Police Brutality and Moral Condescension
After the initial outrage, it seems that some of our more prominent national dailies and news programmes, plus the chattering classes, have reverted back to their sly, supercilious, condescending selves in their reporting of police brutality evident in the past few weeks in London. First, left and right, liberal and conservative, joined forces in their condemnation of the excessive powers of the Met and the police at large and, seemed genuinely perturbed by the unpleasant, creeping suspicion that the police force are now apparently resembling more than ever operatives of the state rather than servants of the public.
But now we’re back to business as usual.
From the inital sympathy surrounding the plight of Nicky Fisher, captured on camera being forcefully hit several times by a meat-headed Met sergeant wearing gauntlets whilst clutching her ferocious implements of combat and subversion-a carton of Sainsbury’s orange juice and a digital camera-we have now moved on to a callous invocation of the improper nature of her lifestyle and history. ‘Oh, but she lives in a basement flat in Brighton and Hove, that awful place where Ecstasy tablets started out.’ ‘Oh, she’s unemployed…and her boyfriend is a overweight and shaven headed and aggressive looking.’ ‘Oh, she was once spoken to by the police on suspicion of shoplifting’ (though she was never charged and the only evidence for this is grounded purely in hearsay). What’s happened? Did the middle classes and the organs of middle-class opinion making shit themselves, or at least become a bit reticent, the first twangs of trepidation reverberating through their Islington pads as they realised that they might be opening an unpleasant can of worms in failing to take the side of the authorities, however apparently politicised and inept, against the plebs, like latter day fin-de-siecle, disillusioned Russian political liberals initially sympathising with grubby revolutionaries before going weak at the knees in terror, staring into the perceived unknown? ‘Well, they might be flawed, but they’re the best we’ve bloody well got!’ you can almost hear them twittering (and probably in the reviled information technological sense of the word, as well).
This kind of thinking is an all too familiar conduit by which middle class contempt for their inferiors in expressed, articulated via a supposedly ballsy critique of many of the hallmarks of any incumbent administration followed by a quick volte-face and the initial tricklings of disdain for those most affected by a particular, catalytic incident (invariably from the lower classes), later to become full blown jeers. Who cares about the background of this woman? The fact remains that she was violently abused by a fairly high ranking member of the country’s most prestigious police force. On a different note, and in a very different context, but with some similar undertones, the reporting of the Ipswich prostitute murders in 2007 was characterised by a deeply unpleasant sense of moral positivism and smug superiority. ‘It’s a tragedy that this happened, but let’s be honest, nobody forced them to be out on the streets touting for business to pay for heroin.’ ‘Let’s not, for God’s sake, call them the People’s Prostitutes’, sniped the Daily Mail, whilst the absence of sympathy emanating from a multitude of other sources of reporting was tangible.
In these ostensibly politically correct and supposedly morally relativist times, it is indeed a sharp reminder that one life, or the human and civil rights attached to a person is still a function of the moral worth attached by society at large to that individual. Further, that any criticism of an offending or encroaching institution or entity from the opinion-making classes will inevitably be rescinded when its authors start to feel that it may lead them outside of the comfort zone of their padded, secure, established orthodoxy.
