“Torch & Truncheon” would be a good name for an artisanal policing supplies outfit
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I was hoping this was already a thing, like a pub or something. Best I could do is find this:
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Obviously, the police would have just looked at it.
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Not shown in the OP: the bit where the police officers throw the guy in the back of the van, put a kevlar vest on him to hide the surface bruising and beat seven shades of shit out of him.
I realise that UK cops are considerably less lethal than US cops but that doesn’t mean they should be held up as some kind of saintly example of how to do things right. There has been an average of 30 “unexplained” deaths in police custody per year for the last decade, and not a single police officer has ever been found guilty of so much as manslaughter. Less lethal, sure, but still not great.
Do a search for Ian Tomlinson on YouTube if you want to see London’s wonderfully restrained and non violent police in action.
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But they didn’t, did they?
Your go-to example, Ian Tomlinson’s death, was 7 years ago. But Tomlinson-like events are a routine, regular, almost daily occurrence in America. Annual killings by police are counted by the thousand.
This isn’t to defend the sanctity and honor of UK cops, just to point out the cosmic scale of the difference between them and US ones.
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That’s a fair point, well made. I’m not trying to claim that UK police are anywhere near as lethal as police in the US because as far as I can tell, US police are (statistically speaking) more lethal than basically anything except heart disease and road traffic accidents.
However, police in the UK (and London especially) are the worst I have encountered anywhere in the world except the US. The kevlar vest thing I mentioned has happened to more than one friend of mine and I’ve personally been stopped and searched under the Terror Act twice now. Harassment from the police is a daily fact of life for anyone who is young, male and working class in London; even more so if they happen to be BAME.
By contrast, I have spent five years in Japan and three in Singapore and have never had an encounter with the police in either country where they were anything except courteous, friendly and respectful. Just because the police in the UK kill fewer people than the US doesn’t mean they are a great example of how to do things right.
I mentioned Tomlinson because his death is a good example of shitty arseholes behaving horribly but there are many more recent examples if you want to look them up. Community distrust of the police has gotten so bad that people have rioted in response. I don’t see that happening in many other countries, even those where they trust PC Plod enough to give him a gun.
It is a more than thrice-a-day occurrence. Final body count for police in the US for 2016: 1152.
[edt - corrected for math.]
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