Category: acab

The police are just ordinary workers, we shouldn’t be too harsh on them

“We are still investigating your complaint, madam, rest assured.” I try not to crack up laughing as Derek makes eye contact. “No, we’re not considering a product recall at present. Have a good day.”

“It’s totally unsafe, it just exploded for no reason whatsoever,” Derek says in a singsong voice. “What was it this time? Left it-”

We are interrupted by a low growl from Simon’s desk, a guttural cry of soul-wrenching frustration. “FUCKING PAPERCLIP!” he ejaculates.

I turn back to Derek. We’re all pissed off at Excel, nothing new. Simon has more of a temper than most of us, and is more easily irritated by that shit, but we’ve all smashed up a few computers when our formulae wouldn’t calculate before. Once, the patronising little fuck from IT ended up with a mouse lodged up his rectum for sneering that sometimes the chart function needed manual axis labelling in that awful supercilious manner of his.

“She left it plugged in,” I tell Derek. He rolls his eyes.

“When are they going to learn? We give them all this advice on how to prevent things from blowing up and it’s still ooh excuse me, I expect you to do something about this, I used my modem for an hour and it exploded.”

“It’s women,” I say. “Always expect us to do something for us…”

“Oi,” pipes up Laura, the token woman on the team.

“Present company excluded.” I give Laura a wink. We’re mates, it’s just banter. She’s the best at handling the hysterical women and we all know it.

The cleaner creaks in; it’s getting late and we’re all tired. It’s still not the end of the shift, though. We work in silence, filling in endless reports of things whiny customers expect us to do something about. Keys tap, and Simon makes noises like a couple of dogs fucking. Before the end of the shift, we’ll see the innards of his PC, I suspect.

Laura answers the phone, politely making soothing noises at someone bitching about how she urgently needs our help because her modem has exploded and it’s killed her cat. I look up to Derek to wink, but something behind him catches my eye.

Simon has leapt out of his seat. He snatches the handle of the hoover off the cleaner, and, with almost superhuman speed, beats her head in with the stand-up Dyson. Blood splatters. It’s all over Simon, it’s flicked on to Derek, it’s all over the fucking walls, and who’s going to clean it when the cleaner is now a messy stain on the carpet?

“What the fuck, Si?” I ask.

He points at his monitor. His shoulders are heaving from the exertion, his face puce in anger. At first, all I see is a pink smear of brain material sliding down it, but then I understand fully. Simon’s conditional formatting has gone to fuck.

The supervisor walks in. “What the fuck, Si?”

“Conditional formatting,” Derek, Laura and I say in unison.

The boss takes off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Simon,” he says. “I know just how much of a complete cunt Excel is. I get it. I really do. But the customers keep getting arsey about our conduct, and this is going to be a complete cunt to sort out.”

“Can’t we make it look like an accident?” I suggest. I am reminded of the time Derek got pushed to his limits in the post room. The dickhead clerk just wouldn’t give him his fucking parcel, which Derek needed to continue with his work. In the end, we managed to convince the higher-ups that that dickhead had been so tired of his miserable life he’d ended it all with a letter opener and a franking machine. “She tripped over the wire.”

In our line of work, we’re fairly familiar with the horrible catastrophes that can befall people who don’t adequately follow advice about safety with electronics.

“Could work,” the boss says. “But listen, boys. We’ve got to try and control our tempers. We’re not going to be able use that excuse forever. It’s already a bit hot after Tony blinded that bitch in the canteen who tried to serve him fish fingers.”

A moment of quiet contemplation. We all completely understand what happened to Tony. He was hungry, and missed all the good food because he was stuck on the phone to a customer. He fucking hates fish fingers. What else was he meant to do?

“Whatever. We’ll give it a go,” says our supervisor. “Si, I hope I can cover your arse. Don’t fucking do this again, OK?”

After this harsh dressing down, Simon looks like a deflated balloon with tragic little sad-dog eyes. It’s kind of pathetic, but I sympathise. We’ve all done shit like this before and usually we don’t get chewed out like this. The supervisor leaves, looking pleased with himself. Again, I get where he’s coming from. He’s the one who has to field all the shit.

Derek steps over the bloodied corpse on the floor and pats Simon on the arm.

“It’s OK, mate. You’re tired. Tell you what, you go home and we’ll finish up for you.”

Life comes back into Simon’s eyes. “Thanks.”

“We’re all behind you, mate,” I add.

