A kapo leader at the Salaspils concentration camp in Latvia.

You may be asking tonight how five Black cops could beat a Black man to death.

I can't answer that. All I can do is tell you a story.

During the Holocaust, at every stage of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, there were some Jews who were willing to help them along. Nazi rule in the ghettos of Eastern Europe was enforced by Jewish police. Forced labor gangs in the concentration camps were worked to death by Jewish overseers.

These collaborators worked under a range of titles, but in the history books one in particular has come to stand for all of them: "kapo." And that label has stuck. To this day, 80 years later, one of the worst insults you can hurl at a Jew is to call them a kapo.

Why did they do it? In a system rigged against them, collaboration was a way to suffer less. If you collaborated, you got better food, warmer clothes. You got beaten less. You got to live another day. And you got a little bit of power -- power that you could wield however you wanted, as long as you only wielded it against your fellow Jews.

The kapos would have told you they had other reasons, of course. Some would tell you that they were trying to be a buffer between their people and the system that oppressed them. Some may even have thought they could change the system from the inside. But in the end, the justifications didn't matter; when the kapos stopped being useful to their masters, they were just as disposable as their justifications.

If you are wondering how a system can get to a point where people are oppressing their own, all I can tell you is: that is how oppressive systems work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapo

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A kapo leader at the Salaspils concentration camp in Latvia.

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