It appears our police tried a George Floyd. After embracing the Yanks and rejecting Huawei we’ve gone all out and taken the knee. Unfortunately that’s no joke as it involved another man’s neck. To add further insult said man was black. I have experienced the British police, not on a regular basis, but I have, and certainly in no way people from poorer communities, be those black or white, have. They’ve been both friendly and truncheon friendly. I won’t defend them. Having been in foreign lands I’ve also experienced foreign police from numerous cultures and I will hold my hands up, the Brits are not the worst. They are not the best, whatever that is, but there are worse out there.
I’m not sure what I make of this kneeing incident. With everything going on this must be possibly the worst moment to do something like that. I wonder what he was thinking, was he conscious of the action or not. The man was handcuffed and restrained, only the policeman will really know whether he felt scared enough to feel it was warranted. And how often do police officers in this country feel it is a necessary action. I genuinely don’t know. How often do security guards or bouncers outside pubs do similar. What I don’t like about this, apart from the obvious, is how we now go about responding to it as a society.
Protests and riots in America were necessary after George Floyd. There was an outpouring of anger and grief. It was the only way anyone in power would listen and anything would happen. Long term let’s see if it all just get’s forgotten about but in the short it shook society to the core. I imagine there will be protests here, how big I don’t know. He didn’t die thankfully otherwise it would have kicked off already. Maybe it has. The police have already chosen their approach by seemingly condemning the act with the Deputy Met Police commissioner describing it as ‘disturbing’ while reiterating of course that it’s not standard police practice or part of training. There are a lot of things they do that aren’t trained, that doesn’t mean they don’t do them regularly.
But then there was a quote on the BBC by a witness; “I was worried he was going to get executed. That’s just how George Floyd got killed”. If the media could come up with a better quote it would win awards. He wasn’t being executed. Words like that are serious, people get executed by police every day around the world. This was not that and to throw something like that out is not only irresponsible, it’s sensationalist and stupid. It’s also how we appear to react to anything in this day and age of outrage. That’s not one spectrum or another, it’s seemingly everyone. I just hope this is debated seriously and we can have conversations which actually lead to something other than a carpet and a brush. I don’t trust the media not to go wild and sex it up for ratings but I just hope we can ignore that long enough to not use it as some kind of societal endorphin hit. I don’t know how much faith I have in this. We appear too far down the rabbit hole already.
Observations and Misunderstandings 