Recent publications: violent drunks and overzealous cops

In recent(ish) months a couple of my essays have seen the light of academic day in a pair of fascinating collections.

The first actually came out at the beginning of the year: a chapter in a wide-ranging collection on Drink in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Perspectives in Economic and Social History, edited by Susanne Schmid and Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp (Pickering and Chatto 2014).

My contribution is a re-focused and updated version of some of my older work on violence and crime in nineteenth-century England, titled 'Drinking, Fighting and Working-Class Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Britain' (the link will take you to the final draft of the essay at my academia.edu page).

A brief excerpt:

A few nineteenth-century London trials suggest a similar pattern. At the skittle ground at ‘The Bell’ public house, Abraham Pomroy had been drinking with Richard Dukes and others for about three hours in June 1830. As a witness put it, ‘they were a little fresh, but they knew what they were doing’. At some point, ‘Pomroy took up a pot of beer, and stood before the skittle-ground to prevent their playing’. He then ‘threw the pot of beer across the ground, and bent the pot nearly double’. The dispute escalated: ‘Dukes said, “Don't throw that beer away, you did not pay for it”—Pomroy then said he had paid for as much as [Dukes]; Pomroy then gave [Dukes] a shove—they had a scuffle together, and they both fell.’  Pomroy died of internal bleeding caused by a fractured skull.

In October 1850, a fight broke out in ‘The Ship’ in Limehouse between James Northeast and William Arnold.  ‘A few words passed’ between Arnold and Northeast, who were both drunk. ‘The prisoner was rather in liquor’, said a witness, and ‘the deceased was intoxicated’. Arnold had provoked Northeast: ‘As soon as Arnold came in he began blackguarding, singing, and dancing, and making use of very bad language.’ (A witness described Arnold as ‘a very drunken dissipated little fellow’.) Northeast dragged Arnold into the street, striking him fatally. A surgeon testified that Arnold’s ‘concussion of the brain’ may have been ‘caused by a fall.’ ‘Drunken persons’, he added, ‘have a good many falls.’

The second essay, 'Public Opinion and the Rhetoric of Police Powers in 1920s Britain', deals with another aspect of the space-crime continuum and arises out of my research into a significant series of police scandals in 1920s Britain.

It appears in the collection Justice et Espaces Publics en Occident du Moyen Âge à Nos Jours: Pouvoirs, Publicité et Citoyenneté, edited by Pascal Bastien, Donald Fyson, Jean-Philippe Garneau and Thierry Nootens (Quebec: Presses de l'Université de Québec, 2014).

One of the thing I looked at in that research is the reaction of various kinds of newspapers to what was perceived (by some) as the excessive and intrusive policing of public morals in London's public parks.

The more conservative or populist press expressed itself similarly. The World’s Pictorial News referred to Hyde Park as “Spied Park” and observed, “the public might have a very British objection to Nosey Parker business”: “The spy, the sneak, the preventive agent, however successful from a crude detective point of view are abhorred by the people. Their methods can be summed up in the most expressive phrase as un-English period.”  The Times thought “something—it may be called the system or the atmosphere or the tradition of the War years—is ripe for revision”. The Sunday Pictorial viewed the plainclothes surveillance methods in Hyde Park cases as “repugnant to British instincts” and condemned the “officiousness and mild fanaticism” behind such policing . ...

Negative comparisons were often drawn with other countries. Labour MP Tom Johnston—while recounting Savidge’s charges in Parliament—said his party must “offer resolute and determined opposition to anything in the nature of the ‘Cheka’, a Turkish system, Star Chamber methods, or what was known in the United States of America as the Third Degree”. The United States was in fact the key counter-example for British policing in the early twentieth century. ...  Likewise, during the late 1920s police debates the Manchester Guardian stated, “there is nothing in the United States that corresponds to the old British attitude towards a person merely suspected of a crime”: in America, “the police seem to be regarded as possible oppressors of the public quite as often as they are saluted as its protectors. That is not our way in England”.

As usual, you'll find (reasonably) up-to-date publication lists and/or downloadable documents here and here.

A few recent publications

Last week, I received a pre-press proof of an essay I wrote a couple of years ago. It has had a relatively long gestation process as a result of what sounds like some challenging financial issues faced by the editor, which appear now to have been solved. In any case, the surprise was a pleasant one, and I'm happy that the not insignificant amount of work I invested in it will at least result in a publication (which will not only be the first publication related to my new research project but also my first German-language entry on my publication list).

It then occurred to me that, since a few other things of mine have recently seen the light of day, I might note them briefly here, in case you're interested in this sort of thing.

