freeinfidel

London’s Metropolitan Police may soon be operating from large, fortress-style bases to which the public will have no access.
While community support officers may be based in local shop-type premises, where the rest of us will be allowed to enter, the bulk for the Met’s forces will be housed in centralised ‘warehouses’, firmly closed to the public but possibly including jail cells.

This is a dangerous move. Police forces, and the Met in particular, are vulnerable to a kind of elitist, isolationist mindset that can become a sort of siege mentality at times.

Within the force, those officers engaged in community work are often seen as ’soft’, or not doing ‘real’ policing. The Met is riddled with an atavistic, macho self-image that sees real policing involving hard men doing tough things. And this leads to the other form of isolationism - the habit of police officers to see the world divided into ‘us’ and ‘them’.

The ‘us’ side is the force itself, comprised of specially trained people doing a tough job for the benefit of society. Actually, I have no argument with that description. The problem is that it leads to a self-image that many police officers seem to hold in which they are an elite, deserving of special privileges (which includes being above the law at times). That’s why police forces will always grab any additional powers they can, regardless of the corrosive effect on civil liberties and society in general. They feel they deserve them because of the difficulties of their job. They fail to understand that, while we may agree that their job is difficult, even impossible at times, society is not run for the benefit of the police. What’s good for the forces of law and order is not automatically good for society. That kind of thinking leads directly to a police state.

This separatist thinking also means they see the rest of society - ‘them’ - as second-class, as a problem to be dealt with. We are all suspects because we are not of their group. We are the ‘other’.

Each London borough has an Asset Management Plan (AMP) that lays out the facilities needed by their police forces. It seems that many, if not all, will adopt these police fortresses, these Green Zones from which forces will issue to deal with the local populace. If this happens, the police will be further removed from society, will be viewing it from the outside. This can’t be good.

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