approach familiar from the communist period, when the Citizens’ Militia participated in a massive campaign involving the forced settlement of Roma people (Mirga 1998; Caban 2008). A good illustration of the attitude of the Polish police toward the Roma population and police violence against them is provided by the story of Jan Paczkowski, a Roma activist from Kielce in southern Poland. Just a few weeks after an angry mob attacked the Roma neighborhood in Mława in June 1991 (see below for details), Paczkowski was stopped for no apparent reason by the police while parking his car near his home. They accused him of driving through the red light at a street intersection, while he insisted the traffic lights had been switched off as it was the middle of the night. Six police cars pulled up, and officers were shouting that they would organize “another Mława.” Paczkowski’s wife was at home and came out to try to support her husband. As a result, she was accused of assaulting a police officer. Finally, the police left, and the Paczkowskis went home. The officers came back, however, and banged on their door. The Paczkowskis were afraid to open it, so the police broke in. Paczkowski recalled in a press interview that the officers were screaming that all the “Gypsies” should move out of Poland. He stressed that his children had also experienced police brutality. A week later, his son was stopped by the police and yelled at for no reason. Paczkowski commented: “We just want to be treated as normal citizens. … We think about ourselves as Polish, we went to school here, we work here, but many people see us differently” (Smorawska 1991; see also Kościańska and Petryk 2022, 201–2).
A series of instances of negligence in investigating cases of violence against the Roma can also be easily traced. For instance, in 1991 an aggressive mob attacked a Roma neighborhood in Mława in northeastern Poland, events that became known as the Mława pogrom or the Mława riot. On June 23, a young Roma man caused a fatal car accident. First, he ran away from the accident site, but on June 25, under pressure from his family and the Roma community, he turned himself in to the police and confessed to causing the accident. However, the local gadjo (in Roma culture gadjo means “non-Roma”) community in Mława believed the Roma bribed the police and the prosecutor and decided to take justice into their own hands. On June 26, around 100 people attacked and demolished the Roma neighborhood. More and more people joined in. During the peak moment of the attack, around 200 people were either involved in the attack or watching it unfold. The police started their intervention two hours after the violence had begun, by which time the Roma’s houses had been totally destroyed and their inhabitants were hiding in the nearby forest. On the ruins of one of the houses somebody had written: “Europe for whites” (Kowalik 1991). The journalists who appeared in Mława the next day were horrified by the scale of the violence: “I saw cities destroyed during the [Second World] War, … but I could not imagine this scale of destruction during a time of peace” (Rudziński 1991; for more on the Mława pogrom, see Kościańska and Petryk 2022, 143–58).
A similar approach to violence against the Roma could be seen in 1994 in Dębica in southeastern Poland. A gadjo group severely beat a Roma teenager. As nobody reacted, they continued and demolished a Roma neighborhood. As this happened after a soccer match, a local police commissioner commented that this was neither a conflict between ethnic or national groups (Poles versus Roma) nor any kind of racism—just a conflict between soccer fans. At the same time, according to him, such violence also happens because the Roma do not follow social rules. Witnesses said the aggressors had been screaming anti-Roma slogans such as “White power, death to the Gypsies,” “Gypsies to the gas [chambers], and” “Blacks1 to the gas [chambers].” According to the commissioner, “somebody shouted ‘Attack the Gypsies,’ but this is not any [racist] ideology” (Janiec 1994; Szych 1994; for more details, see Kościańska and Petryk 2022, 198–99).
The public expression of that attitude is not, unfortunately, a sight consigned to the past. In 2019 I participated in a series of antidiscrimination training sessions for the Polish police. One session was opened by a local commissioner who started with a joke that included antisemitism and antiziganism (anti-Roma sentiment). After such an introduction, the participants were openly hostile and disrespectful toward a lecturer who identified as Roma (for more on anti-Roma racism in East Central Europe, see Law and Zakharov 2019; Chang and Rucker-Chang 2020).
Police violence and negligence have not been limited to the Roma. In 2010 a police officer shot to death Maxwell Itoya, a vendor at Jarmark Europa, the largest market in Poland. Itoya came to Poland from Nigeria, got married, and was granted Polish citizenship. He was selling shoes at the market when the police came and tried to arrest other vendors. Tension between the vendors and officers escalated. Itoya wanted to negotiate with the police. When he approached them, he was shot and died a few minutes later. After his death, a riot broke out at the market, resulting in more than 30 vendors being arrested. Although some activists and public intellectuals protested, the Polish media and public supported the police. The press coverage of the events focused on alleged aggressive behavior of Black vendors; for instance, one of the first articles about the events posted on a then-popular Polish internet news portal was titled: “Black-skinned men attacked the police” (Interia.pl 2010b). Internet commentators applauded the police: “Bravo to the police!,” “send them back to africa,” “[shoot] one more” (comments on Interia.pl 2010a).