1. First, I contributed a chapter to the new collection Moral Panics, Social Fears and the Media: Historical Perspectives, edited by Sian Nicholas and Tom O'Malley (Routledge, 2013).

The chapter is titled 'Watching the Detectives (and the Constables): Fearing the Police in 1920s Britain', and it is one of the last of a series of publications to emerge out of a research project I was involved in a few years ago that focused on a series of British policing scandals in the late 1920s and how they were discussed in the press . (I first stumbled upon these scandals in the context of my research on the Pace murder trial, which became my second book, The Most Remarkable Woman in England.)

A final draft version of the chapter is available for reading or download at my pages at academia.edu or ResearchGate, and here is  a brief excerpt:

There were specific worries about the reliability of police evidence, the rough handling of demonstrators, the over-zealous policing of ‘indecency’ and the possible use of intimidation during questioning. The press gave significant attention to allegations of wrongful arrest and poor treatment, especially when they involved socially prominent or even simply ‘respectable’ people.

An Evening Standard cartoon inspired by the police scandals.

Anxieties peaked in 1928 with two sensational scandals, the Pace and Savidge cases, described in more detail below. These events were given exhaustive press coverage and provoked commentary regarding an apparent crisis in police-public relations. A 1928 Daily Mirror editorial observed, ‘the impression has long been prevalent that, once a man or a woman falls foul of the police, there is no possibility of struggling out of the net that evidently catches the innocent as well as the guilty’.

An essay by A. P. Herbert entitled ‘Stopping People from Doing Things’ [Sunday Express, 27 May 1928, 2] captures the tone of such criticism well, seeing police misconduct as a symptom of wider problems: ‘The habit of the governing mind at the present day is one of continual interference in things that do not matter to the neglect, very often, of the things that do, a habit of meticulous insistence on petty rules and prohibitions; and, naturally, the police have caught the fever from their masters’. Herbert argued:

‘The petty tyrannies of policemen are only the natural and logical consequences of the large policy of social tyranny for which our rulers are responsible. We fondly thought that we fought the Great War for Liberty, but conquered Berlin is a free city, and London is as free as a kindergarten school.’

2. Secondly, the contribution I wrote to a collection on the reception of the ideas of Oswald Spengler (he of Decline of the West fame) that I had previewed earlier this year came out a couple of months ago. The collection, Oswald Spengler als europäisches Phänomen: Der Transfer der Kultur- und Geschichtsmorphologie im Europa der Zwischenkriegszeit 1919-1939 was ably edited by Zaur Gasimov and Carl Antonius Lemke Duque, and it considers Spengler reception in several countries. I was responsible for Britain, and in '"German foolishness" and the "Prophet of Doom": Oswald Spengler and the Inter-war British Press' (one of three English-language contributions to the collection), I focus, as the title suggests, on how Spengler's ideas were discussed in a range of major newspapers and magazines.

A brief excerpt: 

Oswald Spengler, looking jaunty as usual.

Although Spengler's work was highly controversial in his homeland, British commentators tended to depict it representing something typically German. On this basis, in a radio broadcast titled »Spengler–A Philosopher of World History« (reprinted in the Listener in 1929), popular philosopher C.E.M. Joad sought to explain national differences related to Spengler's reception: »The Germans have an appetite for ideas which rivals, if it does not exceed, the English appetite for emotions«*. Referring to then-popular authors of romance novels and histories, he observed: »While the Englishman is enjoying a feast of passion at the luscious boards of Miss Dell or Miss Hull, the German refreshes himself with draughts of pure thought from the fountain-head of some abstruse philosopher«**. Spengler's sentences, he continued, »seem to be the necessary accompaniments of German philosophy in the grand manner: Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, all wrote them and worse; they sound the authentic German note«. [166-67]
----------
* Listener, 27 February 1929, p. 250.
** »Spengler, the most abstruse German now writing, is also the most popular. He belongs, it is clear, to the grand tradition of German philosophy«. Ibid. Ethel M. Dell was a romance novelist and Eleanor Hull wrote Irish history. See also: »[F]or whereas the success of the Anglo-Saxon best-seller depends upon a facile acceptance of emotions, the Teutonic best-seller demands of the reader an equally facile acceptance of ideas«. New Statesman, 3 July 1926, p. 332.  

