Law and Order in the Modern World

What to make of the anti-police movement?

I was subject to a mild touch of police brutality in my youth.

One evening, in my younger and more vulnerable years, in a coastal town, I was on a quiet road drinking a beer with two friends.

A car pulled up. The plain-clothed driver told us to get in, in a particularly ominous and aggressive manner. We sensed danger and ran.

One friend and I escaped into some bushes, but we quickly realised there was nothing but a concrete wall on the other side. We were trapped. The third among us was seemingly caught by the gang in the car.

Before we could think things through, we heard a voice and saw a shadow outside the shrubbery. A man was pointing a gun at us and saying we would be shot if we did not come out. I was bewildered. Were we being robbed, kidnapped, prepared for some kind of gang initiation execution? Who were these attackers?

We had no choice but to comply. We came out with our hands up. I remember being distinctly shaky. A man had his gun on us.

He looked at us menacingly, and then opened his casual jacket, saying, “Just so you know…” On the inside of his jacket was an embroidered word, `Police`. That would be the only identification I ever saw. It turned out we were being arrested for public indecency – the crime of having a beer on a public road. If I had been in a more belligerent mood, as I probably would be if it were to happen now, I wonder if I may have been shot.

We were piled into the car where we discovered our other friend. In true South African-style, he was sipping on a beer – apparently it was fine to do so in the police car!

The main cop told us we would spend the weekend in prison. If you know anything about South African prison, then you would know the implications and menace of that statement.

Fortunately for us, as we drove to the station, the cops saw a street fight and decided it was not worth the hassle to keep us, and we were released. My record remained clean!

It all seemed a bit heavy-handed. On the other hand, however, the beach town which we were in had been inundated with school leaving teens like ourselves, and perhaps the cops were just sick and tired of young people causing chaos everywhere. Still, it seems to be quite an escalation to start pointing a gun at young people for drinking a beer on the road, without even identifying yourself as a policeman.

I recalled this incident during the hard lockdown of last year in South Africa, when in the same town, I saw cops leading a young child away from his family seemingly for the crime of the family having gone onto the beach for a swim on a hot day. See the picture above.

My blood boiled.

This is all to say, I do have some kind of basic awareness and appreciation of how police can be completely heavy-handed. Like anybody, power can go to their heads.

One of the books my daughter has really enjoyed is an old-fashioned, very simple story of a day in the life of a little English girl – she wakes up, has breakfast with mom, goes to town with mom to shop while her father is at work, plays with her teddies, kisses her dad when he comes home from work in his suit, etc. There is one moment where a policeman, looking grand, helps the mother and child cross the road. The policeman is dressed resplendently in uniform, with his bobby hat, on his beat, looking to `protect and serve`. He would obviously have been unarmed.

What a contrast to the world of today.

We live in an industrial world. And obviously that has given us an industrialised police force. That is not the fault of the police per se, but it leads to a police force that is quicker to use force than in days gone by, a police force on edge and on a kind of war footing.

I do not want to give an opinion on the famous case that has played out in the US recently. But I do want to note and discuss, given the fact that coverage of the Floyd case has deeply impacted the entire world, some of the aftermath of the case.

First of all, it must be said that for the rest of the world to use a story emanating out of the US and its media as a basis for their own political discussion is utter madness. The US is a broken society and we would all do better to stay as uninfected by their ideological wars as possible.

(BLM supporters in the US and abroad should, in their fervour, be aware of the name David Dorn, by the way, not just George Floyd. Also Tony Timpa. Do an internet search and prepare for some cognitive dissonance.)

However, it is now a fact that America`s BLM movement has become one of the most significant social movements of all time. During the UK`s hard lockdown for example, an exception was made to allow BLM marches – the police even kneeled before the protestors.

When West Indies toured England to play cricket last year, each day started with discussion of an arrest that had gone wrong in Minneapolis. Think about the strangeness of that.

I even received an email from my old high school informing me how they were responding to the specific case. This took place in a country that has its fill of local problems beside the sad death of George Floyd.

When I watched the first day of the cricket, I was greatly struck by comments given by the West Indian cricketing great, Michael Holding. He addressed critique of the concept of stating that Black Lives Matter, as opposed to saying All Lives Matter. The statement All Lives Matter is apparently unnecessary because we all know that white lives matter. It is obvious white lives matter.

That has stayed with me. And it does not sit well with me.

I think this is because I know of many white people who have been murdered in South Africa.

My father`s close friend spent his life paralyzed from the neck down after being shot at his place of work. A friend`s pregnant cousin was recently murdered in her bed while on holiday, with her young child in the house. A man down the road from where I used to live was hacked to death by a bush knife. A former colleague`s brother was recently murdered in his wheelchair on his farm, after his dogs guarding the property had themselves been killed. The man was in a wheelchair after suffering a prior attack. All in all, I know a lot more of these stories than I do of people dying from Covid.

These people were white. That does not make their deaths more tragic than a black person`s death. I know there are plenty of, and even more, stories in South Africa where the victim is black. But it gives the lie to Michael Holding saying white lives clearly matter to everybody, as though white people lived in some gilded cage.

A little-known fact: even after slavery was abolished in the British Empire and then later in the USA, hundreds of thousands white slaves still existed in the North African, Ottoman, and Arabic worlds. A whole people group in Europe is known as the Slavic peoples – because of their historical use as slaves.

I am not trying to minimize anybody`s suffering, or the injustices faced by anybody. What I am suggesting is that history and society and injustice are complicated.

After the lockdown police states, I am not eager at all to say police forces around the world are to be religiously revered.

But as with any problem in society, you cannot simply say that it is all about one bad group or one victim group. Good and evil does not work that way. And to assume that it does, will not help solve our problems.

I am sure there is plenty of good faith amongst some BLM supporters, but they should be aware that even the US media has admitted that BLM activity highly correlates with an increase in homicide everywhere that BLM marches – because in our post-trust, industrial society, heavy police presence does, overall, reduce crime. When the police withdraw, crime increases.

New York, for example, escalated its policing in the 90s. The city was revolutionized. This was dismantled recently for political reasons, and crime has surged again.

There should be a way, therefore, of looking at policing, law and order, without replacing that system with a mere vacuum.

As I wrote yesterday, the geography of our cities is deeply ugly. Police have to patrol with weapons in cars nowadays, and not on foot with a baton. That is going to lead to some mistakes and also some bad actors taking advantage of their power in ugly ways, but to not have any police at all will lead to much worse chaos.

Funnily enough, Joe Biden`s most successful piece of legislation as a senator was a crime bill he authored under Bill Clinton which vastly increased policing power in the 1990s. He has disavowed it now, but the fact is the 90s saw a historical decrease in crime in American cities.

It would be great to live in a world where tough on crime policies were not useful or needed, but such a world only exists in the one that has disappeared - a world where policemen knew the names of the people they encountered on their daily beat, in which even inner cities had so-called eyes on the street and a sense of civic duty.

All in all, one question worth asking and remembering – given everything that has happened - is whether good and competent people are now more likely or less likely to choose to become policemen, given the current climate? If the answer is less likely, then expect this problem to continue.

And even with good policemen, we would still face the problems of urban decay that leads to a police force constantly on edge. Improving quality of life in cities - in terms of housing, transport, beauty, pollution - should therefore be the focus of elites and political leaders. But that will require a revolution in bureaucratic competence and national vision and cohesion. I am not holding my breath.

In the meantime, we can only carve out lives for our families outside of this decay and decline. That is a difficult task, shorn of the Boomer privileges of institutional trust and upward mobility, but it is our only option.