Modern Policing in the UK

 
My friend just sent me a couple of links to items he said made him feel "angry and upset". So be warned.

One link is to an article from The Guardian about protestor Jody McIntyre being tipped out of his wheelchair and dragged across the street, here.

The other to a (slightly glitchy) YouTube video of a BBC interview with McIntyre, in which he is asked at least twice whether he was "rolling towards" the police in question:



The BBC interviewer (Ben Brown) asks some other frankly absurd questions. For example, would McIntyre label himself as a "revolutionary"? But since when did a person's beliefs become reasonable grounds for inflicting violence when that person poses no threat?

Perhaps one could argue that beliefs, statements, even statements of fact constitute some sort of threat. But the point here is that McIntyre posed no physical threat to the police, even if one were to argue that in his beliefs he posed some sort of threat to society.

Surely in the policing of protest, the police are ideally looking to prevent or stop violence and destruction. That is, they should deal with physical threats or actions and not with why the protesters are actually there. Whether that is what the police have actually been doing in practice is another question, perhaps one the BBC should have asked instead of looking into McIntyre's beliefs.

McIntyre is fortunately very articulate and patient on several points: though it might be reasonable for an interviewer to ask if he has complained to the police, it seems less so to ask the same question three times when the interviewee has already given a perfectly reasonable response. Which McIntyre did — it seems eminently sensible that he first consider his legal options.

And he's right to point out that these are not isolated incidents in recent policing by the Met. Remember Ian Tomlinson, or Delroy Smellie, or very recently Alfie Meadows (here, here, and here).

The footage will stir certain emotions and doubtless cause many to feel anger. And the debate around the cuts and fees means that some will already have taken sides. But whether or not McIntyre and other students are right is besides the point. Just as whether or not McIntyre was, according to The Observer, a "cyber-radical" is surely irrelevant to his treatment at a protest. The arguments for or against the coalition's decision to cut funding for higher education and raise tuition fees seem to me to be very separate from the issues of policing or the media's coverage of protest.