It’s a tough job, ours, and we get far too much shit when we fuck up. Could you do it?

This is how seriously the police take rape

I will confess to having a very low opinion of the police’s ability to handle rape cases, having written several times before on the matter. Even I was surprised, though, by this story. It shows things are even worse than I thought.

A second detective working in the Met Police’s Sapphire unit–a specialist unit for rape cases–has been arrested for falsifying documents in order to get rape investigations shelved. The recently-arrested officer was involved in over sixty cases, and in almost two thirds of them, he claimed the investigation was over. The other officer falsified statements and reports, and wrote to survivors telling them their investigations had stopped, even though this had not happened.

It’s a disgusting business. The people who sought help through official channels–who are already in a minority of rape survivors–have been thoroughly let down by some men covering the backs of rapists and working hard to preserve rape culture through any means possible.

This goes beyond not taking rape allegations seriously, which is enough of a problem in and of itself: the Sapphire unit also managed to miss at least two serial rapists through sheer negligence and not investigating properly.

Even the police have realised they might have a bit of a problem. They have said they have had their “Macpherson moment”–a reference to the Macpherson investigation into police racism following the Stephen Lawrence case. They promise to tighten up supervision and sack any officers who aren’t up to scratch. We all know the impact of Macpherson: police racism totally stopped overnight and they got better and certainly never racially abused anyone ever again. I have very little faith in the police’s ability to mend this and make it right.

So what can be done? Ultimately, the system needs to transform. Rape culture is why allegations are not taken seriously, and some turn to actively foiling rape investigations. It is rape culture–every tiny aspect of it, not just the ones we can see–that needs to go, not a few “bad apple” policemen so the Met can pretend they have done something.

Update: Gherkingirl has written a very powerful (though triggering) post about her experience of negligence and forgery from Sapphire. Her bravery and persistence has led to positive change and this story going public, though it’s sad that this ever had to happen to her in the first place.

Reasons not to trust police witnesses (that aren’t because they’re bastards)

It is a feature of the legal system that an arresting officer will often end up testifying in the court case. It is also a feature in our legal system that the police don’t always tell, as they are supposed to, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I have seen court cases wherein police evidence has suggested the defendant has somehow managed to magically be in two places at once, charging a police line from both ends while simultaneously fabricating a complicated full face and head garment. I have seen court cases where video evidence has revealed that rather than assaulting a police officer, the defendant was assaulted by police officers.

The usual explanation put forward for these “minor inconsistencies” is that the police are a bunch of corrupt, vile pigs. While this may be true, science suggests that they can’t help but misremember.

In a study entitled Witnesses in action: the effect of physical exertion on recall and recognition [paywalled, alas], police officers were tested for their ability to recall details following physical exertion, similar to the sort of activity that a copper might encounter while arresting someone. In short, their ability to remember what happened or recognise a suspect was sorely diminished.

The participants were 52 experienced police officers, mostly male (which reflects the make up of the police force). Half of the participants were asked to beat up a big heavy bag of water–a slightly unnatural task, but presumably the university ethics panel refused to allow the researchers to use students as beating material. After this task, all of the participants went to raid the trailer of an imaginary “known criminal”, where they encountered a living room full of weapons, and an angry stooge yelling at them.

The police officers who had beaten up water recalled significantly–hugely–less about the stooge than those who had not exerted themselves. The exerted participants often could not identify their suspect from a line up.

Now, while this task is somewhat unnatural, it certainly casts damning doubt on the credibility of police evidence: arrests tend to happen after the arresting officer has been physically exerted in some way, and often in a rather aggressive fashion. Why, then, would the police lie in court rather than say “I don’t remember”?

Again, they might just be a bunch of filthy, corrupt pigs, but there may be a more benign reason for police officers saying something that is diametrically opposed to the realms of plausibility. A classic psychology study from the seventies can shed light on this. Loftus and Palmer studied the effects of leading questions, and found that it was very easy to manipulate participants’ memories of a situation by simple phrasing of questions. On watching videos of traffic accidents, participants could be lead to estimate a far greater speed for the accidents if the question involved the word “smashed” rather than “contacted”, and recalled seeing broken glass where there was none depending on the wording of another question.

If police officers have a fuzzy enough memory of a situation, a lawyer asking just the right questions can persuade their minds to fill in the blanks and begin remembering things that did not happen.

