#110 Advice To A Daughter Lamenting Her Late Father, Keith Lamont Scott

September 25, 2016

Occasions when your father saw the rising in your eyes

Watched you coming in to the light.

Reading it all like any canny kid

Caught him catching you coming up,

Coming on, coming into it

And the impression this made on you both.

Such are the contours; so is life handed on.

Maybe slower this year after his traumatic brain injury (car crash).

Slower and perhaps less often.

And all the while you’ve been raising your game:

Higher, faster, further.

Still, you and he; sometimes the stillness.

Camera’s in free-fall – you’re feeding to Facebook live.

Frenzy of shouting, screaming, shrieking

Did you ever have stand-up rows like this?

But here there’s no side to take

’Bout boys or clothes or staying out late

Only your shock and awe, hearing your father is no more –

No more than a parcel of flesh and as many police bullets

As failed to find their way out of his fat, black body.

Take all the noise you need for now, any number of decibels

To shield you from the quiet of the grave.

Only recall and return one day to the still of the light,

And the lively look in a father’s eyes, upon his daughter bright.

#109 Clowning Around In Camden Town

September 18, 2016

Phone video footage is circulating of an altercation between police and a young black male car driver in North London.

It’s ridiculous – the fresh-faced police officer acting like a juvenile delinquent, except the term itself’ s too old for his tender years.

First pulling at the car window then hitting it; stepping back screeching before taking his truncheon to the windscreen.

A dozen blows to smash about a quarter of the screen; a tantrum that shocks because it’s bathetic.

And all because the kid behind the wheel won’t get out of the car; ‘kid’ because the 25-year-old driver who’s locked in and refusing to come out, still contrives to speak youth so the grown-ups can’t comfortably understand.

He needn’t have bothered. On this showing, the adult world just isn’t there to hear him.

Never mind misread him.

#108 Thinking Behind Mindless Killing

September 17, 2016

The Catholic church around the corner is dedicated to a Portuguese peasant girl whose visions of the Virgin Mary prompted the following declaration of her faith:

My God, I believe, I adore, I hope, and I love you. I ask pardon for those who do not believe, do not adore, do not hope and do not love you.

These words are addressed not only to God himself, nor are they simply an intercession on behalf of those who lack faith in him; the girl’s prayer is also a personal statement of her self-belief.

Our Father who art no more nor ever was.

They would say that, wouldn’t they? I mean the teenagers who’ve been hanging round The Stow, the post-war shopping precinct in Harlow, chalking up plentiful police reports of anti-social behaviour (month after month, and for so long the original cohort must have moved on and grown up by now).

Surely they would say something like this, if disposed to speak of the faith and the self-belief that’s been disposed of (behind their backs, without them knowing, despite them trying to appear all-knowing all the time).

Are you kidding? Is this a gang of juvenile Kierkegaards, struggling for belief in a God of Uncertainty. Nothing could be further from theological discourse than the killing of 40-year-old Polish factory worker, Arkadiusz ‘Arek’ Jozwik, who died in hospital two days after he went out for takeaway pizza….and took a blow to the head instead. The only Sorens are the ones who were arrested.

Or, maybe that’s how they vented it – their aggravated sense of loss, and hating themselves for failing to locate, locate, locate anything other than their own paltry existence.

Chunky chap, low centre of gravity – can’t have been a complete pushover. Four years in the meat factory since he came over from Poland, whereas you’re not sure you’d last four minutes before running a mile. read more

#102 Memo To An American Police Officer

August 27, 2016

Was there a moment of shock when it came to you?

A sharp intake, the rasping breath of realisation?

Or simply relief at surviving your rookie shifts,

Then boredom and danger cocktailed into queasy routine.

So you wanted to be a police officer.

Protect and serve; defend and provide for.

If it’s not changing the world, you said to yourself,

At least I’ll be putting the bad guys away.

Instead all you Blues were recruited to the war on drugs.

In designated neighbourhoods your new assignment is to enter

As many perps as possible into the judicial process, if only

For possession, leaving little time for traditional policing priorities

Such as catching killers. In these districts nine out of 10 killings

Now remain untried and unpunished, unless you count

The unlawful acts of recrimination which have all but replaced

The intervention of the state in the expectations of local people.

Of the three guys on the corner, you’re the only one

That ain’t got his own. Dealer knows his job. Users, too,

Have a particular role to play. But you’re the little lost boy

Whose dotted line went off in unexpected directions.

Within your ranks there’s a hard core who might have done it

Anyway, at any time. But the not knowing who you are,

Not exactly sure what or who you’re there for

Must have been a factor in some of your folks not knowing

How to react, therefore emptying the magazine as if that means

Rubbing out a few pages instead of tearing into the flesh and bone

Of a fellow human being. Who knows whether all those ID checks would have

Gone so badly wrong if the policeman’s lot had not been re-cast without telling him?

