The Problem With The Polis

So as new camera-phone footage of various police brutalities from the G20 protests continue to flow past the soggy remains of the flood-gates and onto our global news channels, my thoughts have turned to my own feelings about the police.

Small-town rozzers are no joke as any fellow small-towner will tell you – ‘they’ll do you for anything mate’ is the opinion I grew up with. The theory we often whined from the rain-drizzled cocoons of our adolescence was that - to quote Shakespeare - ‘tis grand to have a giants strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant’ - in other words, give a man the power of a policeman but nothing really to police and he’ll soon start stamping on the little people just because he can.

Over the course of our tribal years stalking the streets of Alnwick with nothing but sullen glances, greasy hair and pretentious asides about music we thought no one else understood, my friends and I were regularly arrested (or at least accosted) for the tiniest of misdemeanours. My old pal Dillon spent a night in the cells once just for pissing behind a wheelie bin – although to be fair, he had chosen inexplicably to pull his jeans and pants right down to his ankles to do so, thus landing himself with an indecent exposure charge to boot. Looking back, I’m fairly sure it was the reflection of the moon’s sombre glow on the pimply crescent of his arse that alerted the copper in the first place.

I myself reached my nadir one regrettable night staggering home while polishing off a bottle of Happy Shopper merlot. Last drop of acidic bile duly sunk, I placed the bottle beneath a parked car next to me so I could continue up the road with my profound thoughts when, from no where, a police car stopped and told me to pick it up – something I obliged to do with a slurred grumble.
Once they’d pulled away again, I sat the bottle back under another car with all the smugness Ronnie Briggs must have felt as the Great Train became a Tiny Dot in his wing mirror - only difference was, I got caught. The copper saw it happen, reversed back up the road and told me to pick it up again.

With muted outrage, I proceeded to inform the policeman how incongruous I felt his actions to be in the context of our fine town where not four streets away, fights were likely to be breaking out as people left the pubs – how, as a tax-paying young citizen with a clean public record and a bright future ahead of me, I resented being ‘nannied’ by the state or indeed any of it’s front-line employees.

Six months later, when preparing for my court appearance, the policeman’s report described the incident more like this:

“AT APPROX 02:12 AM, THE DEFENDANT WAS SPOTTED LITTERING IN THE STREET AND WAS ASKED TO PICK ITEM UP. DEFENDANT OBLIGED THEN REPEATED THE OFFENCE A SECOND TIME. WHEN ASKED TO PICK IT UP AGAIN DEFENDANT SAID ‘LOOK MAN FOR FUCK’S SAKE WHY DON’T YOU GO DO SOME REAL WORK?'. WHEN TOLD ONCE AGAIN TO PICK ITEM UP DEFENDANT SAID ‘FINE FOR FUCK’S SAKE THERE LOOK I HAVE IT – CAN’T EVEN WALK HOME WITHOUT YOU GIVING ME SHIT CAN I?’” Etc. etc.

I’ll never quite forget the mixture of mirth and shame on my Mum’s face as her only son pleaded ‘guilty’ to littering in a patch-work suit of old school uniforms one chilly morning in November. The subsequent paragraph in the Alnwick Gazette was, incidentally, my debut in print.

So small-town police can be petty in their approach to their job, but then small-town people can be petty in their approach to their lives full stop. The policeman could have let it go and not charged me but then I could have just carried the bottle to my front door and no been so petulant – his churlishness and mine formed a symbiotic circle of frustrated behaviour, two parts of the same grim condition. Having grown a little wiser and travelled a little further, I’ve realised that the police are a bit like God in that you’ll scoff at the thought of them but then, in the most desperate of circumstances, you don’t half find yourself wishing they’d show up somehow.

But what about the masked figure who took a baton to the back of Ian Tomlinson's head, the anonymous architect of the bewildered fall which has proven so emblematic of reckless policing, as well as a chilling precursor to a father’s pointless death?

Behind the yellow jacket and the scary mask, it’s easy to imagine a frightened young officer whose training has led him down. Confronted with a mob of protesters to whom you embody the general antithesis of their aims, sprit and conviction, what would you do?

Would you keep it cool, stand your ground, try to reason? Or would you lash out in fear?

I’ll never know, mainly because I’ve got about much chance of becoming a policeman as I do of becoming Barrack Obama’s second pet dog. But I do think it’s worth bearing in mind that grace under pressure is a tall order as well as a fine concept. Perhaps the person behind the riot gear was stood there wishing, against all logic, that somehow the police would show up and make everything safe for him.