3. Finally, a couple of my reviews have also come out this year.

• One at the open-access journal Law, Crime and History on Shame, Blame and Culpability: Crime and Violence in the Modern State, edited by Judith Rowbotham, Marianna Muravyeva and David Nash. (Issue here, direct link to review [pdf] here.)
• Another at Reviews in History on Haia Shpayer-Makov's excellent new police history: The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England. (Link to review.)

I have, incidentally, uploaded most of the reviews I've written over the last ten years or so to both academia.edu and ResearchGate.

Happy reading!

Investigating the investigators

For those of you interested in this sort of thing, my review essay on Haia Shpayer-Makov's fascinating new book on the history of police detectives has just been published at Reviews in History.

It starts like this:

‘A detective’, wrote a crime-fiction reviewer in 1932, ‘should have something of the god about him’:

It was the divine, aloof, condescending quality in the old great ones of Poe, Gaboriau, Wilkie Collins and Sherlock Holmes that made their adventures so glamorously irresistible. A writer of detective stories might have a style as brilliant as Poe’s, as consummately competent as Collins’s, as pompously absurd as Doyle’s – it did not matter: what mattered was whether he gave us a detective whom we could worship.

Even the most ardent fan of crime fiction might think ‘worship’ an overstatement; nonetheless, by the time those words were written, detectives had indeed become among the most popular figures of modern literature. In the decades since that ‘golden age’ of crime fiction, police detectives have often even managed to hold their own against their previously more celebrated private counterparts, whether in print, on television or at the cinema. As The Ascent of the Detective makes clear, such trends are remarkable in view of the suspicion that greeted real-life police detectives in their early years and their frequent literary belittlement.

I hope you find the rest worth reading: both the review and the book.

The poetry of the police log

At the end of the written record (published today in the Telegraph) of a series of events that happened at the main gates of 10 Downing St. not too long ago -- which involved some colourful language from the Tory Chief Whip Andrew "Thrasher" Mitchell directed at the police officers guarding the gate -- one finds these delightfully deadpan words:

"I write this for your information as Mr Mitchell's last comments would appear to indicate that he is unhappy with my actions."

Indeed, Officer Pleb, he's probably, in retrospect, most unhappy about your action of writing it all down.

Bobbies, good and bad

I was pleased today to receive the print version of my latest article on the history of inter-war policing in Britain: 'Press, Politics and the "Police and Public" Debates in Late 1920s Britain', Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History and Societies, vol. 16, no. 1 (2012): pp. 75-98.

Since its closely related to the topic of my forthcoming book, The Most Remarkable Woman in England, I go on about it a little at the other blog. 

Which you should check out anyway, if you haven't already.

And tell your friends.

And so on.

Outrage by the numbers

You may have noted a bit of outrage regarding the revelation that London's Metropolitan Police spent £35,000 on calls to the 'speaking clock' (a telephone service to provide callers with the precise time) in the last two years.

(Well, you may have noticed it if you read the Daily Mail, and I know that not all of you indulge in that particular pleasure.)

Not that I always necessarily feel like standing up for the boys in blue, but I thought I would point out James Ball's interesting article at the Guardian today, where he takes a closer look at this expense, finding:

So what does the spend on the speaking clock represent? The force spent £16,879 on calls to the service in 2010/11. At 31p per call, that's just under 54,500 calls over the year.

That works out as 1.5 calls to the speaking clock for each officer, or in other words represents each officer in the force using the service just once or twice each year.

Is that unreasonable? Accurate time is occasionally important to police, when noting chronologies in reports or ahead of operations.

It's not hard to imagine police officers needing to sync their watches (or phones) on particular operations on occasion, or perhaps occasionally mistrusting their computer's clock when trying to timestamp a report.

The rest is worth reading as well.

I would admit to finding it a bit odd that a such a clunky seeming technology as the speaking clock would still be in semi-regular usage, and for this reason I probably would have smirked as well on first seeing this kind of headline.

Still, as Ball points out, the Met has a budget of four billion pounds a year, and with an enormous staff, small costs per officer add up quickly.

Justice delayed but not denied(?)

There is an intriguing report from the Telegraph today regarding the investigation into the killing of Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher in 1984 in London while she was policing a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy:

Following the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, Scotland Yard, which has kept the case open, is planning to send officers to Libya in the hope of bringing the suspected killer and his alleged accomplices to justice. Mr Ameri was identified by a witness in a 140-page secret review of evidence conducted at the request of the Metropolitan Police. The report, seen by The Daily Telegraph, was written by a senior Canadian prosecutor and addressed to Sue Hemming, the head of counter-terrorism at the Crown Prosecution Service. Pc Fletcher was killed by a single bullet that hit her in the abdomen. An 11-day armed siege followed that ended when 30 Libyans from the embassy were deported. No one has ever been charged with killing the officer.

