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| Minneapolis 3rd Precinct |
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People gather to protest during a solidarity rally for the death of George Floyd, June 6, 2020, in Tokyo. Credit: AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko |
Back in the day when student life was ending and we were all looking for jobs a friend of mine became a police cadet, the rest of my friends were in the TA apart from one who got a job at a local off license. I was going to join a TA engineering regiment to learn a trade, but when I got to the barracks I noticed it was a Para engineers regiment, so I gave it a miss.
Anyway, of my social circle my friend who joined the police quickly became very, very, bitter and quick to violent outbursts. Even acquaintances who had seen some combat in Afghanistan were shocked at some of his antics. He told me all about his training and even let me read some of the training materials while he was still a cadet. It was pretty enlightening, the training included riot practice where the new recruits are the police shield wall, while the officers play the rioters and pelt them with glass bottles and actual petrol bombs. Though these were only filled to about a fifth or a quarter, to minimise the danger, but they still started fires, and on one occasion his eyes were raw and stinging because the night before the recruits were made to walk through a cloud of CS gas. In H's own words this was to both build toughness but also about cementing strong bonds between them.
When he went on patrols and house visits he told me all sorts of stories about the people who lived on the estates as if they were from another planet. This was especially strange since we both lived in comparable housing in neighbouring estates, and we often ended up at parties in the same worn out terraces. Looking back this is what surprised me the most about how effective police training is in reshaping minds.
I think the worst thing he did before I lost contact with him was after he policed a free festival. He looked depressed, and when we asked him what was wrong he told us he'd had a bollocking from some superior officer because he and four other police had been caught on camera by reporters beating a drunk guy up. I never saw it appear on the local news, so I guess they quashed it. But what really stood out and shocked us, was that the reason they beat the drunk up was because the guy laughed at their helmets.
Seriously that was the reason given, a bloke who had to much too drink laughed at their helmets, so four police officers (well one was still a cadet) slapped him around in a crowded public party. And he didn't see why we were giving him a hard time about how he shouldn't have done that.
He was never a pacifist but his attitude and world view did a complete transformation, and it only took about a few months before the changes were noticeable.
In the interest of some balance I suppose its only fair to talk about the one time a police officer did in fact provide some assistance to my family. My step father sadly took his own life after a period of emotional trauma, it took us by surprise and I spent much of the day trying to calm down my distraught mother. The police investigating the disappearance and then death weren't particularly helpful, they found him, but he had done it in a very public place so it was only a matter of time, and they regarded the matter as a suspicious death, but from what I understand they're suppose to treat all suicides in that manner so I don't hold that against them, it just wasn't particularly helpful to be badgered with questions while my mother was grieving and we were trying to think of what to tell the grandkids.
No the actual helpful police officer was a traffic policeman, who lived nearby and was a distant relation through marriage. We knew him and he knew us, and when he heard about what happen he came over and gave his condolences and wanted to know if there was anything he could do. It turned out there was, one of the nasty sides of treating suicide like a suspicious death and possibly murder is that the police officers assigned to handle it keep their distance unless its relevant to their investigation so after the awful news in the morning, we heard effectively nothing for the rest of the day, and ringing the contact number we were given gave us nothing useful. So he rang some officers he knew and gave us some details and we able to start working through that horrible process.
So yes that was very helpful, but it didn't really have anything to do with him being a police officer, he knew us and sympathised and he used his connections to help out. Still appreciated.
Protests and Profiling
In my time I've took part in (perfectly pacific and legal of course) protests and usually just seen a handful of bored police officers stand well apart from us lazily observing and chatting amongst themselves. Sometimes though I've marched past armed police and canine units, I remember one Alsatian was straining at the leash to bite a brass band section while its handler struggled** "No! come on, stop it, calm, calm it, sit,". But so far no pepper spray or truncheon scars. So not to bad right? Well yes but they were still arrayed in a loose position that declared they were in opposition to whatever it was we were about, and that was only the visible police presence. You'd be surprised what's lurking just around the corner.
The clearest example of this I can think of was early on during the coalition Lib Dem and Conservative government started passing austerity measures. You may remember this was when the government started to cut the police funding which prompted the Police Federation; which is the closest thing in the UK to a police union, to start protesting. So you had this strange and to my mind offensive sight of police force banners joining TUC marches. At a local protest to support those one day "general strikes" of public sector workers called to put some pressure on the government I turned up, and saw this great big banner for the local police force held by two local coppers. I thought about leaving, but instead moved as far away from them as I could, which put me in a crowd of Labour councillors, I said hello and made small talk with the few I knew. I was surprised that they also weren't happy about police trying to rub shoulders and piggyback sympathy. As professional politicians and moderate community types I thought they'd be all for it. One of them in particular pointed out to me that there was police van full of them, all in riot gear just around the corner watching us. So even when they were joining the protests the police remained able and willing to use force against them.