Like everyone else in Britain, the wake of the G20 protests has done much to shake my faith in the police, just as listening to N.W.A's 'Fuck Tha Police' did much to shape my default antipathy toward them all those years ago, and I sincerely hope that lessons are learnt by all. In the mean time, I'll just be doing my best to avoid getting into situations where I find myself praying for a man in blue: and watching where I leave my wine bottles, of course.

The Three Great Unmentionables #1 - Religion

Staggering hung-over through the musky folds of the internet brought me, for once, to a pure and happy place this morning.

Karen Armstrong - a religious scholar who I won’t pretend to have known about before my accidental (or perhaps divinely intervened) divergence from alternating between pages of football gossip and blue-tinted voyeurism, has articulated brilliantly what I have always felt but never had the brain cells to say about that flaming potato, religion.

Far from seeing God-stuff as force for evil simply because it’s been misappropriated over our bloody history to aid various political objectives, Armstrong views it as having the potential to help achieve global harmony. She’s called for a ‘Charter for Compassion’ to be drafted up between all the world’s major religions – a document that keeps at its centre what her study has shown her to be the ‘golden rule’ or the principle that underpins all religious teachings, from the chilled out vibes of The Buddha to the seriously out-of-fashion orders of Allah to our own beardy, Bush-bothering JC.

Weirdly the principle – ‘don’t do unto others anything you wouldn’t want done unto you’ – is something my dear old Mum used to drop surreptitiously around the edges of my Lego sessions and generally proffer as good guidance through life. Clearly this means She harbours the combined wisdom of all mankind’s prophets from Confucius onwards, and that maybe I should do a little less eye-rolling when she speaks and little more sitting cross-legged in attentive silence with candles.

In any case, I find Armstrong’s view of religion a lot more palatable and interesting than the Nu-Atheists currently sneering at religion from the sides of buses. For me there was always something uncomfortably smug about the Atheist Bus Campaign which saw the message ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ scrawled across the body of Number 32s all over Europe.

It’s not the idea of atheists being allowed to say their piece that bothers me but the line they went with – ‘stop worrying and enjoy your life’ – like Richard Dawkins and his followers hop, skip and jump through their care free existences tipping their bowler hats at bemused strangers and out-whistling the song-birds all because they’ve decided there’s no God.

Frankly, I think religion is self-made whether you worship Satan, yoga, the music of Marvin Gaye or the whisper of Autumn leaves cradled in the wind – whatever gives people meaning and some inner-peace through this sometimes weary toil.

But what Armstrong points out is that in the case of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism and Buddhism – proper, big religions – ‘belief’ isn’t a state you can be in or a possession you can have, it’s an action you have to perform. Reminds me of the start of that Massive Attack song where she harks: ‘Love, love is a verb / Love is a doing word’. Religion teaches that divinity and enlightenment – or the ‘light’ that atheists snigger at – is reached through actions and discipline, and the central endeavour to these actions and disciplines is the concept of compassion – putting others first. It is in this dethroning of the self from the centre of our own worlds, religion teaches, that divinity is achieved. And we all know how fucking difficult that can be.

The problem with religion then isn’t that it ‘causes war’ or breeds intolerance but that people can’t be arsed to learn about or follow it properly – if they did, things’d be hunky-dory. A bit like Communism, if only the pesky aspects of human nature – greed, selfishness, malice – didn’t blinker us all then religion would have a lot of the answers we need.

My personal ambivalence on the subject stems from an early childhood in which, when troubled, I would lie awake at night and whisper to what school, my Mum and Sunday mornings had told me was an all-loving, ever-listening God - a best friend. From the portal that was my duvet, flanked in soft, cuddly versions of things that would eat me in real life, I would order my thoughts and pray; for situations at school to be resolved and the survival of my parents and sisters and a nightmare-less sleep and all the other things that preoccupy a young mind.

Now of course I never contact God unless I’m exasperated or accidently trodden-on, but I do remember the comfort of faith and so hate the dogmatic over-simplification that characterises many people’s attitudes to religion. When scriptures are followed, rather than manipulated or preached, you usually end up with a good person trying to do good things, and no – you don’t need religion to be a moral or decent person, but then why object to people who let it help them out?

Ultimately of course defending or finding a place for religion in our modern world is a task too great for my mediocre intellect or probably even that of Richard Darkins or Karen Armstrong. No, best as ever to leave life’s greatest conundrums to life’s wisest TV show: The Simpsons. And which character is happiest in that..?

Diddly.