Here, also via the Telegraph, is an original report from ITN on the incident:



There are various kinds of justice to be done with the (apparent) collapse of the Gaddafi regime: the death of PC Fletcher -- and the wounding of several demonstrators -- is only a part of it, but an important one nonetheless.

Career opportunity

For any of our British friends who are looking for a new and highly challenging job with (I imagine) a decent salary and good benefits, I noted this announcement at the BBC newsticker:

So, dust off those CVs, people!

And for anyone looking for something a bit more light-hearted about something which is thoroughly depressing, you could do much worse than Photoshoplooter.

These people, after all, deserve to be mocked.

Police and thieves

I don't really have much to add to the discussion about the riots in various parts of London over the last couple of nights (other than finding them pretty appalling and pointless...as are the infinitely more costly riots going on in today's financial markets).

But in reading coverage about events in Tottenham, Enfield, Brixton and elsewhere (such as this interesting piece about the role of Blackberry Messaging service in helping to organise the mayhem) I've stumbled more than a few times over a bit of terminology that I hadn't expected and which, because of my interest in the history of policing, intrigues me.

Since when have cops in Britain been referred to as 'the Feds'?

E.g.

Mark Duggan, whose shooting by police sparked the disturbances, used Blackberry Messenger to send his last message to his girlfriend, Semone Wilson, 29, writing: “The Feds are following me." 

Since the UK is a unitary (and not a federal) state, this doesn't really make sense (not that slang ever really has to), and I'm assuming that it's borrowed from the US. (Transmitted by...what, music? The Wire?)

Having written about another instance of the transfer of policing-related slang from America to Britain in the early twentieth century (i.e., 'the third degree'...it seems the original article is freely available at the moment, so get it while you can), I'd be interested to know whether anyone who is a bit more hip to what the young people are saying these days might be able to enlighten me.

Words

I've run across various things relating to words recently; they don't really fit together in any way, but I thought I'd mention them here anyway.

1.) The most important German word of the year, at least as determined by the German Language Society is 'Wutbürger', which means 'enraged citizen'. This has been quite a year for Wutbürger in Germany, what with...um...well, the controversial building of train stations. And, um, the lowest unemployment rate in two decades.

Lots to be angry about here, indeed.

Perhaps this word, Wutbürger, will become a glorious part of our export-oriented economy and have a great career in other--potentially more justifiably angry--societies, just as Schadenfreude once did; or perhaps, more like Fremdscham, it may remain an under-utilised gem.

Anyway...

2.) Also under the heading of interesting Germanisms: I ran across something unexpected while walking around in Mainz a few weeks ago. I saw a man in a uniform (and with, I think, a gun) emerge from a car on which was printed the striking phrase word Polizeipuppenbühne.

I read that a couple of times, wondering whether my non-native German had it quite...right: was it really 'police puppet stage'?.

I made a point of looking it up when I got home, and, indeed, there is, in our state of Rhineland-Palatinate, a police puppet theatre. And our state is not the only one: Wikipedia (German only, unfortunately) tells us that police puppet theatres emerged in the 1950s as part of various forces' public education activities.

Now, police puppetry is interesting enough; however, research along these lines led me to the wonderful German word Verkehrserziehung, which means, essentially, 'road safety training', and is, of course, one of the main activities of the police puppeteers.

It's a lot more fun as one word, and the success of childhood Verkehrserziehung is part of the reason for the charming German habit (one that I've taken on for myself) of waiting to cross the street until the light says you can.

Not all Germans do this, of course, but still, a large enough number of them do to make it a national characteristic.

3.) Finally, thanks to Andrew, I have been made aware of Google's new Ngram viewer.

This new toy is a certain way for me to lose hours at a time on intriguing but economically worthless inquiries, so I've been trying to avoid it since finding out about it.

However, having written a recently published article about the (American) origins and use (in Britain) of the phrase 'the third degree' (in the sense of illegitimate interrogation), I couldn't resist putting the comparative phrases 'give him the third degree' and 'give her the third degree' into Ngram. (Submitting 'the third degree' would give too many false positives on this topic, as this might refer either to burns or freemasonry.)

This was the result (click to make it larger):

Which is interesting.

My suggestion in the article is that the concept of 'third degree' interrogation was introduced into Britain around 1900 (the first press reference I found was from The Scotsman commenting on the police treatment of Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President William McKinley in 1901).

