Pre-modern Policing in the UK: A glimpse

 
Following my post on the worrying direction modern UK policing is taking, I happened to flick through Henry James' English Hours, a book about his experiences in England.

Illustration by Joseph Pennell [1]

Then I found this in the introduction to the book:

England's treatment of political radicals was another example of this general equality. On the day the Queen opened Parliament, James had witnessed a demonstration in Trafalgar Square 'which might easily have given on the nerves of a sensitive police department'. But the English police were unperturbed; they allowed the demonstrators to 'sun themselves' freely. James was struck by the 'frank good sense and the frank good humour and even the frank good taste of it', as well as by

the fact that the might mob could march along and do its errand while the excellent quiet policemen — eternal, imperturbable, positive, lovable reminders of the national temperament — stood by simply to see that the channel was kept clear and comfortable.

It was political revolutionaries like this 'mighty mob' — as well as those he had witnessed in France — that James was remembering when he wrote The Princess Casamassima. [2]

Almost enough to make one slightly nostalgic, no?


Coming soon: a consideration of The Princess Casamassima.


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[1] Accompanying the essay "London" by Henry James in The Century; a popular quarterly Volume 0037 Issue 2 (Dec 1888), pp. 219-239. Available online: http://digital.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=cent;cc=cent;rgn=full%20text;idno=cent0037-2;didno=cent0037-2;view=image;seq=00229;node=cent0037-2:1 [Accessed: 18-Dec-2010]
[2] Introduction to English Hours, Henry James (1905), p. xxxv [ed. Alma Louise Lowe, 1960, Readers' Union reprint (not for sale to the public) Heinemann London 1962]

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.