The author of the exertion study summarises her research by saying:

“The legal system puts a great deal of emphasis on witness accounts, particularly those of professional witnesses like police officers.  Investigators and courts need to understand that an officer who cannot provide details about an encounter where physical exertion has played a role is not necessarily being deceptive or uncooperative.  An officer’s memory errors or omissions after an intense physical struggle should not unjustly affect his or her credibility.”

I disagree. This absolutely should affect their credibility. We need not necessarily feel angry at the police, but every judge, magistrate and potential juror in the country ought to know that the police account–with its added weight of credibility as it comes from a person with higher social status–is likely to be flawed and possibly outright untrue.

As for those who have found themselves on the wrong end of police untruths in court, is it still worth suing the officers when it may not be their fault? Absolutely. This sends a clear message that if the officer does not remember something they should say so in court. They should be aware of the shortcomings of their own memory, rather than this being used as a tool for implicating people in crime.

The system has capitalised upon these quirks and inconsistencies in human memory for too long. This needs to end.

 

Rape, the police and political point-scoring

Obnoxious reality TV star and Lib Dem Brian Paddick has done something interesting. Hot on the heels of his whistle-blowing about being asked by the Met to water down a report about rape, more revelations have emerged.

From years of experience in the Met, Paddick has identified certain problems–problems with which regular readers of this blog will certainly be familiar. Basically, the police don’t give a shit about rape. They often assume that the survivor is lying, they try to deny a crime happened for the good of their statistics, they subscribe to rape culture myths, and they just don’t get it. From his interview, Paddick seems to understand the seriousness of rape, and the set of attitudes in the police and broader society which allow rape to happen. It really is quite gratifying to see a public figure discussing these issues openly, and highlighting suggestions for how this can change.

Paddick’s suggestions are very sensible, involving a radical rethink in the way police and other parts of the system treat survivors. He also has ideas for poster campaigns targeted at dispelling rape myths, and offers support to advocacy groups. All in all, it looks bloody good, and it feels like a tiny little victory for feminism to see these issues being put onto the public agenda.

There’s always a but, though. There’s always a sneaky little catch, the barely perceptible string which rather spoils the whole thing.

Brian Paddick is running for Mayor of London. All of what he is saying forms part of his campaign. The criticism of the police only comes now Paddick is safely out of the institution, and control of it lies in the hands of a rival political party. His speaking out serves to discredit his opposition while bidding to win the votes of rape survivors and those who fear it one day happening to them. His suggestions–ideas put forward by feminists and advocacy groups for years–are not framed as things that should be done as a matter of utmost importance, but, rather, as campaign promises.

Paddick probably believes everything that he is saying to be right, and that’s because he is talking sense here. It is just that the stench of politicking rather sullies the whole thing. It becomes a matter of a better approach to rape being useful rather than being the right thing to do. Rape is a deeply traumatic yet horrifyingly commonplace event, and it should be fought against because it is a travesty that this happens, rather than because it might gain Brian Paddick a few more votes.

It is a form of blackmail, to use this as an election promise, particularly when it comes from a member of a party who are not exactly famed for holding to their election promises. All that he has proposed is things that should be happening anyway, not only as a component in a campaign. We don’t need to put a cross in a box in the vain hope that some bloke will possibly try to tweak the system a little bit. With his connections and platform, Paddick can serve as a useful ally, but ultimately the battle is ours.

It is we who need to fight rape culture where we see it. It is we who need to decide whether the state can ever be an adequate source of support for survivors and whether it can ever truly help right the wrongs that have been done. It is we who need to work towards building a safer world.

Rape is not a party political issue.

Rape and “no crimes”: this is a fucking travesty

Trigger warning for discussion of rape

A while back, I wrote about how for many women, not reporting a rape to the police can seem like the best possible option. Information which has arisen in the last week has changed nothing in this thesis: if anything, it is worse than I had previously thought.

A report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorates of the Constabulary and the Crown Prosecution Service on rape investigations has found some pretty worrying facts, but also some good news. More survivors feel able to report rapes to the police, and the police response has improved. On the other hand, police are failing to identify patterns of repeat offences and were using intelligence poorly.

Most worrying of all, though, is the incidence of “no crimes”. According to guidelines, a no crime should be:

Where following the report of an incident, which has subsequently been recorded as a crime, additional verifiable information is available which determines that no notifiable crime has been committed.