In the graph above, the references emerge first in the late 1890s. The peaks between the 'him' and 'her' versions match in pattern (if not in magnitude) rather well (most of these seem to come from fictional contexts, i.e., crime thrillers), except for the post WWII period, when the 'him' version is clearly dominant.

Given that I'm still not entirely sure of the nature of the source base, I would rather not make too much of this result, but I find it interesting.

My research stopped in 1939: the rise in references to 'the third degree' since 1990 is a bit of a mystery. I'm wondering whether it has to do with an increase of re-prints of early 20th-century works?

Anyway: that was enough thinking for an evening this close to Christmas.

I am the (minty fresh) law?

Discovered while searching for discussions of police powers in the summer of 1928:

Mr. HAYES asked the Home Secretary the grounds upon which the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis has prohibited the use of chewing-gum by police while on duty?

Sir W. JOYNSON-HICKS: The Commissioner has prohibited the use of chewing-gum by police officers on duty because the practice seemed to him not only to invite unfavourable comment, but also to be likely to impair an officer's capacity to deal promptly and efficiently with many of the situations which are constantly arising in the course of his duties.

Mr. HAYES: Is the order prohibiting the use of chewing-gum to be extended to a prohibition of the consumption of chocolates by the Commissioner; and, if so, will it have any effect on the administration?

Viscountess ASTOR: Is it not much more difficult to answer questions properly when you are chewing gum?

Sir W. JOYNSON-HICKS: That is one of the reasons why the Commissioner has prohibited the practice. I am also informed that in blowing a whistle you may blow the gum into the whistle.

Mr. HAYES: There is a serious question involved here. Is the prohibition of the use of chewing-gum extended to a prohibition of the purchase of chewing-gum? In fact, the purchase of chewing-gum has been prohibited in the service canteens, and, that being so, why is an officer, who may not drink beer while on duty, allowed to buy beer in the canteen when he is off duty?

HC Deb 05 July 1928 vol 219 cc1550-1

It sort of reminded me of something I posted last year, about the dangers of orange peels and anarchists.

The Third Degree

I've just been informed today that an article of mine has made an appearance in an 'advance access' online version. It derives from a project I've been working on about the media and concerns about police powers in 1920s Britain. I'm quite pleased with it (for a change...) and it's been very enjoyable to research and write.

As it will be, I hope, for you to read.

The abstract:

The late 1920s saw a dramatic upsurge in popular concern about the abuse of police powers in Britain, the end result of a longer-term trend. Various aspects of policing were seen as worrying, but the most important concerned illegitimate forms of questioning. The phrase ‘the third degree’—imported from America—came to encapsulate this unease. Before the First World War, the terminology began to be used in British coverage of American crimes and their investigation, typically accompanied by disparaging commentary on American methods as well as the confident assertion of the superiority of British policing. The wartime growth in police powers and broader state regulation caused some to see an erosion in the ‘liberty of the subject’, and a series of scandals seemed to reveal serious problems with police procedure. The popularity of crime dramas featuring ‘third-degree’ interrogations also shaped public images of the police. Scandals in 1928 generated enough of an outcry to force the calling of the Royal Commission on Police Powers and Procedure (1928–29). Even though few concrete procedural changes were undertaken, it appears to have successfully calmed worries about the police, which receded and did not reach a similar level until the late 1950s.

The article: full-text; PDF. 

(For those of you interested in such things: when the published, paginated version appears, the links will, I am informed, be updated.)

Street-fighting men

Here's something I just ran across: a photograph of an apparent battle between police and demonstrators against the introduction of the means test in Bristol in 1932.

Click for a larger version, where all kinds of interesting details become apparent.


This, and a number of other interesting photos, available at the Mirrorpix blog, which sadly seems to have gone a bit quiet.

(This reminds me of a rather different--though equally interesting--street scene that I referred to last year: a police film of street betters in Chesterfield in 1935. See a fascinating episode from the birth of the surveillance state!)

On gloveworthy childhoods and clips round the ear: or, the children of the poor find their own way home

What follows are some comments on the police from C. H. Rolph, a former police officer himself, from his edited book, The Police and the Public: An Inquiry (London: Heinemann, 1962).

