One rule for us…

And one for the cops (and no, it wasn't an emergency).

Better uses for a riot shield part 1

I've been pressed up against a wall of riot shields, so I'm all for the alternative use demonstrated in this video. How sad that these larking coppers have been disciplined. To maintain policing by consent, we need to see that cops do have a human side - something they've increasingly forgotten over recent years. Which is why I can't find any reason to condemn these guys.

'Ello, 'ello, 'ello

The Ig Nobel awards have been announced this year, given mostly for improbable scientific research, and usually featuring an actual Nobel winner as prizegiver. Particular respect and the Literature prize goes, this year, to An Garda Siochana, the Irish police force. Their achievement was to dole out more than fifty traffic awards to Mr. Prawo Jazdy, a Polish gentleman. The story's been doing the rounds in Ireland for months, but it's nice to gain international recognition.

Prawo Jazdy isn't a careless driver. His name translates as 'driving licence'.

The Peace prize went to a Swiss team who investigated whether it's worse to be smashed over the head with full or empty bottles, the Economics proze rather predictably went to the Icelandic banks (wonder if they sent a representative to collect the prize), the Chemistry award went to the Mexican (of course) team who made diamond films from tequila, and the Medicine one was awarded to a man who cracked the knuckles on one hand for 60 years to discover whether it caused arthritis. And so on ad nauseam.

Never trust a copper, never read The Sun

Do the police lie to us? Of course they do. But most of the time, they merely mislead, dissemble and distort. Why? Because every branch of public service has been encouraged to see itself as a 'player' in the information game. Each agency has an internal PR team - which isn't the same as a communications team - trained to play offence/defence spin rather than to provide accurate, cautious, checkable and honest information. The police have their friendly media contacts and they know which papers (I'm looking at you, The Sun - 'G20 anarchy' indeed, and you Daily Mail) will print whatever they say without bothering to check using boring old journalism - and in the case of Tomlinson, may have added further imaginary details simply to suit their pre-mixed 'story', as Nick Davies points out:

There were six days of substantially false coverage about a man who apparently died of a heart attack as he walked home while a screaming mob of anarchists hurled missiles at the police officers who tried to help him. Any inquiry into this media misinformation will want to find out whether that was simply the hyperbole of ignorant reporters or the product of bad practice at the Metropolitan police, the City of London police or the IPCC.

They got caught this time thanks to citizens ignoring threats to treat filming cops as 'aiding terrorism', but it must make you distrust pretty much every account of any major event prior to this. Nick Davies has a good piece in today's Media Guardian. How's this gem?

when an IPCC investigator came to the Guardian, with a City of London police exhibits officer, he asked for the video to be removed from the website on the grounds that it could prejudice the police inquiry and would upset the family. The deputy editor-in-chief who met him declined and pointed out that the Tomlinson family at that moment were in another part of the building, talking to Paul Lewis, the reporter who had driven the story, and publicly thanking the paper for its help.

But this isn't simply a problem for the rozzers. It's a fundamental journalistic failure brought about by financial concerns (investigative journalism is expensive: transcribing 'sources' and press releases can be done by the office monkey) and by the collapse of a public sphere independent of hegemonic forces: papers have grown dependent on 'authority' and close to power - they'll automatically cite established, discrete power blocs such as police forces and governments rather than test their claims (except for climate stories, in which case they'll print the ravings of any mad liar (Johnny Ball, Bellamy, Lawson, Monckton) rather than the 99% of actual climate scientists who know we're screwed).

La Police Vous Parle

The rozzers have been extremely active on the PR front recently, so I thought I'd show an earlier reaction to authoritarian propaganda, from the 1968 student insurrection.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

You may have seen some rather Orwellian police adverts around recently. This site has collected some subvertised versions you may enjoy. The one I've chosen was funny before. Now Ian Tomlinson's dead, it's rather more sombre.

'ello 'ello 'ello

Last night I watched ITV! Worse than that, I watched In the Line of Fire, a fly-on-the-wall 'documentary' about CO19, the Metropolitan Police's armed squad. It was clearly part of the coppers' post-Menezes PR push, so I was curious to see how they'd deal with that episode. In the end, it was handled with kid gloves - the critical comments weren't presented by the narrator but relegated to clips from news broadcasts and pictures of newspaper hoardings - as though the narrator couldn't bring himself to utter any criticism of the police. The head of CO19 was filmed giving his position without any questions - so there was no chance to challenge him. No mention at all was made of the jury's decision to disbelieve key police claims about the circumstances of the shooting. 

The effect, therefore, was to remove any credibility: this wasn't a documentary, it was a hagiography, shading into propaganda. No doubt the circumstances of gaining access to the squad implicitly required a positive spin, but the whole exercise smacks of a concerted public relations exercise on behalf of the police, and of spineless, lazy TV programming by a media which is becoming increasingly rightwing. I was quite amused to see India 99 appear on the show - it's the police helicopter which has its own show, Sky Cops on the BBC. That's a postmodern moment. Will the In The Line Of Fire incident appear in the next series of the Jamie Theakston-narrated show? Are there any police cars without a TV crew? 

I do think that this mindless deification of the police across all channels for the sake of exciting pictures of 'goodies' v. 'baddies' is dangerous. There's never any questioning of policing methods (why are they all in cars?) Aren't they ever wrong? If anyone remembers the Guildford 4, Birmingham 6, West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, Miners' Strike or any of the peace, poll tax, anti-capitalism, anti-war or anti-racism protests, you'll know that policing is (and always has been) far more nuanced. More than that, these shows promulgate the idea that crime is a matter of 'good' working class people protecting 'us' from 'bad' working class people - devoid of social context. I don't remember any shows following the activities of the Serious Fraud Office or any of the other operations going after white-collar crime - though perhaps that's because such operations are usually failures. It's far easier to pretend that crime is all about drunk black teenagers nicking cars and claiming too much child support rather than bankers defrauding us all of billions of pounds.