The two crucial constructs here are that the evidence the crime did not happen can be proven, and that whatever happened was not a crime. In rape cases, this sounds like it might be pretty difficult to prove, yet the report found that 12% of reported rapes were consigned to the no crime pile. These statistics often involve women withdrawing their complaint, which can be seen in this FOI request to South Yorkshire Police. There are obvious problems with this approach, and these are so apparent that even the police have noticed this:

In reality a rape that has been reported and then recorded as a crime, should only be “no crimed” if for example, the victim states that the crime did not occur. Even in these circumstances it should be anticipated that there would be further verifiable information available to support this, because our experience shows that victims may withdraw allegations because they cannot face the criminal justice process. In other words if there is any doubt the crime remains recorded. There is a key difference between a victim who retracts their allegation and one who withdraws from the investigative process.

Given the high prevalence of no crimes, it seems that the verification that no crime occurred is not being followed through adequately. In some forces, it was found that only 40% of the no crime decisions were actually correct.

This is a fucking travesty. Thousands of people who have shown the courage to enter the agonising process of rape reporting are being let down, and their complaints dismissed away to nothing. When even the police think it is a problem, it is a serious problem indeed. This has very serious implications. For the survivor, this must be a thoroughly horrific experience: he or she will be unable to access the support provided by the system, and will experience doubt and guilt over what has happened. More broadly, it will make it harder to identify repeat rapists if a crime is not investigated or recorded.

It gets worse. Former police officer, politician and rather irritating public figure Brian Paddick recently testified at the Leveson enquiry regarding his time in the Met. He said that he had been asked to “tone down the criticisms and water-down the recommendations” in a previous report on rape reporting and investigation. In the light of this, what has been identified in the recent report may well be downplaying the problem rather than reporting it accurately.

Certainly, in my reading of the report, it was difficult to find some crucial data. For example, the statistic that some police forces have very low levels of correctly no criming rape allegations was fairly well-hidden and no attention was drawn to it. The problem of burying bad news remains in a desperate attempt to maintain a good reputation.

This PR exercise has major ramifications and can ultimately only make things worse, rather than better. Rather than frantically flapping around to cover their arses, the police need to admit honestly to their failings to create real solutions. Trust in the police is low. Most rape survivors do not report their rapes to an institution that should, theoretically, be on their side and help amend what has happened to them. This is not happening: it is merely an illusion of aid.

People are being failed due to severe problems which may be worse than imagined. Lives may be destroyed. This needs to change.

The cops can strip women in the streets.

Trigger warning for humiliation and forced undressing.

Sometimes, you see things which are almost too chilling to put into words.

In this video, a young woman protester wearing a tent as a costume is surrounded by police. We cannot see much of what happens; we see what appears to be a knife being passed along and the woman shouting “this is not consensual, don’t take my clothes off”. She is then left in her underwear, clearly distressed, sitting on the grass.

It is a genuinely horrifying scene. A woman is forcibly stripped and humiliated in public by people with more power than her. Most people who watch this video will surely be disgusted and appalled by such behaviour; it appears to be such flagrant abuse.

Unfortunately, we live in a culture where victims of such abuse are blamed for what happened to them. People are frightened of the notion that the police are not exactly a benevolent protective force, people are frightened that they might find themselves victims of humiliation or abuse. And so the circus of victim-blaming for this woman began.

A local news article is careful to point out that the police asked her politely to undress first. This is hardly surprising coming from a Murdoch-owned rag, yet it is mild compared to the bile that came from self-professed feminists. Apparently she should have worn more than just underwear under her costume. Apparently she was “entrapping police”. The poor police cannot be to blame for forcibly stripping a woman in public.

No. What the police are doing here is utterly unacceptable. Any feminist should understand that it is never acceptable for some powerful people to strip a woman in public. Any supporter of the police should know that police guidelines involve them not making people strip in public. There is no justification for this whatsoever. It’s abuse, plain and simple.

I don’t want to live in a world where the police can forcibly tear my clothes of if they think my outfit is a bit silly. I don’t want to live in a world where people seek to justify that in any way.

This is wrong, thoroughly wrong. It must never happen again.
__

Thanks to @alxsm for linking me to the story and @Orbsan for the local news article.

Are all coppers bastards?

I know a song
And it isn’t very long
It goes
All Coppers Are Bastards!

-Traditional protest song

ACAB. It doesn’t mean Always Carry A Bible, which explains why many who have the letters tattooed across their knuckles do not have any religious texts about their person.