One of Rolph's topics was 'the ear-clipping period', i.e., that (possibly mythical) time when police constables took a more, shall we say, rough and ready approach to keeping Britain's potentially feral youth in check, based on techniques of which today's Daily Mail reader would no doubt approve:

I have heard citizens of little more than thirty speak of it fondly, as though it belonged to a golden age before the invention of juvenile delinquency. But any man who is forty today was in his pram when I first joined the police service, and even then the ear-clipping period was spoken of as past. The formula is usually the same, ‘In those days the bobby gave you a clip on the ear with his gloves, and you heard no more about it. Nowadays you’d have to go before a juvenile court, hang about for months waiting for the result, remand home, probation officer’s report, women police, children’s officer, attendance centre, perhaps an approved school – the lot.’ In the version I heard as a child, the policeman always put wooden blocks in the tops of the glove fingers to make them hurt more. I had an Edwardian childhood, its leisure hours being partially spent in pursuits that, from a police point of view, were outstandingly gloveworthy. But no police glove ever clipped my ear, though once or twice I was caught (this was rare because the police were fatter in those days).

Nowadays, by comparison, ‘if a policeman strikes a boy there’s a Parliamentary debate and a Committee of Inquiry’; and this, according to the glove advocates, is the cause of the ‘juvenile crime wave’. (187-188)

The more things change, eh?

I also like this quip about the public image of the police:

Apart from the armed forces, the police service is in fact the only public serve whose ultimate sanction is physical force: inside every gentler policeman there lurks a hired strong-arm man, a licensed tough. This is the policeman perceived most readily by some people; others see always the uniformed constable with the lost child in his arms. Both are middle-class conventions, if not smoke-screens: the children of the poor find their own way home and the children of the rich are not allowed to get lost. (188-89)

Watching the watchmen

For various reasons, I ran across something I should have mentioned before.

My friend and colleague Chris Williams published a fascinating article on the early days of police surveillance in the journal Surveillance & Society earlier this year.

Not only is there good analysis to be had, but the primary source -- a surveillance film of street betters in Chesterfield in 1935 -- is remarkable.


There are times when I remember why I love my chosen profession.

Enjoy the rare glimpse into the past.

(And all praise to S&S for being freely available to the public.)

Notes from a dangerous age

Here's something I just ran across in Vincent's Police Code and General Manual of the Criminal Law, 16th edn., 1924, which contains an alphabetical survey of all the duties of police officers.

Under 'O', we find:

Orange or Banana Peel.--1. The police should remove pieces of orange or banana peel when seen on the pavement, frequent accidents occurring by passengers slipping thereon.

2. If orange or banana peel is wilfully and continually thrown on a pavement, with the evident design of causing annoyance and exposing the public to danger, the delinquent may be summoned or apprehended, and charged with throwing rubbish on a thoroughfare. (See Highways.) [p. 171]

Insight into the concerns of the period is also provided by the fact that this edition contained a lengthy entry under 'Anarchism', drawing particular attention to the dangers of 'outrages' caused by the throwing of bombs or, more mysteriously, 'infernal machines'.

Of your run-of-the-mill anarchist, however, it is noted: 'This class of person is often, apart from the dangerous opinions he possesses, harmless in himself.' [p.13]

Love-hate relationship

David Pescovitz at Boing Boing posted a photo of that rare beast, police-positive graffiti (or, maybe more properly, graffito, but I'm not about to get picky).

It reminded me of a phrase we ran across a couple of years ago in a little Normandy town that we like to think of as a home away from home.

It's not exactly pro-police, but it is surprisingly...differentiated.

Welcome to London: fotographieren verboten

Ah, London. Where the law-enforcement fun never stops!

Today's Guardian brings the story of Austrian tourist Klaus Matzka and his son, who were visiting the world-class metropolis and, as one sometimes does, taking some snaps.

This fell rather afoul of a couple of super-vigilant members of London's finest:

Like most visitors to London, Klaus Matzka and his teenage son Loris took several photographs of some of the city's sights, including the famous red double-decker buses. More unusually perhaps, they also took pictures of the Vauxhall bus station, which Matzka regards as "modern sculpture".

But the tourists have said they had to return home to Vienna without their holiday pictures after two policemen forced them to delete the photographs from their cameras in the name of preventing terrorism.

Matkza, a 69-year-old retired television cameraman with a taste for modern architecture, was told that photographing anything to do with transport was "strictly forbidden". The policemen also recorded the pair's details, including passport numbers and hotel addresses.

Matzka and his son, perhaps, stood out due to their unusual--indeed, vaguely Ballardian--tourist interests:

He said he and his son liked to travel to the unfashionable suburbs.

"We typically crisscross cities from the end of railway terminals, we like to go to places not visited by other tourists. You get to know a city by going to places like this, not central squares. Buckingham Palace is also necessary, but you need to go elsewhere to get to know the city," he said.

He said the "nasty incident" had "killed interest in any further trips to the city".