Tribune of the plebs

December 21, 2012

Gone is the goatee; now he flaunts his double chin like a badge of office. Roly Poly (Jon) Gaunty (Gaunt) boasts he’s ‘not thin on ideas.’ Look at me, I’m too busy speaking for the people to be fastidious about food intake. Former Sun columnist and Talksport ‘shock jock’, recently turned media trainer and PR consultant, this self-styled ‘populist’ has been working with Midlands branches of the Police Federation, voicing their opposition to government cuts. Gaunt’s clients include the Federation branch covering the Sutton Coldfield constituency of ‘plebgate’ MP, Andrew Mitchell. The patricians don’t like Gaunt or his commissioners in the lower ranks of the police service. Of course, David Cameron refused their invitation to ‘a Balti in Birmingham’ during the Conservative Party conference there (no ‘beer and [curry] sandwiches’). Of course, Gaunt is the epitome of cheese compared to Andrew Mitchell’s chalk-stripe elegance (‘epitome’ – etymology: Ancient Greek – being a word that Mitchell might use but Gaunt surely wouldn’t). Mitchell’s good bones mean that he really could be gaunt, in a way that round-faced Gaunty simply can’t be, ironically. The real irony is that the policemen’s preferred self-image, as projected and personified by their ‘populist’ PR, means it goes without saying – that very word, the extremely controversial term, which this particular patrician may never even have said.

Authority in Crisis (4)

October 27, 2012

Farewell then, Sir Norman (aged 56 and three-quarters) ‘So as George Dixon used to do – he used to sign off by giving a cheery smile and a salute – I’ll do that now and look forward to your questions’. Top cop’s right arm sweeps out so that the fingertips of his straightened hand can come back in and graze his eyebrow. In the YouTube clip, the camera closes on him holding the familiar gesture. Introducing an online Q&A session with the Bradford contingent of the Police and Communities Acting Together scheme (ePACT), which took place in 2011, West Yorkshire chief constable Sir Norman Bettison adopted the mannerisms of PC George Dixon, UK television’s first fictional policeman. Sir Norman took us back to his own boyhood, in the days of chip butties and cup cakes for Saturday tea, when, pre-Dr Who,Dixon of Dock Green was the best thing on and there were only two channels to choose from, anyway. Despite receding hair and a mouth thinned out by 40 years of tight-lipped policing, the chief constable wants us to know he’s the same Yorkshire lad who looked up to George Dixon from his parents’ through-lounge in Rotherham, and policing is not much changed neither. That flat accent (‘water’ rhymes with ‘matter’), as if Dixon himself had re-appeared in a Hovis advert. Boots on the streets, Dixon-Hovis insists, that’s what counts, same as always. Bettison, for it is he, means the size 9s of a cheery constable. But Yorkshire folk remember the jackboots of an occupying army during the miners’ strike of 1984-5, aka the English Civil War. Liverpool FC supporters won’t forget the same approach being applied to them at Hillsborough in April 1989, resulting in the death of 96 fans. They hardly need reminding that it was Bettison who led the police propaganda campaign in the wake of this disaster. But there will be no more salutes from Sir Norman. Earlier in the week he said ‘vale’ instead, and resigned his post with pension still intact. A local boy who made his way through the ranks – this chief petty officer has outlived his usefulness, along with his style of command. read more

Authority in Crisis (2)

October 15, 2012

Deborah Glass, Independent Police Complaints Commission Wide-eyed through rimless glasses, high-vaulted eyebrows drawn into a look of continual surprise. But the default expression – Shock! Horror! – of Deborah Glass, deputy-chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, is offset by the calm authority of her voice, as she reads a lengthy statement on the Commission’s new inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster of 1989. The biggest ever inquiry into police activity. Begin by reviewing 450 000 pages of documentation. Precise, deliberate diction of someone accustomed to high stakes: Glass worked in Zurich as an investment banker, before becoming a financial regulator, and, latterly, police complaints commissioner. Occasionally the sandpaper sound of her Australian upbringing (Monash U, LLB 1982, couldn’t wait to get away from her first job as a solicitor in Melbourne), but hardly enough even to call it a twang. Earrings and a pearl necklace above an oddly informal white top (bunching up beneath her linen jacket, more T-shirt than blouse). Fine hair (needs volume) and a wonky parting; but the heavy metal coiffure favoured by many professional women, would only have done her a disservice. Here, we are told, and we can see and hear it for ourselves, is human frailty tempered by due process. A personal, personable metaphor for the painstaking work of the IPCC, allegedly.

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