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I feel very upset after watching the clip. Admittedly it’s a short clip and we don’t know the full situation, but the poor little fella should never have been exposed to that by the police and/or his father.
I kinda agree its sub optimal. But then its just the opposite of the clip from Slough.
Person (alegedly) breaks (numerous) law(s)
Police intervene
Person doesnt coopperate
Things escalate
This time the police have the means to escalate in their favour.
What should they have done? Let him get back in the car?
I was more worried by the tazer in a petrol station than infront of the kid!
Have been thinking about this thread and hope it continues, it has mileage. FWIW, I do like the contributions of the OP. There is a skill in asking seemingly simplistic questions which actually require a great degree of thought.
So.
You walk into a supermarket and see two older people on the floor, restraining a younger person.
The young person is obviously being restrained against their will, screaming, crying and in obvious distress, begging to be released and shouting that they are in pain and have done nothing wrong. They are attempting to break free and aiming punches and kicks at the two older people.
You may have seen the two older people force the young person to the floor. One is holding their legs down and the other is holding their arms.
Split second, as a member of the public, what do you do?
If you were a police officer called to this situation by a member of the public, how do you react?
Second situation.
You are a police officer.
There is a legally sanctioned demo in your town.
Things are starting to get out of hand, the demonstators and counter demonstrators have started to get violent and there is a danger to people who have just come to town to do a bit of shopping.
You ask people to disperse for their own safety. A photographer, you're not sure from which side, if any, refuses and continues to put themselves in danger to record what's happening.
How do you treat that person?
Not my words...
Yesterday, the Prime Minister gave a pre-recorded speech in which he attempted to explain the government’s latest strategy for responding to the pandemic. Stay Alert, we were told. But a soundbite does not a strategy make and, mostly, he seems only to have confused people (including senior members of his own government).
“Stay at home as much as possible.”
“Work from home if you can.”
“Limit contact with other people.”
What do these statements even mean? They are so subjective as to be rendered almost meaningless.
But, as ever, police officers out on patrol will be expected to interpret and apply them. And some will accuse those officers of being heavy-handed in doing so, while others will accuse them of not doing enough.
A Copper’s Lot is to be caught in the middle, trying to make sense of things that make almost no sense at all.
The Last Few Days
Last week, the nation marked the 75th anniversary of VE Day. Friday evening’s BBC broadcast included a beautiful musical tribute to key workers and members of the emergency services. Except that the police weren’t featured in it.
There were teachers and nurses, members of the armed forces and farmers, train drivers and shop workers, ambulance crews and firefighters, pharmacists and vets, doctors and bin men and posties. But no police officers.
And I can’t for the life of me understand why we wouldn’t want to acknowledge and appreciate members of the police service too – those remarkable women and men who go where most wouldn’t and do what most couldn’t.
A Copper’s Lot is to be taken entirely for granted, until the moment when we need their help.
The Last Few Weeks
The general media coverage of the policing response to the pandemic has fascinated me. And not in a good way.
From the start of the lockdown the focus has been, overwhelmingly, on the negative – on isolated instances of individual officers misinterpreting or over-reaching their new powers. The early headlines were all about Easter eggs and shopping bags and park patrols and drone flights. By comparison, far less attention was given to accounts of police officers being coughed on, bitten and spat at by suspects claiming to have the deadly virus. Or to tales of officers visiting the elderly, doing their shopping and filling their fridges. Or to stories of the thousands of their colleagues who were simply getting on with the day job – protecting the most vulnerable and pursuing the most dangerous in society.
When it comes to policing, bad news travels much further and faster than good news. And when it turns out that some of the negative stories aren’t even true, the damage has already been done.
I’m no blind apologist for the job I used to do. Sometimes police officers – both individually and collectively – get things terribly wrong. And the consequences when they do can be disproportionately damaging. We have every right right to expect higher standards of police officers than we do of anyone else in society.
But is it too much to ask for a bit of balance? Because, for every negative story told about policing, I could tell you a hundred extraordinary ones – involving the kind of humanity and heroism that would likely take your breath away.
A Copper’s Lot is to ignore the noise and get on with the precious business of saving lives and finding the lost and comforting the broken hearted and confronting the violent and defending the weak.
That remarkable, old fashioned thing called duty.
The Last Few Years
In truth, the media coverage of policing during the last few months has, for the most part, been consistent with coverage during the last few years. And with much of the political commentary too.
For the past decade, the story being told about policing by many politicians and newspapers has been an undeniably hostile one: the police are racist; the police are corrupt; the police are incompetent; the police are unwilling to change. Just as thousands were being cut from their ranks, and billions from their budgets. During this period, one journalist with a more open mind posed me a powerful question.