I'm not surprised. I know that feeling myself.

In a telephone interview from his home in Vienna, Matka said: "I've never had these experiences anywhere, never in the world, not even in Communist countries."

Anyway, this might be a semi-amusing anecdote if it weren't part of a broader problem, one that is symbolised by the the arrest around the beginning of the year of artist Reuben Powell, who was photographing an old building as part of an art project. As the Independent reported:

"The car skidded to a halt like something out of Starsky & Hutch and this officer jumped out very dramatically and said 'what are you doing?' I told him I was photographing the building and he said he was going to search me under the Anti-Terrorism Act," he recalled.

For Powell, this brush with the law resulted in five hours in a cell after police seized the lock-blade knife he uses to sharpen his pencils. His release only came after the intervention of the local MP, Simon Hughes, but not before he was handcuffed and his genetic material stored permanently on the DNA database.

But Powell's experience is far from uncommon. Every week photographers wielding their cameras in public find themselves on the receiving end of warnings either by police, who stop them under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, or from over-eager officials who believe that photography in a public area is somehow against the law.

Which it's not.

And, as a service to our readers, we reprint in handy clip'n'save format, the following statement from the Association of Chief Police Officers, quoted in the Independent article noted above:

"Police officers may not prevent someone from taking a photograph in public unless they suspect criminal or terrorist intent. Their powers are strictly regulated by law and once an image has been recorded, the police have no power to delete or confiscate it without a court order. This applies equally to members of the media seeking to record images, who do not need a permit to photograph or film in public places," a spokeswoman said.

Just in case, though, I offer you this image of the Vauxhall Bus Station, so that you don't need to take any unnecessary risks.

(Non-terrorist source)

Let us swear allegiance to a land that's free...

Speaking of cops...

Campeau-Laurion, the director of Web productions for a media company, attended the Aug. 26 Yankees-Red Sox game with a friend, who had a ticket package for 11 games at Yankee Stadium during the 2008 season. Campeau-Laurion had attended several of these games with his friend.

Campeau-Laurion quietly watched the game, ate a bag of peanuts and drank two beers. He decided to use the restroom at the start of the seventh-inning stretch – a period when fans often choose to use the restroom. He got up and made his way down the aisle as “God Bless America” began playing. A police officer blocked his path and indicated that he could not leave during the song. Campeau-Laurion explained that he needed to use the restroom and was not concerned about “God Bless America.” Then he attempted to walk past the officer.

Before Campeau-Laurion could take a step, the police officer grabbed his right arm and twisted it behind his back. A second officer twisted Campeau-Laurion’s left arm behind his back, and the two officers then marched him down several ramps to the stadium’s exit with his arms pinned behind his back. The officers refused to ease their grip, even though Campeau-Laurion was not resisting them.

The encounter ended with one of the officers telling Campeau-Laurion to leave the country if he didn’t like it.

The policy by the New York Yankees of enforcing attendance during the playing of 'God Bless America' was apparently enacted, 'to promote patriotism amongst those attending Yankees games.'

Well, mission accomplished there, I'd say...

(Via LG&M)

Fighting the law...

With increasing age, I have noticed that, while I have somewhat more suspicion of the state, I have greater sympathy toward the police on an individual level. It's a strange feeling, and possibly a very idiosyncratic mix, I admit.

It so happens that I'm also currently working on a research project related to a rather heated debate about accusations of the misuse of police powers and allegations involving the erosion of civil liberties in an earlier period of British history. As a result of that combination, I have been following the recent accusations of police brutality surrounding the G20 protests in London a few weeks ago (my, how time flies) with some interest.

I should say the now expanding accusations of police brutality, as the Guardian has today offered a feature containing various videos of incidents of conflict between protesters and police.

Now, there are a lot of difficulties with interpreting some of these things: we only get snippets of information, we have only a limited view of the situation, a lot of context is missing, etc.

Ok.

And, it should not be forgotten, there were a fair number of people out for trouble on that day -- am I the only left-of-centre person who's a bit tired of the 'black block' and their pointless destruction of banks and fast food restaurants? -- and that it is the police's job to keep a limit on that sort of thing.

I'm not exceptionally open to generalised 'fuck the police' kind of rhetoric.

Ok.

And I'm also aware that 'police brutality' is a pretty relative term. Over the last few weeks, I've read a lot about American police methods in the early 20th century. Which has been...well, pretty chilling.

There are, also, some pretty extreme examples of that genre of behaviour around the world that make what happened (at least so far as we know so far) at the G20 look like playground fun.