Some people hate the police. Really fucking hate the police, usually following a negative experience like a beating, repeated racially motivated stop-and-searches or other violations of human rights. Others mistrust the police thoroughly, feeling as though it might be better not to get the police involved. Many more have a neutral opinion to law enforcement, would call the cops after a mugging but otherwise displaying indifference. Some even love the police. Usually it’s people from the first group who believe that all coppers are bastards.

All of these evaluations of the police, though, are based on anecdote and experience. A good experience with the police will lead to a higher personal evaluation of the police, a bad experience the opposite.

Where does the truth lie? Are all coppers bastards?

It is time to do some science.

The police personality

The first question we need to ask ourselves is, is “being a bastard” a personality trait? There are certainly some kinds of personality which seem obnoxious and unpleasant, such as right-wing authoritarianism or the “dark triad”, a personality type which includes narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Fortunately for us, there’s no evidence to suggest that police tend to be narcissistic, Machiavellian psychopaths or right-wing authoritarians, although there certainly do seem to be some personality traits which are common to police.

The police are subjected to tests in the “interview”, and studying the difference between those who make the cut and those who do not can provide insight into the police personality. In one comparison, it was found that successful applicants to join the police were more dominant, more independent, more intelligent, more masculine and more empathic than the unsuccessful applicants. Presumably, the unsuccessful applicants went on to become bailiffs.

A problem with this method is that those who apply to join the police may well be different to the general population. To better see if there is a “police personality”, it may be prudent to compare police to the non-porcine population. In such comparisons, police emerge as more conservative, “tough-minded” and extraverted than general population norms (matched to the police sample by socio-economic status, the statistical way of describing class). One study compared new recruits, police with less than two years of experience and the general population. Both groups of police were found to be more conservative and authoritarian than the general population, although spending time in the police seemed to lower levels of conservatism and authoritarianism. However, time spent in the police also led to a more intolerant view of immigration and more support for the death penalty: the authors concluded that the police attracts people who are conservative and authoritarian and while training has a temporary “liberalising effect”, service results in greater levels of racial intolerance.

There are several issues with police personality research. Sample sizes in studies are often fairly small, and it is difficult to choose a representative comparison group. Furthermore, it is difficult to tease out whether personality differences are a product of an internal trait or socialisation within the police. Certainly, the shifts in test measurements over time would suggest some effect of being in the police. If all coppers are bastards, it may be a product of their social environment rather than being immutable bastards all along.

Police culture

Several attempts have been made to study the “culture” in which police are socialised: in other words, police norms and what police as a group believe to be acceptable behaviour and beliefs. In synthesising insights from psychology, sociology and anthropology, it appears that police culture values an “us and them” mentality; an ethos which values bravery, autonomy and secrecy; and authoritarianism. Furthermore, there is a strong sense of hierarchy among police: they respect taking orders from their superiors. These cultural aspects may alienate them from the rest of the population, thus enforcing their own social norms.

Testing the affects of police culture is a difficult task: it is tough to investigate something so comprehensive empirically. One study investigated whether police brutality was related to police social norms. This was done by a survey methodology: police officers were asked questions about how severe they thought deviant behaviour such as corruption (in the form of accepting gifts), excessive force and theft to be. They were also asked how serious they believed their peers to think these behaviours. Of the three types of deviant behaviour, corruption was thought to be least serious, while theft was thought more serious than excessive force. The perceived opinions of their peers was an important predictor: police officers who believed their colleagues thought excessive force not serious were significantly more likely to have been complained about by the public. This suggests that the opinions of fellow police is important: in an environment where violence is thought to be acceptable, police may be more violent. A flaw in this study is its self-reported nature. A better test would be to use a network approach and identify whether more violent police socialise more with other violent police.

Culturally, acceptance of the Human Rights Act is low among police. In a qualitative interview study, it was found that since the introduction of the HRA, there has been little raised awareness of human rights. In fact, what the legislation became was a kind of bureaucratic paperwork which is used by officers to justify and legitimise their existing practices: the authors conclude it is used as a way of “protecting officers from criticism and blame”. As police culture values secrecy, this is hardly surprising.