“Who is standing up for policing in this country?” he asked.
He didn’t think that anyone was.
A Copper’s Lot is to remain in the arena, face marred by dust and sweat and blood, absorbing the relentless criticism of those who don’t count.
It Was Ever Thus
Perhaps it’s always been this way. Perhaps we regard police officers in a fundamentally different way to almost everyone else in frontline public service – the emergency services in particular.
Nurses help people. And we love them for it.
Doctors help people. And we love them for it.
Firefighters help people. And we love them for it.
Paramedics help people. And we love them for it.
Police officers help people too. If you ask most of them why they joined in the first place, they will tell you that it was because they wanted to help people. But that’s not all they do. Sometimes they stop people. They pursue people. They challenge people. They search people. They arrest people. Sometimes they use force to do those things. And, as I have already acknowledged, they don’t always get it right.
Perhaps that’s why we find them a little harder to love.
Because there is a part of policing that is rough – involving the kind of violence and trauma and chaos and catastrophe that most of us would prefer not to think about. Until it visits us, that is.
A Copper’s Lot is to venture repeatedly into the hurting places – in amongst the broken lives and broken bones, the broken hearts and broken homes. And you won’t hear a word of complaint from any of them about those things. Because that’s the job. It’s what they joined to do.
I just think that the rest of us ought to show them a little more appreciation along the way. And not just on the desperate days when one of them has been murdered or in the immediate aftermath of the latest terrorist atrocity.
Policing is an entirely imperfect response to an entirely imperfect world but, for more than twenty-five years, I served alongside a bunch of absolute bloody heroes. The best of them are the best of us all.
https://policecommander.wordpress.com/2020/05/11/a-coppers-lot/
Don't you come on here with your inconvenient truths!
We want to show how edgy and intellectual we are by constantly referring to singular events from several decades ago. Orgreave? Hillsborough? Blair Peach? Stephen Lawrence?
That's the face of modern policing alright and I demand to be allowed to loathe and criticise based on those events and all the others I can think of.
I do apologise, I will go and sit in the nearest cell and await my kicking.
I'm not sure I understand your point Scapegoat. I'm generally supportive of the police, I've never met a copper I didn't get on with, and I've worked with a couple of ex officers - indeed, I work with one at the moment, he's great.
Does that mean we are supposed to forget about "Orgreave? Hillsborough? Blair Peach? Stephen Lawrence?", in case someone thinks we're trying to be edgy? How about Ian Tomlinson? That was only a decade ago, are we allowed to mention that?
I'm the least 'edgy' person you'll ever come across, but I understand why some parts of our society have a different relationship with the police than I do.
I think Thegreatape says everything from our point of view. Bravo!
Not much more to add except...
A large percentage of the UK Population have no contact with the Police.
When they do its usually because something bad has happened. You don't call us when everything is hunky dory.
Everything we do nowadays is recorded. Either by ourselves on bodycams or by members of the public.
The media love to hate the Police. It generates headlines.
The small things that help society are very rarely recorded or publicised. But we can live with that.
just something for you all to think about.
I remember as a young PC having many dealings with a family with issues. They created probably 60% of my workload over a number of years. Mostly minor stuff, petty theft, public order etc. I knew most of them by name and they knew me by mine.
Then one night the eldest was killed in in an RTC.
I had to deliver the news.
Despite everything that had happened between us the father took me to one side and thanked me for everything.
We are all human. Behind each uniform is a mum, dad, sister brother, whatever.
There are over 120,000 Police in the UK. Not all of them are saints.
Does that mean we are supposed to forget about “Orgreave? Hillsborough? Blair Peach? Stephen Lawrence?”
No, of course we mustn't forget. The police certainly haven't. When I did event commander training at any level Hillsborough was used as an exemplar for how things can go very wrong. What happened that day very much informs how large events are planned and policed. The service learnt (and is still learning) an enormous amount from that one day. Decades later, the police have moved to a much better way of doing things, yet no one ever seems to mention that. Hillsborough was cited on page one of this thread as a reason not to trust the police.
Similarly Lawrence. The McPherson report was published in 1999. In the 21 years since then the service has moved heaven and earth to move away from the label of "institutional racism." I can only speak from personal experience, but I can state that the officers on my teams were genuinely shocked by any behaviour or language that even hinted at any forms of racism or bigotry. And yet still folk insist that coppers are all racists etc etc.
I can honestly say that (in my experience) the service I retired from a couple of years ago was very different from the one I joined. Transparency, diversity, not just accepted but very much part of the fabric of the service.