Ok.

But, still, I'm left wondering...

...what the fuck?

No, really: the Tomlinson case is bad enough, as were the attempts by a few tabloid papers to smear the man who was attacked -- from behind -- by police.

I don't care whether he'd had a few drinks or he hadn't taken the quickest route home, or wasn't getting out of the way of the police as quickly as they wanted him to.

I would see the right to have a few drinks and walk around the streets without being struck from behind by a state-sanctioned thug in a mask and body armour to be one of the essential things that is one of the great privileges of living in a Rechtsstaat and not some kind of hell-hole like...I don't know...Dubai. (Via Geoff.)

Had Tomlinson been attacking someone, ok.

Had he been seriously causing a danger to someone, ok.

However, and this sounds kind of obvious to me, the police should not have the power to beat us into acting according to their convenience. No matter how many annoying punk kids in hoodies they've had to endure on a given day.

Which brings me to the video released today (I think) of an encounter that occurred on the day after Tomlinson's death, apparently at some kind of memorial to him.

The Guardian doesn't seem to allow video embedding, but I'll wait while you go watch it. (I would suggest looking at it a few times to take in the details.)

If you read around the internet or look at the comments on YouTube videos of the event (which I'm not embedding because the quality isn't so good) you get a lot of the 'the bitch deserved it' kind of thing.

Which is pretty unpleasant. To say the least.

Watch it again: someone -- a guy with a newspaper -- tries to walk past the police cordon and is told he can't. He discusses the issue, seemingly, in a reasonable manner. The camera moves to someone else -- a guy with a camera -- who is also refused exit. (Presumably, this is the 'kettling' tactic that everyone is now talking about.)

The camera pans back and Man With The Newspaper, is now being shoved about by a few of the officers, for no good reason that I can see.

The crowd reacts as you might expect.

Then a short woman begins remonstrating with a police sergeant, who then backhands her, and the crowd reacts.

Again, as you might expect.

Or maybe you don't expect that.

Alright: maybe we're just different kinds of people with different kinds of attitudes to the arbitrary exercise of authority, but I have to say, there have been few times in my life that I have really wanted to hit someone, and one of them emerged in reaction to that cop's strike.

The police should not be authorised to respond to a some cheeky verbal bollocking by someone who is clearly not a threat to them by striking that person in the face and...then...batoning her in the legs after she, quite understandably, expresses (shall we say) her disapproval with the way she has been handled.

Even if you're of the persuasion to think that this screechy woman was an annoyance, think about this: how effective was the policing that you see on display in that video? Context is difficult, I know, and if new concrete evidence emerges, I'm happy to change my view.

But, please, those cops managed to turn what seemed to be a reasonably quiet protest into an enraged crowd in about thirty seconds through their physical overreactions to mild provocations.

And, in the end, dealing with being called a 'fascist' several hundred times in a day without striking out randomly is part of the job description. Being a public servant of this sort involves discipline, not the license to distribute some bruises wherever you happen to feel it worthwhile.

Of the various videos on offer at today's Guardian site (and, if I didn't know better, I'd be a bit disappointed at the fact that some of the other papers that go on about 'freedom' all the time when it involves health'n'safety regulations gone mad or a few too many EU regulations about banana shape have said little or nothing about this) I think one of the most telling involves no violence at all.

It's the one where (scroll down to '2 April, 3.46pm, junction of Royal Exchange Passage and Cornhill') a very friendly officer (at least initially, and, a confession: I've not been able to take British police entirely seriously since they started wearing fluorescent jackets all the time) tells a group of the press to leave the area for a while 'under section 14 of the Public Order Act' in order to help them 'resolve the situation'.

Questioned about what exactly it is they're going to do and how the absence of the press might make it easier, the officer turns to threats, suggesting that they could either follow his orders or 'spend the rest of the day in the cells'. When it is suggested that this just might constitute 'threatening the press' Officer Friendly offers sarcasm, and then further threats.

It's not a pretty scene.

But it's rather educational.

It's my humble view, perhaps not a widely shared one, that any policing in a free, constitutional state should be able to be done in the full light of day and press attention in order to remain legitimate. (With the possible exception of absolutely necessary undercover work required for dealing with, say, organised crime or terrorism, etc. I'm not naive.)

It strikes me that that is neither a controversial opinion, nor one that has much to do with 'left' or 'right'.

Or am I wrong?

I have to say, I'm not impressed with the Met and the City of London police on this occasion.

But I am becoming increasingly aware of the importance of cheap and ubiquitous video cameras.