One very important aspect of police culture is that police wear a uniform. A uniform sets the police aside from everyone else: it is hardly normal to wander round in a tit-shaped hat and a high-vis stab-proof vest, after all. This serves to increase isolation of the police from everyone else and may serve to reinforce the culture they have created. The uniform itself produces interesting psychological effects: it can create a strong sense of identity which can lead to negative effects discussed in the next section. The colour of the uniform, trivial as it may seem, also matters. Most police wear dark colours–the Met wear black. The problem with black uniforms is that they lead to aggression. No, really. One study identified a clear link between aggression and sports teams wearing black, which has clear implications for the kind of policing we may see. One wonders, then, whether the high-visibility vests and jaunty powder blue baseball caps we see on the Territorial Support Group in crowd situations are actually a measure to stop them from beating the fuck out of people indiscriminately.

The scary 60s social psychology effects

 The 60s was an interesting decade for psychology: social psychology had taken off, and ethics boards had not yet clamped down on doing really disturbing research. One of the most famous of these is the Stanford Prison Experiment. In this study, twelve participants were randomly allocated the role of prisoners, and another twelve allocated to playing guards. The guards were given khaki uniforms and mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact. They also wore wooden batons, which they were not allowed to use on the prisoners–they were just props. The prisoners were dressed in smocks and stocking caps to cover their hair. After a mock arrest, the prisoners were interned in the basement of a university building. The guards were instructed they were not allowed to physically harm the prisoners. Everyone was psychologically healthy when the study began.

Despite all of these safeguards, it went to shit pretty quickly. The guards began using psychological methods of torture, removing prisoners’ mattresses, forcing them to repeat their prisoner numbers over and over, refusing to allow prisoners to use the toilet or empty the toilet-bucket, and punishing prisoners with removing their clothes. A prison riot broke out on the second night. After six days, the experiment was called off. Some of the guards expressed disappointment at this: they were enjoying themselves.

This shocking study demonstrates an effect called deindividuation: the loss of a sense of personal identity in a crowd or role-play. In this situation, merely putting on a uniform and being given power led to horrifying instances of sadism. The implications of this for the police are terrifying.

Deindividuation often appears to lead to very negative psychological effects, as demonstrated in a recent Derren Brown experiment, The Gameshow. Derren gave the participants masks and the power to make decisions which would affect another person’s life. By the end of the hour, they had had this random person falsely accused, arrested, kidnapped and run over by a car. I would recommend watching the show: he gives a brilliant account of deindividuation. Of course, Derren Brown being Derren Brown, he is somewhat misleading–he uses another phenomenon on top of deindividuation, and eggs the crowd on. The effect of obedience can have consequences as dire as deindividuation.

Police forces have a hierarchical structure: orders come down from above. At our most wishful thinking, we tend to hope that the police are moral human beings who will disobey the orders given if these orders are horrific. Stanley Milgram believed something similar–that people, after the Second World War, would no longer “just follow orders”. He designed an experiment to test this.

In the Milgram experiment, there was one participant and two stooges. The participant was told they were participating in a memory test. One stooge played their learner, the other was the researcher. Every time the learner got a question wrong, the participant was told to give them an electric shock. Each time, the shock was of a greater voltage. The learner would scream, and eventually go silent. The participants, when they wavered, were prompted to give another electric shock by the researcher.

65% of participants delivered the highest level of electric shock, 450 volts. This was delivered after the learner had gone silent, and was beyond lethal. Our good friend Derren Brown demonstrates the phenomenon with none of his typical misdirection. This is actually how it happens.

The capacity to “just follow orders” is within most of us. When combined with the orders the police may receive, this is frightening.

So, are all coppers bastards?

Some police officers may be lovely people. They might be the nicest person in the world when off-duty. While at work and in their uniform, though, they are unlikely to be on your side. Combine a culture which can legitimise and reinforce violence with racial intolerance and the basic human capacity to become sadistic in a uniform and obey horrific orders, and a terrifying picture emerges. Can we trust a police officer on duty? Probably not. The capacity for being a bastard is in all of us, and the job brings it out in coppers.

When not reporting a rape seems like a sensible option

Trigger warning for rape and systemic abuse of rape survivors

Some years ago, I was raped. I never reported it.

I am not alone: the vast majority of rapes are not reported to the police. Some estimates suggest up to 95% of rapes are unreported. The thing is, a lot of the time, not reporting a rape seems like a sensible option.

When a woman reports a rape, forensic evidence is gathered using a rape kit. This procedure is highly invasive, consisting of a full, intimate physical examination and sampling from parts of the body which have only recently been violated. It is highly understandable that many survivors would not want to subject themselves to this intrusive procedure following a traumatic experience. There is also questioning, sometimes with an insensitive or disbelieving tone from the police. Between half to two thirds of rape cases never make it past investigation, and there is a paltry 6.5% conviction rate. A convicted rapist will serve an average of eight years in prison.

