Tag Archives: police

All Greek to me

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Hardly a week, hardly a day goes by without examples of police brutality being reported somewhere in the world. Mounted police charging into peaceful demonstrators, suspects tasered to death, handcuffed prisoners shot dead, people in custody beaten up in watch houses, arrested and restrained people sprayed in face with capsicum spray, people dragged behind police cars, people in police trucks left to die from the heat on hot days, you name it, it’s happened somewhere yesterday, happening today, will happen tomorrow.

All par for the course when armed, uniformed men, with absolute authority, are given power over the powerless. Much the same happens in prisons. Or in wartime. But I didn’t want to talk about the actual brutality so much, as about what follows.

Generally nothing.

As soon as an accusation is made, or CCTV or mobile phone footage comes to light, the police force swings into action. Counter accusations will be made against brutalised victims, calls for consideration of “context” of the event, demands that it be recognised what a difficult job police have. Leading politicians, high-ranking police chiefs by their side, will, grim-faced, support their thin blue line. Internal enquiries will be promised. Things will be got to the bottom of.

Police union heavies will hold press conferences, appear on shock jock radio, calling for sympathy and understanding for the traumatised policemen involved, demand that no action be taken, criticise even the suggestion of a totally secret internal investigation.

What there will not be, from any policeman or policewoman, is any hint of sympathy for the victims of the police action, or any hint of criticism of the police concerned. Call that solidarity, this is solidarity. The thin blue line is suddenly very thick indeed, guarding the bridge against the barbarians. The barbarians being the 99.9% of the population who are not members of the police force.

The other occupation, apart from police, derived from the Greek word “polis” meaning both city-state and body of citizens (who created and governed the city-state) is politician. Hardly a week, hardly a day goes by without examples of politicians making sexist and racist remarks, using refugees as political footballs, talking garbage about climate change, favouring the very rich while pretending at principled action, and so on. You think of a piece of wrong-headed, stupid, nasty and vicious comment that could be made, and it was yesterday, is being made today, will be made tomorrow.

Bad enough that we have people in politics with minds like gutters, sewers even, but it gets worse. No sooner is the comment made than leaders of the political party concerned, fellow members, will be blitzing tv, radio, newspapers, to defend the obnoxious remarks, spin them, soften them. Shock jocks will join in to make it seem that this new level of gutter politics is perfectly reasonable, honest, accurate, is now, in fact, the new norm.

What there will not be is any hint that the politician was wrong in what they said about refugees, Aborigines, climate change, single parents, lesbians and gays, environmentalists, the poor. The thin blue line of conservative politicians will be there to hold the line against the outraged politically correct 90% of the public who do not share those views.

Look I get it, really I do. Football players will rally around someone who has stamped on an opponent’s head, soldiers around those who have shot civilians, doctors around those who have damaged patients, lawyers around those who fail clients in court. Defend your fellow workers when they are in trouble and they will defend you when you are. But even without that reciprocity element, the compulsion to look after your own is very strong, perhaps hard-wired back to when the first band of early humans dashed across the savannah pursued by lions. Even on a much larger scale, the concept of “my country right or wrong” “love it or leave it” seems to be a common feature of countries which differ in everything else.

Poor young Bradley Manning has recently completed 1000 days of solitary confinement in very nasty conditions, not even actually charged, let alone convicted. He was a whistleblower, but those responsible for the nastiness he helped expose (for example the helicopter crew massacring Iraqi civilians in Baghdad), remain unpunished, uncriticised even, while he has been subject to the acrimony of a whole nation.

The American government seems determined to ensure that Manning’s treatment will be a warning to others, that no one will ever again break ranks and reveal wrong doing. That the interests of the state and those of its citizens are no longer inextricably linked as the Greeks had envisaged.

Police and politicians seem to have never believed they were. I don’t get it.

It’s all Greek to me.

Law’n'Order

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The most striking Australian political event at the end of 2010 was possibly the election of a Liberal government in Victoria. In one sense it wasn’t that startling, since Labor had been in power for 11 years, and Australians are in the sometimes misguided habit of cheering on the underdog and thinking it’s time they had a go. Some commentators claimed that the size of the swing to the Liberals was the surprising thing, given that John Brumby was such a laid back kind of guy that no one, not even the opposition leader, seemed to have a bad word to say about him. But this completely misses the point that the swing was as big as it was precisely because even the Liberal leader couldn’t find a bad word to say about his former schoolmate. You would think if the Labor Party had learned anything in the last couple of years it would be that if you have a Labor Party behaving exactly like a Liberal Party (as they do at state and federal level these days) people will decide they might as well vote for the real Liberal Party, given any kind of excuse.

