Police Violence, Media Violence

Police Violence

 

·         It is eminently possible to understand the much publicised excessive and preemptive police violence at the anti-cut Demonstrations in London last week (and previously).

 

·         It is also easy to understand the government’s desire to recast the police violence as the violence of the protestors.

 

·         What is mystifying is the sustained and ongoing media violence. This violence is of a different order.

 

 

The police violence makes perfect sense, even if it perplexed me at first.

 

·         At first I could not understand why the police were using such barbaric tactics. I could understand that individual policemen were going to be violent. (I know people who joined the police, and they joined the police for precisely that reason: the chance to be allowed to be justifiably violent. All of them the same: this was their rationale. And these were people I knew at university, by the way; students taking their degrees without having to pay fees, just like me. Indeed, I remember clearly one of them saying to me “Oh, I really want to be an accountant for the money, but I really want to be a copper for the aggro”. ‘Thankfully’ he became an accountant. I say ‘thankfully’, though I worry about his clients…)

 

·         What I could not believe was why the orders from above seemed so brutal. The police on the lines are of course surely merely following orders and instructions, which is why rage directed against them seems so counterproductive and distracting (shifting, as it does, attention away from the issues, away from ‘politics’ and onto issues of ‘policing’). And it took me some time to get beyond my shock at what I was seeing.

 

However, thanks to a conversation with my colleague Kerry Moore, I now realise that:

 

·         The police pawns on the front line are of course ‘merely’ following orders and implementing a strategy.

 

·         The most obvious strategy hinges on the decisions about where to kettle people. It has become clear that the kettles were often set for the most dramatic media effect. The logic is as follows: ‘Kettle them there, so that when they start to boil, they graffiti on this monument, light fires with this treasured material and smash these particular windows. Perfect for demonizing the freezing, frustrated, angry protestors, showing them to be violent vandals.

 

·         This is similar to the much publicised event of the police abandoning a police van right in the middle of the demonstration. The idea here is obvious: let the demonstrators smash it up, so that there is plenty of footage of the protestors attacking the poor old police and vandalising the police van. (Thankfully, even sixteen year old schoolkids saw through this feeble tactic and actually started protecting the police van from vandalism.)

 

·         The strategists behind the police pawns are quite clear about what they intend to do, which is to maintain the status quo. In this the ends justify the means.

 

·         So, it obviously makes sense to deter protests and protestors. It helps therefore to make sure that protests are construed as scary, violent and associated with criminality, irrationality and badness. This will help to deter potential challenges in future and also to pre-empt and undermine future protests.

 

·         From the policing point of view, there is never enough and can never be enough policing. There are always ‘threats’. So it makes sense – even at the risk of attracting some bad press – to test the boundaries of what is acceptable policing practice. Push the envelope; punch the invalid.

 

·         Each demonstration is equally a demonstration of police power, and therefore also an experiment in what can be practiced and normalised.

 

·         For strategists in charge of policing there is a logic: there can never be enough security. Therefore, for them demonstrations mean exceptionalism. Anything constructed as a ‘state of exception’ can be used to try to justify any exceptional violence.

 

·         As a footnote to this “police logic” or “police perspective” we also need to note: the police force is also facing budget cuts. Anything that they can do to demonstrate their necessity and the need to expand investment in the police force rather than cut it back is surely understandable. The police force need criminals, and plenty of them – good, dramatic, visible ones too; ones that need lots of police to police them.

 

·         This police logic is already working. Already the Home Secretary has given explicit approval for the use of water canon on future protests – of which there will doubtless be many.

 

·         Finally, perhaps, it needs to be clear that the intensive physical policing we have seen has always operated as a means to enable lots of information gathering, surveillance and scrutiny. Everyone who wants to leave a kettle (i.e., everyone) is only allowed to leave after being photographed and definitively ID-ed.

 

 

What remains inexplicable is the sustained media violence – the persistence in representing the protests as ‘riots’, riots that were simply spontaneously ‘caused’ by the violent intentions of the protestors; the persistence of framing the protests as inherently violent; of focusing on minor acts of vandalism rather than the simple reasons for the protestors being stuck there in the first place; the violence of representing the protests as purely student-interest, as selfish, as merely a matter of self and selfishness; and the complete ignoring of the political logic of the shocking responses, on the streets, in Parliament and, worse, in the media itself.