Then there are horrifying stories like this. Layla Ibrahim was attacked and raped by two men. She was courageous enough to report this to the police, even though the police had a track record of repeatedly arresting her twelve year old brother and failing her sister after a beating, due to being a mixed-race family in a predominately white area. Despite overwhelming forensic evidence, the police chose not to believe Layla. She was sent to prison for three years.

This did not happen in Iran or Sudan. This did not happen many years ago. This happened last year in the UK.

It is yet another story of rape culture. It differs from others in magnitude, not substance. We live in a world where survivors of rape are not believed.

Rape culture falsely differentiates between “serious rape” and other rapes. This dichotomy alone is enough to ensure that many rapes are not reported. I did not report my rape because rape culture had taught me that what happened to me was not rape. So many women I know have had a similar experience.

When a woman does identify that she has been raped, she faces disbelief from others. This is particularly true if she has been raped by someone powerful: the treatment of the women who accused Julian Assange and Dominique Strauss-Kahn of rape are testament to this. It is also true if she has been wearing “the wrong” sort of clothes, or being “the wrong colour”, or behaving in a way that rape culture dictates is a “definite sexual invitation“.

Layla Ibrahim was accused of “wasting police time” with reporting her rape. Meanwhile, 450 London detectives have been pulled from their usual work to go over CCTV footage of rioters with a view to prosecute them. What, here, is more of a waste of police time? Seeking justice for a person brave enough to be in the minority of people who report rape, or sending a kid to prison for nicking a pair of trainers?

Not reporting a rape seems to be the best possible option in a culture which allows rape, sometimes encouraging it. Not reporting a rape seems to be the best possible option in a broken justice system where barely any survivors see justice served. Not reporting a rape seems like the best possible option where the survivor can be sent to prison while the rapists walk free.

What, then, can be done for rape survivors seeking justice?

In her fantastic book Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, Inga Muscio proposes a solution: Cuntlovin’ Public Retaliation:

The basic premise of C.P.R. is publicly humiliating rapists. Since rapists count on a woman’s shame and silence to keep them on the streets, it seems to me an undue amount of attention focused on rapists would seriously counter this assumption.

C.P.R. can be employed when a woman is sure of her attacker’s identity. Since most attacks are not perpetrated by strangers, this is a highly relevant factor.

There is safety and power in numbers.

A group of two hundred women walking into the place of employment of a known rapist would have an effect. If each of these women were in possession of a dozen rotting eggs which were deposited on the rapist’s person, the rapist might well come to the conclusion that he had committed a very unpopular act, one which was not tolerated by the community. If a rapist had to walk through a crowd of angry, stating, silent or quietly and deadly chanting women to get to his car in the grocery store parking lot, he might feel pretty uncomfortable.

This technique would require a vast degree of solidarity among women and allies. Were it to happen, though, it would feel a damn sight more like justice than the current shambolic system.

The risk to survivors is considerably lower in Muscio’s admirable proposition. Here, they do not risk further invasion with no justice served. They do not risk imprisonment for daring to report a rape to a morally bankrupt police force. They do not become passive pawns in a game of patriarchal power. It is justice for survivors, by survivors.

Muscio stresses non-violence, and I thoroughly agree. Violence is not a solution to violence. Showing a rapist that such behaviour is thoroughly intolerable, reminding him that his behaviour is thoroughly unacceptable, through a supportive network of the community–that is more like what justice looks like.

Were this to happen, rape culture would topple. For this to happen, we need to fight rape culture. Then, perhaps, we will see true justice.

Evidence-based public order policing: The Met are Doing It Wrong.

The reaction to the riots has been what can kindest be described as knee-jerk, though “absolutely bloody ridiculous and terrifyingly driven by a desire for revenge” is more apt. The police have now been given the power to use what are essentially lethal, dangerous weapons against crowds. Morally this is completely wrong. It is also likely to be ineffective, if not actively making things worse.

