The Metropolis

Awards night and the strange psychology of the police

Josh Hall | Friday 4 November, 2011 15:13

Last night, the Metropolitan Police sent a delegation to the Jane’s Police Review Gala Awards. Held at the Park Lane Hilton, and attended by “the most senior and influential figures in policing and government”, the awards are billed as an opportunity “for recognising and rewarding excellence in community policing.”

The Met was nominated in six different categories – suggesting that Jane’s perception of excellence may be rather different to that of the average Londoner.

The Metropolitan Police consists of almost 50,000 employees, and has an annual budget of over £4 billion – making it the largest and best-funded violent gang in the country. It is a rotten from its core to its extremities, riven with racism, authoritarianism, and disregard for the laws it is charged with upholding.

As with any other gang the Met has its own, internal forms of structural discipline. Where the force differs, though, is in the state’s assumption that this internal discipline is sufficient – and that officers who, for example, lie about demonstrators, or assault people in the street, should not face further action.

The Enfield crime squad is a perfect and timely example of the way in which policing in the capital functions – or, rather, of its intrinsic dysfunction. Earlier this week a disciplinary panel, meeting in secret, decided that six members of the squad would keep their jobs following an incident in which five officers were found to have used “more force than was reasonable or necessary.”

The incident, which occurred in 2008, saw the group use baseball bats and a pickaxe handle to break the windows of an allegedly stolen car. In a video of the incident one officer can be heard saying “attack, attack” before the group rounds on the vehicle, smashing the glass of the rear windows, attempting to break the windscreen, and dragging the driver onto a dual carriageway. Meanwhile Tracey Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ blasts from the stereo, providing an oddly Kubrickian musical counterpoint.

The video is instructive on several fronts. Perhaps most importantly, it illustrates the impunity with which these groups of thugs feel they can act. That the police think (correctly) that they can destroy a suspect’s car in the middle of a crowded road, using weapons closely associated with street gangs, should be of concern.

It also provides a glimpse of the strange psychology of the police. There is a sense of little boys (and girls) playing at being all grown up; a desperate yearning towards the machismo that they clearly associate with being a copper. Their homemade ‘POLICE DETECTIVE – CRIME SQUAD’ jackets are horribly, painfully tragic, the sort of item one can imagine a ten year old’s mother stitching together in an effort to bolster her child’s waning self esteem. It is, in the truest sense, pathetic.

Clearly, the treatment enjoyed by these seemingly pre-adolescent bullies is indicative of their unique position: inside the justice system when it suits them, and untouchable by it when it does not. The case demonstrates that if you are a serving police officer you can smash up cars with pickaxe handles all you like, and there will be no consequences whatsoever. In other words: even when you exceed the already vast and iniquitous powers given to you, the Met and ultimately the judiciary will stand by you.

Of course, this will come as no surprise to those who see these uniformed gangsters commit extraordinary transgressions every day, consistently unpunished. From the grinding racism of the ‘community’ beat officer to the furious violence of the Territorial Support Group, the Met is an organisation shot through with thuggery, built on a culture of intolerance and bigotry, and founded on a presumption of exception and impunity.

In a separate case this week, two officers were shown to have fabricated evidence against attendees at a protest at SOAS earlier in the year. The officers were happy to see two young people potentially incarcerated over an assault that they were well aware never happened. Last week, in a separate case related to the same protest, police were again found to have lied in order to justify dragging a demonstrator down a flight of stairs, punching him, and holding him in a headlock.

Were it not for amateur video footage of the demonstrations, these innocent people would have been convicted of crimes they did not commit. No action is being taken against the officers who, it appears, may have a perjury case to answer, because in the country’s biggest gang you can lie, smash up a car, or assault a demonstrator – all without consequence.

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