And the Victorian Liberals gave them the excuse with the familiar conservative Law’n'Order campaign, featuring the usual suspects of “more police on the streets” “armed guards on train stations” (!) and mandatory sentencing. I understand the feelings that people in cities have. As the cities become bigger and bigger and more crowded, crime in total grows. The disparities in wealth don’t help either, nor poor educational resources and lack of employment in outlying suburbs, nor the war on drugs. But mostly statistics show actual crime rates (taking into account population growth) falling, while what isn’t falling is the constant and growing media emphasis on crime in news bulletins. And crime presented in such a way that every citizen in the city (especially those living in “quiet streets”) is meant to feel afraid, very afraid, that at any moment they may be mugged in the street, have bullets fired into their house, suffer a violent home invasion, or be brutally murdered. Every such event is presented to the tv cameras as if it is some random piece of violence that could happen to anyone; only the small print, or a very low key piece days later, point out that most such events happen between people who know each other as a result of domestic disputes, or criminal (often drug related) activity.

But because the media is constantly running a fear campaign on law and order it is very easy for politicians to piggy back on it and indulge in bidding wars in which the two political “solutions”, more police, mandatory sentencing, are ratcheted up ever higher. No one pausing to ask whether people really want to live in a society in which armed police are everywhere in our cities, and where our jails fill up (as in America) by people with ever increasing minimum and mandatory sentences for often minor crimes. Nor does anyone pause to ask what the politician claiming to be “tough on crime” is going to do about the root causes of that crime in terms of education, employment, and economic viability.

Don’t get sucked in by all this – treat the media, and politicians, talking about crime and law and order with the same skepticism you apply to them talking about anything else. I have a feeling that if you had a quiet chat with most Australians and asked them what they want their politicians to do, the answers would involve better hospital services, more funding for public schools, more aged care and child care support, attention to local infrastructure (bridges are dear to my heart after the flooding of December), intelligent support for farmers, and a determination to leave the environment of state or country in a better state than when they took office (returning more water to rivers, and stopping tree clearing would be places I might start). Sure we all support our local police, and a commitment to improving their pay, facilities, and technology would go down well with everybody. But this is not what “law and order elections” are about, and when you hear a politician using this as the main reason to vote for them you might ask yourself, and them, what are they going to do about the really important, and real, issues we all face.

Of course we all want order in our society (and my goodness, Australians really don’t have to worry too much about lack of order in any rational assessment of our society), but a more important question to ask, of those who want to govern us, is what kind of a society do we want the order in?

Where the buck stops

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The television media made much in the period leading up to Christmas of the massive police "crack down" on drunken behaviour in the streets of the major cities. The only problem they, the media, had with the program was that there should, apparently, have been thousands more policemen, and they should be on the streets all the time, 24/7/365. Strange how the television media seems so in favour now of having a police state. Once upon a time the idea of thousands of armed police roaming Australian streets backed up by surveillance cameras on every street corner would have seemed inconceivable, Orwellian, but now it is taken for granted, the only criticism being the Oliver Twist one of "more please".

Virtually no discussion about how it came to be that teenage boys, and girls, were getting so drunk out of their minds they were vomiting on the street and kicking each other in the head. Just one of those things it seems. Almost no mention of the remarkable coincidence that a massive increase in liquor licenses, and switching from 10pm closing to drinking all night might have coincided with the change in drunkenness. The only time I heard this mentioned was when a tv presenter said that of course reducing the drinking hours wouldn't work because when we had 6pm closing we had the "6 oclock swill", when workmen, only one hour to drink, glugged down as many as possible. What this has to do with the more recent civilised closing hour of 10pm wasn't explained. Reduce drinking hours and the number of alcohol outlets would certainly reduce alcohol problems and also the huge profits the liquor industry is now used to. Guess more police is a preferable answer.

All the debates go like this now. A recent, and not unrelated, increase in knife crime was being dealt with in Melbourne by random searches without necessary cause. Oh, civil libertarians complained of course, always do, but if you aren't carrying a knife then you would have no reason to object to being stopped in the street, at random, and being body searched by a couple of policemen. Would you? Again, much puzzlement about the increase in knife crime with little reference to the glorification of violence and criminals in the media. Nor any reference to the massive availability of all kinds of knives in certain shops. But restrict the showing of violent crime, or the availability of knives suitable for street fighting? No, can't be done.

Might be time to start considering causes, not just treating effects. Even if the result is a few less bucks for some interested parties. The cost to society has become too high, and it's the rest of us who are paying it.

All David Horton's earlier writing is here.