the polite force in a polite state

1.i am under no illusion.the capitalist state is when stripped down to basics a "body of armed men".when put to the test this is the default position.in britain those forces might have "velvet toe caps".

2.earlier thi month my wife,who like me and many others active in campaigns might be called "silver backs"attended a dwmonstration at the town hall to protest against the labour led council setting a legal budget,in which central government expects the budget to balance.

3.at some point the demonstration pushed its way into the building to press its points home-rejection of cuts.it appears police did not resist in view of inclement weqat5her and probably as the demonstration might actually be easier for them to manage.

4.at some point the temperature of the demontration reduced.then my wife and our friend found a bench to sit on take a rest and a little away from the throng.

5.a little while later a woman police officer approached them to qask them to leave and uggeting thqat refusqal might lead to arrest.unphased my wife asked under 2which law they wouled be arrested.unusually the officer went away to find out.on return she may have apologised,certainly got into conversation,recieved a quick education that the issue was about resisting piblicd sector cuts including "our" local library.she agreed to sign the on-line petition,which technically might place her in breach of the law if the library i on her beat or patch.

6.this is an interesting and unusual incident.i am certain the outcome would have been different and closer to the uual outcome had the gender,age,race and body language dynamic been even slightly different.

lost,
17/03/2011

last week bbc news reported on its bulletin during "today"its major morning news magazine programme,an incident in which a police force organised a surveillance(possibly including armed officers)of a(small)group of children between the ages of 4 and 10 years old.

at some point uniformed officers arrived in a marked vehicle to apprehend and detain these children.in the process the children were frightened,reduced to tears and possibly traumatised.the crimes were criminal damage and probably theft as the children had ben caught cutting daffodils in a public place(possibly a park).i dont know what the outcome was,as the story quickly dissappeared from the news.

i only make the following observations.this might provoke comments from edia and community that the police should be doing some other form of"proper policing".in any case following a reduction of the age of criminal responsibilty to the age of 10 following the bulger murder now many years ago,criminal responsibility beins at the age of 10.not 4.

some years ago the police tried re-branding as a service rather than a force.workers and revolutionary socialists should reject such rebranding.words are important in a culture in which words accompany images all the time.

this is important where they have added one more failure to serve the community.over the last year or so there have been several acccounts of systematic failures to protect vulnerable people from criminal victimisation,aloingside more failures to support female rape victims.alongside their wider and longer poor record in relation to civilian deaths in police custody or care,it is my view that these failings are not werrors but systemic.at best,reform will slice a small part of these problems.

i also suggest that comparison with other "more brutal" polities and police practices elsewhere indicates that the differences bewtween britain and elsewhere are less clear than they might appear.

there is often a joke made here that the expression police intelligence is a non-sequitor,a contradiction.but then their primary task is brute force before intelligence as part of the body of armed men on which the state is founded.

lost,
22/03/2011

Indeed, I think that as Marxists we can say that all power (and thus the State) rests on violence (whether it is just potential like in Europe or opened like in Libya). The police in this sense serves as a first wall to protect the powerful as it had been shown so many times all over the world, especially over the last years with the economic collapse.

Everywhere you look in Europe you can find similarities with the situation you described. Here in France, police beat up teenage girls protesters in groups and in front of the cameras and no journalists intervene nor denounce such useless and mindless violence.

As inequality grows the elites know that they have to thighten repression to scare the population (there was recently in France a media campaign claiming that inmigrants from the Arab world were going to "invade" France, causing more violence in the country) while at the same time nothing was saif about a new law that forces internet providers to keep for a whole year track of all Internet activity of their clients... Divide and conquer.