I know that the lessons of the past have been learnt, and will continue to be learnt. The officers and staff deserve credit for that, and yet still we see the same tropes trotted out, as I said, decades later, to describe an organisation that is barely recognisable from those descriptions.
As you said @scapegoat most of us won't ever meet Police officers. That is why we make judgements based on the wider picture of the information provided to us by the media and social media.
The problem with Hillsborough was not the mistakes made in policing the event - the huge issue that still burns brightly for many, many people is the cover up. If you don't get that you haven't learnt a thing. Changing statements, paying bribes, lying and buddying up to the highest level of Government and giving fake accounts to the media - within hours of the tragedy - to ensure the S*n etc paint the picture of blame on civilians. Same as Orgreave, when the Police broke the law, use the media, Government and friends in power to direct the blame to the civilians.
I absolutely understand that the Police forces are a group of many individuals, some absolute saints, but you have to accept that there are some scoundrels too. I genuinely feel that the Police force have come a long way since the dark days of the 80's but there are two outstanding problems, one being that in any organisation you will have people who don't behave as they should and the other is institutionalised discrimination. The whole phrase "institutionalised racism" is about the institution, it's not about individual behaviours. And it is absolutely not about pointing a finger of blame. It is about acknowledging that systems and ways of working lead to inadvertent racism. And it is about the perception within the community, not your perception! And this is of particular concern with the role-out of automated facial recognition and tracing. I am sure great improvements have been made in individual behaviours and language. The problem now is things like stop and search and policing of regions with deprivation without the community feeling like they are being singled out. Their lived experiences still seem to be very different to a nice middle class suburb.
The problem with Hillsborough was not the mistakes made in policing the event – the huge issue that still burns brightly for many, many people is the cover up. If you don’t get that you haven’t learnt a thing. Changing statements, paying bribes, lying and buddying up to the highest level of Government and giving fake accounts to the media – within hours of the tragedy – to ensure the S*n etc paint the picture of blame on civilians. Same as Orgreave, when the Police broke the law, use the media, Government and friends in power to direct the blame to the civilians.
You've answered your own question in the same context that I have been trying to argue. The cover-up is as old as the tragedy itself. If you think the cover-up is indicative of current behaviour then you have, I'm afraid, proved my point.
The OP asked why some members of the general population treat police officers badly, which relates to the general population's impression of the Police. Certain members of the Police continued to propagate the cover-up for years, as evidenced by some members refusal to engage with the inquiry, is one very good example of why a lot of people still don't trust the organisation as a whole. The examples given show that these kind of cases keep popping up in time, they are not 'long gone'. It may be the case that the leadership has completely changed, but there will be officers who were serving then and accepted the corrupt way certain forces behaved.
We are arguing the same thing, there is a distribution or people and behaviours within the public and within the policing institutions. I am sure that the vast majority of Police officers join for good reasons and are good people. But you have to accept there are bad behaviours, some of which are institutionalised, that marginalise certain groups or communities and mean that some members of the public will continue to mis-trust the Police.
The whole phrase “institutionalised racism” is about the institution, it’s not about individual behaviours. And it is absolutely not about pointing a finger of blame. It is about acknowledging that systems and ways of working lead to inadvertent racism. And it is about the perception within the community, not your perception! And this is of particular concern with the role-out of automated facial recognition and tracing. I am sure great improvements have been made in individual behaviours and language. The problem now is things like stop and search and policing of regions with deprivation without the community feeling like they are being singled out. Their lived experiences still seem to be very different to a nice middle class suburb.
This deserves a bit more discussion perhaps. In the immediate aftermath of the London Bombings I was tasked with writing and delivering strategy for community engagement and reassurance. It might be apposite to note that several of the bombers were from my district. The police and the local authority were proud (initially) to boast that they were on top of community engagement because they held regular meetings with representatives from the various visible and other minorities resident within the area. It quickly became clear that those representatives were that in name only. We're going back to 2005 don't forget. The police at that time erroneously supposed that those communities were homogenous, and therefore if they spoke with one community representative they were talking to them all. Reality couldn't have been further from the truth. There was a level if disingenuity on both sides - it was of course convenient to showcase the meetings as they ticked various boxes, but the police very much failed to recognise the political and factional divisions within those communities. While many of those forum reps had nothing but the best intentions, others had a very different agenda- such as self-aggrandisement, and even in one case, criminality.
What the police consistently failed to recognise was that they didn't own the narrative. As you point out, if you continue to tackle a problem from the wrong perspective, then you're setting yourself up for failure. The solution would therefore seem straightforward: Seek out true representatives of the real community, not the sock-puppets or self-styled "leaders" , forget your ingrained values, and gain their trust. Simples!
