Explain this to me. Why is it that a gathering of mostly white working-class men protesting about a rape is met by a line of menacing riot cops, and yet a gathering of primarily non-white youths running riot on a high street is given the kid-glove treatment? Following the events in Epsom last night, this query should be on everyone’s lips.
Tooled-up riot officers formed a battleline against the angry men
The scenes in Epsom, Surrey were extraordinary. In response to reports of a rape, a large crowd gathered to express their fury. A local woman reported being stalked by several men after leaving a nightclub before being subjected to a sickening assault outside Epsom Methodist Church. Surrey Police say they do not have “sufficient information” to release a description of the suspects.
It was this that piqued the anger of locals. Many fear information is being withheld. Some no doubt suspect it was migrants who carried out the attack and the cops are being cagey. Of course we have no idea as to the identity of the suspects. They may well be local men. Yet the suspicions of the crowd are understandable, given officialdom’s lethargy these past few years when it comes to revealing the immigration status and ethnic origins of perpetrators of sexual crimes.
The police response to the agitation in Epsom was swift and unforgiving. Tooled-up riot officers formed a battleline against the angry men. The high street was a sea of navy helmets. Their shields raised, their visors down, the police seemed to view the Epsom locals as the enemy within – a lowly mob that might explode with frenzied rage at any minute.
Contrast this with the scenes in Clapham just two weeks ago. Gangs of masked teens swarmed the high street there. They menaced shoppers. They nicked stuff. There were reports of emergency workers being assaulted. And as some observers noted, the riotous juveniles were mostly non-white. The police’s response to that mayhem? Well, they issued a dispersal order. And that was about it.
There were no riot cops. There were no lines of officers slowly impelling the delinquents off the streets. The approach seemed to be: “They’re just letting off steam. They’ll tire soon enough.” We need to talk about this, no? About these strikingly different police tactics where the chief consideration seems to be less what the crowd is doing than who they are.
People use the term “two-tier policing”. I’m starting to wonder if that’s a little too soft. It seems to me we face an even more troubling prospect: a new kind of political policing, the slow transformation of the police from a body charged with keeping the peace into a body whose prime role is to enforce the diktats of identity politics. Have our police forces become the armed wing of chattering-class ideology, the truncheon-wielding implementers of “progressive” moralism?
It feels undeniable now that the identity of protesters – and even more strikingly their class – impacts on how the police decide to deal with them. So white working-class men in Epsom are treated to a mini Battle of Orgreave, while the swarms of affluent socialists and cranky Islamists who spent nigh-on three years marching for the destruction of the Jewish state were given free rein.
Think about the oddness of this disparity. Sure, the men in Epsom got a little rowdy, but their demands were pretty reasonable: give us information. Meanwhile, on those soulless trudges against Israel there were frequent cries for violence against the Jewish nation and instances of vile racism in which Jews were likened to Nazis or branded “baby killers”. Yet Epsom gets truncheons, while the Israelophobes get kid gloves.
People use the term “two-tier policing”. I wonder if that’s a little too soft
How do we explain this other than as a reflection of ideological prejudice within the police? Drunk on identitarianism – like so much of the establishment – perhaps they have come to see “rough” working-class men who are worried about immigration as Bad and keffiyeh-sporting leafy leftists and their Muslim comrades as Good.
There are numerous examples of cops enforcing correct-think. Think of those people who feared a knock on the door from the boys in blue over their scandalous belief that men cannot become women. Or the dystopic vision of officers dancing like loons at Pride festivals. Or the truly chilling events in Birmingham last year, where police barred Israeli football fans from an Aston Villa game pretty much at the behest of mobs of “anti-Zionists”, some of whom were threatening to take to the streets in blind rage if those dastardly Jews turned up. It was the clearest example yet of a police force willingly making itself into a weapon of fashionable bigotry.
This is not to diss all police. Many do a fine job, and a thankless one. Personally I would like to see more of them on the beat. But, institutionally, something feels off. We live in an era of asymmetrical multiculturalism, where minority groups are encouraged to take pride in their history and culture, while the majority is urged to feel uneasy about its own. That even the police seem to have imbibed this baleful and hypocritical ideology is not surprising, but it’s shocking. It will sow injustice.
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