The Wardman Wire

Policing, or, why paperwork matters

Newsflash to the right: just because someone’s in a police uniform doesn’t mean that they’re Dixon of Dock Green.

Newsflash to the left: just because someone’s in a police uniform doesn’t mean they’re a member of Birmingham CID.

The police are sometimes a bit naughty. Well, stop the presses. No, m’lud, he fell down the stairs before accidentally brutally stabbing himself to death while shaving.

Indeed, while it shouldn’t happen and other officers there should have stopped him, it’s no great surprise that when you put a load of people in uniform and then alternate them between sitting in vans for ages and dealing with the great unwashed, things go a little bit Zimbardo.

There has been an amount of soul-searching given that the right would not normally react in a positive way to something like this; I’m going to point you in the direction of our Hellenic chum, Mr Eugenides.

The police are, amazingly, humans. As I said earlier on, it should be no surprise that the police are subject to all the other features, good and bad, of the H. sapiens. For the record, I suspect that most but not all police are not in the habit of hitting someone with their truncheon for no good reason. For the record, I suspect that most but not all police are not racists.

It only takes a few people to give a larger group a bad name, whether their name is Constable Savage or their penchant is for throwing bricks through windows. As ‘Various People Against Nasty Things (Hijacked by Nutty Lefties)’ does not, as yet, have a standing army, I’m going to focus on the police as they are present everywhere and are rather more important to the cohesiveness of society.

Fortunately, the police are a lot better than they used to be but incidents like the death of Ian Tomlinson (or, rather, his being hit with a truncheon) don’t only happen when there’s a camera watching.

Opposition to paperwork in all its forms has become something of a leitmotif for many parts of the political spectrum, as is opposition to ‘heavy-handed Whitehall diktat’ or words to that effect. Certainly, there is a balance to be struck, but I hope that this incident shows that we do need to find a more satisfactory answer to quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – who watches the watchers? – than the Guardian and Indymedia. That means paperwork and that means procedure and that means form-filling and that means having a watching brief to make sure that it’s not going to far in either direction. That equally applies to social services, teaching, medical care and so on.