Take away the uniforms and you have a channel 4 report on the growing problem of aggressive young men starting fights.

The whole thing about the police being “up for it” reminds me disturbingly (although with a much lower death toll) of the *Grand Finale for the end of our tour of Northern Ireland* attitude in the 2nd paras just before bloody Sunday. Again, not to compare body count, just to observe that the police deployed at demos, like the army, are generally the kind of people likely to psych themselves up for violence.

As a point of psychology, it’s interesting to wonder when the professional training of police officers switches off, to be replaced by the human responses of sustaining hours of physical and verbal abuse, and at times very real physical danger, or threats thereof. I only mention this to be fair to the police in accepting that it can be a tense environment. There are always elements in the crowd who make a job of pissing off the police.

But of course that isn’t an argument, nor is it the end of the issue. Hitting people who irritate you, is NOT policing. Power, especially where that power originates from the monopoly of force held by the state, must, as a rule, be exercised in response, not ‘because you can’. That undermines the legitimacy of the public order institutions. The point of public institutions is to induce consistency of behaviour among officials, and (and this is important), to restrain their prejudices in the exercise of power. The police prejudices of crowd-control are, to some extent, formed from years of experience dealing with crowds. I’ve no interest in whether those prejudices are justified or not, because that is irrelevant (suffice it to say that no two crowds are exactly the same, so I tend to demur from ‘one-size fits all’ sledgehammer crowd policing).

The police and the justice system must, at all costs, restrain their prejudices. An authority that can restrain itself earns its legitimacy. But maybe attitudes towards the police need to change as well. If, as Sir Robert Peel said, “The [police are the public and the public are the police]“, then there’s clearly work to be done on both sides of that equation.

It’s good to see this story now getting mainstream coverage and that the officer responsible has been suspended. It’s also a very encouraging aspect of citizen journalism, that it is being used to police the police.

and that we had this long before the dead tree press