From Stephen Lawrence to today's Taser revelations, Britain's forces of law and order have defiled the idea of the public sphere
"The police are the public and the public are the police," said the force's modern founder, Robert Peel, in the early 19th century. Never has a fundamental principle come to sound so hollow. Everything from the treatment of domestic violence victims and the appalling treatment of the Lawrence family to the Hillsborough campaign smears, undercover spying on protestersand today's revelations about Taser use even the stitch-up of a high-level government minister reveals quite the opposite: that the police regard the public as a dangerous, entirely separate thing, to be surveilled, imprisoned and physically restrained wherever possible.
The police force manifestly does not understand itself to be part of this "other" public, but rather a separate agent dealing with an always potentially dangerous mob, some of whom can be pre-emptively singled out on the basis of poverty, ethnicity or opposition to state policy (or a combination of these) and reminded of their place: big brother is watching you, and if you catch him in the act he'll harass, smear and stomp on you until you get back in line. The police are the public, we could say, but not the public of the people, where the term originates, but the public of "public order". Reported by guardian.co.uk 15 hours ago.
"The police are the public and the public are the police," said the force's modern founder, Robert Peel, in the early 19th century. Never has a fundamental principle come to sound so hollow. Everything from the treatment of domestic violence victims and the appalling treatment of the Lawrence family to the Hillsborough campaign smears, undercover spying on protestersand today's revelations about Taser use even the stitch-up of a high-level government minister reveals quite the opposite: that the police regard the public as a dangerous, entirely separate thing, to be surveilled, imprisoned and physically restrained wherever possible.
The police force manifestly does not understand itself to be part of this "other" public, but rather a separate agent dealing with an always potentially dangerous mob, some of whom can be pre-emptively singled out on the basis of poverty, ethnicity or opposition to state policy (or a combination of these) and reminded of their place: big brother is watching you, and if you catch him in the act he'll harass, smear and stomp on you until you get back in line. The police are the public, we could say, but not the public of the people, where the term originates, but the public of "public order". Reported by guardian.co.uk 15 hours ago.