Except that for dialogue between them to be established demands that decades of ingrained community memory be erased, decades of mistrust needs to be dismantled on both sides. That lack of trust is one of the biggest barriers, but it goes hand-in -hand with an unwillingness on the part of authority to hand over control of decision-making.
I don't have all the answers, but I do know that I made every effort to dismantle at least some of those barriers. I'd like to think I made a difference, but I suspect it's a work in progress that will take much longer to get the better of. My point, I suppose, is that the service is far more progressive than people give it credit for. I wasn't unique.
What happened in Slough is simply the friction that arises when a community within a community establishes itself with its own values and norms. In the case of Slough that community frankly doesn't give a toss what the government says or what the laws are - it operates by its own rules as has been the case in many other cities.
Anyone who knows Slough will be aware that the sort of "friction" that takes place there (mass sword fights in streets amongst other things) has been going on for a long time. There's zero respect for the police and no consequence for that - that's the underlying problem.
I respect the law and police.
I just don't like being talk to like I'm a child, two examples in recent times:
Went for a walk with another male. He had been in Australia for a few years. We decided to walk local footpaths for a catch up then a pint to finish. Someone rang the police on us as it was semi rural Police caught up with us on a lane. Talked to us like the headmaster chastising naughty kids. Demanded to know who we were, name, address etc and where we were going without any explanation as to why. Going for a walk ffs. I wouldn't have been so belligerent if I was spoken to in an appropriate manner.
At work on the ward. Man in custody has the usual pretend chest pain. Comes to the ward in cuffs.
Wants food. Fine. Give him some cheese, crackers and butter and a plastic knife. Policewoman who had barely acknowledged me at that point followed me out of the bay to have a go at me for giving him a plastic knife.
A. They refused to divulge his crime.
B. They didn't make it clear before hand.
C. Talk to me like you are in my place of work, not like I'm a criminal.
She then complains to my manager in front of me about it. Ward manager tells her to jog on.
I find 50% of my interactions with police are like this. I still respect the work they do.
I find the turn in discussion very interesting, but I want to reiterate my point that other police forces in other countries have shady history too, but they still command ipso facto the respect of the population.
The RCMP, for example, have been accused of some gross abuses against Canada's Native peoples, but as a force in society - even amongst those same Native peoples - they still command respect. I am sure there are some in Canadian society who think of the police as 'pigs' or some such stupid thing, but you just don't seem to get the same sense of familiarity (positive or negative) happening between the police and people. Police are treated much more like, say, Special Forces or something, as opposed to another bunch of lads, just in black and white uniforms.
Thanks @scapegoat. I do hope that things are progressing in the right direction. I have nothing but respect for what the Police do and put up with day-in-day-out, with friends who serve. I couldn't do it. It's interesting what you say about community engagement and whether or not you are actually speaking with the 'community'. As well as the 'self styled leader' thing, I suspect partly in such densely populated areas there isn't really a community as-such any more.
In one of the towns I covered there were/are, very strong communities. I don't want to appear to over-generalise, or perpetuate stereotypes, but I lost count of the number of factions within what had previously and erroneously been labelled as "the Muslim Community." It meant navigating an absolute minefield of diplomacy, and took a lot of painstaking research and discussions to even start to understand the dynamics of some of them. They varied from ultra-conservative, but nonetheless powerful and influential denominations, as a wider community, to members within others that engaged in powerplays with other mosques of the same denomination. Some of the communities were from different national heritages, and wielded a different type of power and influence. Add to that the often bitter in-fighting between different factions within the same supposed "community" and you'll understand that there was and never will be any "one-size-fits-all" solution. Don't forget that at the time we were looking to implement the earliest stages of Contest and Prevent, and even the tentative beginnings were being viewed extremely suspiciously. Any overture towards one individual could be and often was seen as partisanship/cronyism. Some remained completely opposed to any forms of communication or cooperation, while others welcomed our efforts with open arms.
That same dynamic exists across all communities, and isn't just confined to Muslim communities. It appeared amplified to me at the time, but I'm sure that was down to circumstances. I met similar frustrations in other areas amongst different cultural and ethnic groups.
I know that nearly all police are reasonable people doing a tough job. Mental health social work mostly I imagine. Thank you for picking up society’s failure.
But.
They have all the power and I have none. So every time I have to interact with one I will regard them with suspicion and caution until I’m convinced they’re not a dick, because if our interaction goes wrong it could be life-changingly catastrophic for me.
And I’m not even black or brown or a woman or gay or any of the other people who routinely get treated worst than me.
Not wanting to go too off topic, but...
The Hillsborough cover up was not just "at the time", it was maintained (covered up) for many years afterwards with the police refusing to come clean.