The thing is, the standard police approach to policing crowds is already completely wrong. I have been on a lot of protests and have been unlucky enough to end up kettled twice. On neither of those occasions did the kettles cool everything down and quell anger: quite the opposite happened. It’s not fun to have to endure a debate with oneself about whether to piss on the statue of Churchill or the statue of Lloyd George (in the end, I went for sneaky option C, and fashioned a toilet cubicle from metal fencing and tarpaulin. When I got out, there was a queue for the ersatz facilities). While I built, all around me people took poles and smashed in the windows of the Treasury. Horses charged, batons rained down on skulls and the people fought back.

There is evidence behind the idea that crowd control and public order policing is taking completely the wrong approach. This report provides theory, evidence and recommendations, and I would thoroughly recommend you read the whole thing.

Public order policing subscribes to a theory of crowd psychology that has very little evidence behind it. It assumes that once a sufficient number of people are assembled, they will become irrational and easily open to agitation. Crowds, by this theory, are dangerous, a hive mind which must be controlled: “the crowd is a barbarian”. Police are trained in this model, and taught to disperse or contain crowds where they form. This approach is demonstrably ineffective, and as supported by evidence as classic crowd psychology itself.

A better approach to describing crowd psychology is the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM). This theory has roots in Social Identity Theory and Social Categorisation Theory: our behaviour is influenced by identification as a member of a group and roles we take on. We divide the world into “us” and “them”. In a crowd situation, this becomes “police” and “protesters” or “football fans” or “people who fucking hate the police”. As a member of a crowd, one identifies with this group. The police are “outsiders”. When police use indiscriminate, coercive tactics such as baton charges or kettling, the crowd will start to see itself and everyone else in the crowd as posing very little threat, and the police use of force as illegitimate. This leads to a strengthening: the crowd as “us”, the police as “them”. This can empower people to confront the police in a way they would not have done had they been left to their own devices. This can escalate to rioting, caused, inadvertently, by the very tactics the police are using to avert rioting.

The us-and-them mentality extends to the police themselves. The police tend to view crowds as a homogenous, dangerous mass that requires controlling, partly as an effect of their training, but partly as an effect of their social identity as a police officer. A friend of mine, while kettled, once ended up in conversation with a police officer. She asked to get out. “I’m sorry,” he said, “you’re all the same to us. It could have been you who graffitied Nelson’s Column.”

With the weight of evidence suggesting classic police tactics make things worse rather than better, is is clear that police tactics need to change. Fortunately, there is a much better way of policing. It involves taking a graded approach, and, crucially, treating people as individuals rather than members of a crowd. There are four phases to this approach:

  1. Understanding the crowd and their motivations. Understand the culture and the context. Communicate in advance what is and is not acceptable.
  2. On the day, visibility of the police should initially be low-impact: they should move in pairs, and wear standard uniforms rather than riot gear. No helmets, shields, or visible batons. They should interact with the crowd positively: smiling and adopting a friendly posture, being helpful with directions when they can. Communication is key.
  3. If trouble arises, target only the trouble. It is made clear in the report that this does not mean arresting “known” people, the go-to technique for public order policing. Instead, it means targeting those who are causing the trouble, and only those. Communication, once again, is crucial. No acting against the whole crowd.
  4. If there is still a problem and a riot breaks out, go back to usual police tactics of beating up everyone.

Three interesting things emerge from where this approach is used in practice. First of all, self-policing tends to start happening: members of the crowd will be less likely to accept violent behaviour. Secondly, the police are perceived as far more legitimate: the “all coppers are bastards” effect dissipates. Finally, and most importantly, the situations do not escalate. When the approach was tested in Euro2004, in zones where police were using the approach, the riot gear never came out, and only one England fan out of 150 000 present was arrested. The approach, it seems, averts riots.

There are two things in the report that bother me. First, and most importantly, is the assertion in the report that using this approach will facilitate intelligence gathering. As a believer in the right to privacy, I am not particularly comfortable with this. Secondly, as an anarchist, I do not really believe in the necessity of the police in the first place. This report, though, shows they are not hugely necessary at a mass gathering: it is gratifying to see evidence that, when left alone, a crowd will tend to self-organise and decide on non-violence: this is one of the reasons I am so annoyed to see rioting described as anarchy: anarchy is the state of order naturally emerging, and people working together.

Police tactics for crowd control, as currently used, are provocative. Bringing in bigger, more dangerous weapons which will hit anyone indiscriminately will not make anything any better. If anything, it will escalate the situation, provoking a war between the police and anyone who is not the police.

It is, of course, the government’s traditional approach to evidence. They ignore it at the expense of pursuing populist political point-scoring. It will endanger us all.