That was protests, me and friends though have been profiled on multiple occasions and harassed by the police. The reason why is that we are football fans and we enjoy watching matches and going on away days. This means as young men who aren't local and who used trains that police intelligence has selected as probable vehicles used by hooligans. Now of course violence football violence is terrible, but the solution isn't making all the out of towners occupy a small part of a carpark and then march them under guard through the town until they're at the stadium and then not let them leave. Or when you're trying to leave after a match penning them into a part of a station and refusing to let them board trains apart from one that's been designated for them, and just ramming them all on there. I've seen a tazer used once and it was when I was leaving after a match, the police had decided to force the football fans to one side of the station and not let them board several trains and then when one turned up we were allowed to board they restricted us to the rear carriages only, this created a massive jam, and at one point they tazered a man in the back. On one particular occasion the police effectively ambushed us at the stairs leading from the platform to the exit, they questioned us and since we didn't have local accents they ordered us out into a side car park, they didn't even ask us if we were there to see a game and we weren't wearing team shirts or scarves or anything. Funnily enough they let the older guys in our group through without issue, including the man who had multiple offenses and banning orders for football related violence, because as an older man walking with his daughter he didn't fit the description. That incident had a happy ending though, we managed to outsmart them by walking back into the station and then walking back out through the door right next to it.
Things aren't much better during home games either, its not unusual to find the whole surrounding area to be full of police, often with lines outside pubs determining how many can come in, and on several occasions groups of cops on street corners just stop people in the street and interrogate them before deciding whether or not they are or are not allowed to continue walking down the street. Then there was the time I was boarding a bus and two men behind me in the line started singing a local club song, not one of the really offensive ones, it was one of the "We are club and we are great" ones. A car immediately parks behind the bus, four plain clothed police get out, detain them, order them to shut up and start questioning them about their identity and history, before letting them get on the bus with a warning.
Now of course no one likes football fans, even other football fans, in my own group we're always on the look out for certain people we can't stand, but the effect is none of the nastier aspects of football fans are curtailed in anyway. On the contrary it often magnifies it. I've seen groups of men who at worst were being loud and obnoxious pushed around and humiliated to the point of explosion. That's what kettling does and why its called kettling, it literally refers to the act of increasing pressure and boiling points. Protestors didn't give these modern policing tactics the name kettling, the police did themselves. Its even worse when you look up the origins of the tactic and term, it comes from the German word Kessel which is a type of cauldron, and was used in German army talk for a tactic to overwhelm and eliminate an enemy. And one of the earliest examples of modern kettling was in 1986 in West Germany. They know full well what these tactics and behaviours do and there associations, they just don't care.
Now of course this only a fraction of what black populations and other minorities in the USA, UK and a depressingly long list of other countries have to face. I've had some quite close calls but usually only had to risk incurring the wrath of the police on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and I could further reduce that risk by just giving up a treasured hobby. As the murder of George Floyd reminded us, other people don't have that luxury. Just being alive is considered reasonable grounds for suspicion and the use of violent and often lethal force. I said I was profiled because me and my friends were, we matched a category and were treated differently because of it. When it first started we tried to solve the issue by stopping wearing our colours, we don't wear things that indicate we support the team and just wear ordinary clothing when going to away games. Sometimes this works, which is probably why hardcore hooligans also do this which is why the term "the casuals" is a thing, to give just another example of police measures failing to prevent crime. But what exactly can you do when the category is your very existence?
When Black Lives Matter protests started to gain traction, many well meaning but oblivious commentators promoted training at risk communities teach themselves and especially young people how to behave with officers since Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice's legally sanctioned killings showed that youth is no shield. The death of Philando Castille, who was shot five times precisely because he was following the instructions of the investigating officer Jeronimo Yanez, shows that also doesn't seem to work. Breonna Taylor was shot to death in her own bed, her boyfriend actually called 911 to report that his house had been invaded by armed men who turned out to be the police. There is nothing you can do to protect yourself if the police decide to target you, they are better equipped and trained and far more willing to use force, and the law won't protect you even when other parts of it agree the police are out of line, because they're wedded to the same system and part of the same foundations.
The police need to go, and if getting rid of them requires also getting rid of the whole rotten power structure of exploitation and domination, and the challenging and defeating the bigoted ideas that empower and justify them, then I say all the better.
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| The other ACAB, All Cats Are Beautiful |
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