Oliver Barnes:

A picture taken during the Olympics is useful for characterising today’s British police officer: it shows seven men in uniform pulling Usain Bolt poses. These police officers are individuals carried away by the Olympic spirit. They enjoyed the moment along just like the rest of the country. Yet in many ways they are more than individuals. Their uniforms, their custodian helmets and their stab vests all express their difference. They are the perfect expressions of the ‘citizen in uniform’.

By way of contrast, consider European-style gendarmes. Gendarmes are soldiers who live in barracks and are stationed outside of their home regions. Gendarmeries are autonomous forces designed to impose order on society. The British police are fundamentally different from these. Police forces are localised institutions – consider, for example, the community beat officer. The British police officer lives in the community they police.

The British security model is ‘policing by consent’. The community consents to give the police the power to maintain peace. Any individual could threaten this peace although there are statistical tendencies (for example, males aged 18-25 are the most likely group to be both the victims and perpetrators of alcohol related crime). These individuals could also be police officers.

Given that we are all capable of being victims and perpetrators, a police officer’s individuality is essential. If the police officer were not an individual but a state-automaton, he would treat citizens as total identities who were either enemies or friends. They would either enforce state law against us, or enforce state law for us.
But this way around, police officers are able to recognise our individualities because they have them too.

Constables recognise that we deserve to be judged for our individual actions. Their individuality, their freedom of thought and understanding allows them to judge us properly. Their individuality allows them to understand us as we are and not as preconceived types.

The ‘citizen in uniform’ shares our individuality. They relate to us as individuals because we, like them, can be nothing more.

Aliya Ram 

After almost a year of uncertainty, Alfie Meadows and Zak King finally entered Woolwich Crown court last week for the beginning of what promises to be along and painful trial. The pair were accused of violent disorder during the 2010 anti-fees protests, at which a policeman hit philosophy student Alfie with a truncheon, leaving him requiring emergency brain surgery.

In light of all this, it felt ugly to hear that the second day of the retrial saw an unprecedented and unnecessary number of police officers turning up to court. Indeed, there were enough of them that the judge commented on how unusual it was to have policemen in the gallery, telling them they should feel free to leave at their own discretion.

The image of ‘the hand of the law’ being gently chided out of a court of that same law reveals something important about how we relate to policemen. What was present in the gallery was not the abstracted, disembodied force of justice that the phrase ‘the hand of the law’ suggests, but many individuals who were variously rude, kind or un-cooperative. These policemen incarnate are problematically opposed to their ideal conceptual counterpart, the so-called hand of the law.

Policemen are armed and put on horses because they supposedly represent a society which is greater than the individuals of whom it is comprised. But the language of fear and self-protection they use to defend themselves from charges of brutality is not appropriate to something the size of society.

When standing in a gallery or when faced with protesting students, policemen turn into men-police. This would not be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that these men are armed. By giving great power to fragile bodies we facilitate the identity-elusion that allowed Alfie’s jury to hang in April.

Of course we must recognise that policemen are as vulnerable ourselves with our thinly clothed nakedness. Evolution dictates that a policeman will defend himself, but as long as he can hide behind the sublimity of his superhuman career title, so ought we defend ourselves from him.