Gradually, some follow-up articles went deeper into the case, focusing, however, not on police brutality but on illegal migration from Nigeria, sexual contacts between Nigerian men and Polish women, and how African migrants use White women, gaining their love through deception and their supposed incredible sexual potency, to stay in Europe (see, for example, Zieliński 2010; Kościańska forthcoming). Many focused on the goods sold at the market, stressing they were mostly fake items purported to be made by major global brands (Interia.pl 2010a).
The officer who shot Itoya was not punished in any way. The prosecutor of the case decided the officer had done nothing wrong (Fakt 2012). There was also an investigation by activists and journalists that brought to light the deep racism implicit not only in the actions of the police on the day Itoya died but also in how the case was investigated. The voices of other Black vendors were not taken into consideration, and some of the vendors did not want to testify because they feared the potential consequences (No Border Group Warsaw n.d.; Machajski 2010; Tegnerowicz 2010).
As in the cases of anti-Roma violence, one can observe multiple examples of police negligence in fighting racist violence against people of color. For instance, in June 2002 the body of a 19-year-old Afro-Pole was found close to ŚrodaŚląska in western Poland. Although the body had some visible marks suggesting the young man in question had been viciously beaten and his friends and family testified he had been beaten many times in the past and was often verbally attacked, the police classified his case as death by accident (Kornak 2009, 259–60). In a more recent case, when a Black male immigrant was beaten by a group of White Poles near a liquor store in central Poland, the police and the public prosecutor’s office classified the act of violence as an affray (bójka) rather than a case of battery (pobicie). The jurisprudence sees the two crimes, although placed in the same paragraph in the Polish Criminal Code (§158), as fundamentally different: battery occurs when the perpetrators have an advantage and are significantly stronger than their victims, while an affray is deemed a clash between equal parties. In this case, a single Black man was attacked by a group. The classification of his case was only changed when the beaten man asked the ambassador of his native country to intervene.2
How can such instances of police violence and negligence be accounted for? In the field of police studies, excessive violence along with other forms of misconduct displayed by the police officers toward various groups are often understood through the lens of a situational approach that “focuses on the dynamics of police-citizen encounters.” Based on an extensive review of the available research, Sanja Kutnjak Ivković shows that “police officers are more likely to use … excessive force … in situations involving citizens who are defiant and antagonistic towards the police … , lower class … , intoxicated … , male … , and black/nonwhite” (2019, 312). As Polish public opinion polls indicate, this also applies to social perceptions of excessive violence as well as the negligence shown toward the victims when investigating crimes targeting those groups. It suggests that violence directed at minority men, often of lower class and perceived as antagonistic or defiant toward the state, is, in a way, socially acceptable or at least not very harshly condemned. The Polish public was aware of the killing of Maxwell Itoya and many other cases of police brutality against Black people or Roma people, and also was familiar with police negligence displayed in relation to protecting minority groups and investigating cases of violence against them, such as the police’s tardy response to the Mława pogrom. Nevertheless, this had no influence on their trust in the police, which continued to grow unabated as if the public had chosen to close their eyes to what was really going on.
The high level of social trust placed in the police is grounded in a Polish version of what Charles Mills called “white ignorance” (2007). The majority group does not recognize the police brutality and negligence shown toward minority groups; even if the violence is discussed in the mainstream media, it can be easily explained not in terms of unacceptable police abuse, but rather as a result of a minority group displaying improper behavior to which the police have to react (such as Nigerians entering Poland illegally and “abusing” Polish women’s trust in order to legalize their stays or law-breaking by Roma people). Even if the police response in such cases was excessive, they were forgiven by the Polish public because they were, after all, acting in the interests of public order by contributing to the maintenance of a racialized social contract (Mills 1997). Therefore, the police brutality directed at those groups and the negligence they displayed when it came to investigating various instances of violence against them, even when descriptions of those incidents appeared in the media, failed to influence the trust the Polish public placed in the police.
This essay was first published in Social Research: An International Quarterly, a John Hopkins University Press publication, in its Winter 2024 edition. Reprinted with permission.
