The Beatable
Time was, you see, that you could just set about protesters with riot gear to your heart’s content. Gas them, fire rubber bullets at them, charge with batons, shoot them down with water cannons, and generally beat them to a pulp as and when you felt like it. Then things changed. Perhaps it’s the change in the weather – everything seems hotter nowadays. Perhaps it’s the change of venue – those slick-looking glass towers are just more appealing to look upon than some dingy terraced street. But finally people are noticing police brutality. Is it the high-visibility jackets? I don’t think so. I think it’s four things, some of which are quite dark.
Firstly, the people we were used to seeing being beaten to a bloody pulp were the ‘right kind’ of people to beat. Specifically they were poor, rough-looking people. Miners, for example. The same papers who printed headlines criticising the police in their handling of the recent countryside march read ‘Scum miners’ etc when the size-ten-police-issue boot was on the other foot. Proto-commies and the poor are the kind of people that the police were somehow just allowed to beat. Rugger-buggers from Rugby are not. If you go to university, or own a horse, and you pronounce the letter H correctly, somehow it’s assumed that you get some kind of invisible protection from the Police. And if you ever found anything to protest about, they’d just politely tell you to tone it down a bit. The scenes from miner’s protests where it looked like some medieval battle - the king’s cavalry and infantry were being deployed to quell some peasant uprising – played to all those strong British images. In any circumstance from the war to the late eighties, the police could just blame ‘the rioters’ for starting it, regardless of what had actually happened, and half the population would collectively say ‘you know, I think the police have a very difficult job, and it’s easy to blame them when really whose to say what it’s like on the ground?’ regardless of whether this was right or wrong. Even when the poll tax protests turned nasty, it all seemed like it was the right way round – though surely there could be no clearer case of an unfair shift in taxation policy in recent years – because the interests of the rich were, it seemed being protected by the police from the poor. To paraphrase and bastardise Graham Green, those being beaten were still part of the beatable classes. Whether-or-not blame could clearly be established on either side, the working assumption held by large parts of the British public’s mind was that the rough-looking protestors were more likely to have instigated violence than the police, and this informed public perception and the media reports. When it turned out that half of the protesters against motorway expansion were undergraduates, however, people started to think about it a bit. Still, they thought, ‘they look like a bunch of dirty hippies, don’t they? The police still have a very difficult job, and we don’t know exactly what it was like on the ground…’ As outrage built about the Iraq war, people started to see that protesting against government policy was not just for the poor. No longer did they have a government that specifically protected the interests of the rich, but was capable of pleasing or displeasing almost anyone (except, perhaps, big business). Then we had the countryside alliance. And they didn’t look like poor people at all, even with a baton in their face. This was the countryside set. And now G20 has arrived, and everyone is at least capable of looking at the police in the same way, even if they don’t. The perspective of a man being beaten to the ground for no reason at all.
And, secondly, protestors were easier to blame too, because the cameras used to be deployed during or after the event. The ‘first blow’ was rarely caught, and the cameras and reporters stood on the outside. Now, the cameras are everywhere, in and amongst the crowd. Someone saw the first blow land. And it settles arguments without prejudice. It doesn’t eliminate misinformation or the possibility of error, but it helps an awful lot, as do information exchange systems offered by the internet. It’s more difficult for the police to close ranks and protects their own – likewise the protesters. In response, the police have tried to get back some anonymity. But a picture tells a thousand words, and eventually the pressure builds. I was once told about a riot that had happened at a festival – according to the man who I spoke to everything had gone wrong, there were no bands to play and everybody was restless. In came the police to move everyone off-site. They were feeling pretty worked up, but everyone was behaving themselves, it being a bit rowdy. Then, in his words, ‘One of the coppers just maced this kid for no reason’. Word got round and everything just kicked off.’ I didn’t know whether-or-not to believe him. If there’d been a video he could have shown me, though, that might have settled it once and for all.
Thirdly, we have more information. Public perception of the police themselves has gone through a sea-change in my lifetime. Guilford four; Birmingham six; that didn’t help. But more, as police corruption and bully-boy tactics have come more to light, we’ve started to see them for what they are – they’re just people. They are no more or less noble than the rest of us, and just as fallible. Further, as more and more people found that they wanted to do slightly criminal things (mostly drug-related, but often also politically related), they started to see police as people who could be an enemy, a force specifically designed to repress certain aspects of freedom. A necessary evil, as it were, with little or no place in any ideal society. The police could implement laws you agreed with, and protect you, but they could also pursue agendas you disagreed with, sometimes to the point of hitting you. This was easier to accept for some, not so easy for others. As the population became more educated, which always helps to grey moral issues, and started to be able to appreciate the roots of social problems, the police now seemed more like an emergency task force, or a pack of trained attack dogs, something that needed to be controlled and monitored. Not only that, but the police themselves had no particular moral authority of their own. Individual policemen were less likely to know the ins-and-outs of a given situation than the protestors, and both sides knew it. They started to look like they didn’t know whether-or-not what they were doing was right, but doing it anyway because they were ordered too. Which felt less like a collection of friendly helpful Bobbies, and more like a troop of soldiers.
And lastly, they lost faith in those that command the police and their intensions. If the British people could have believed that, regardless of the shortcomings of the police, if the people in charge of the police knew what was best – if the attack dog was under the control of a kind master – then everything could be ok. But nobody did. It was apparent under Thatcher that the government and the police hierarchy’s first loyalties were to themselves and their friends, and last to the British people. The corruption did nothing but grow for the next few years, and though a brief blip of trust arose once more with the advent of Blair, people lost faith in the people in power. So now, the police look like the private army of some corrupt minority who happen to be in charge. A scary thought, not helped by the masks, stab-proof vests and uniforms. And then, as if we needed to utterly destroy the reputation of the police further by means of their organisation and deployment, we have terrorism policy. When the police shoot innocent men in the head for no reason at all in the name of protecting us from terrorism, things start to look mightily shaky indeed
But that is not what they are. The police really are necessary, and, as an institution, they are not a pack of attack dogs. A decent, accountable police service is a necessity because we don’t live in an ideal society. But protest, and the freedom to protest without fear of violent repression from your own government is also a necessity because we do not live in an ideal society. The fact the police ranks are filled with aggressive young men trained to assume that any group of protesters is a riot in waiting is a sad indictment of the current state of the police service, but it is not their only function, it is not definitive of their role and it is not the only possibility for the institution. Neither are they defined by petty target-driven convictions, anti-terrorist over-reaction or the convenient framing of groups of Irishmen. Some of them still solve murders, and pursue rapists and try to solve a whole multitude of offences as best they can. And they still come round your house when there are a load of arseholes on your front lawn threatening to set fire to your car (thanks, guys). It is how we use the police, how we organise them, and what powers we give them that counts. But more, it is what we do not allow them to do that is most important. And when we see pictures of police beating someone to the ground, or smacking them in the face, our first thought should always be ‘that could be me’. And if we think ‘the police have a very difficult job’ it shouldn’t be because we want to excuse them for something, but because we are recognising a fact. Police should have a difficult job – they have the responsibility of protecting us, the citizens, and that is difficult. And if we suspect them of protecting something else – the interests of, say, the government – against the citizens, then we need to check that, and come down hard on it.