It is understandable that footage of a police officer kicking a man in the head as he lay on the ground at Manchester Airport caused concern. Hell, it should have caused concern. It looked very much as if the police officer was assaulting him.
But to be concerned about a situation isn’t — or shouldn’t — be to assume that we know what happened. What were the circumstances that led up to it? I would be concerned if I saw a man chasing another man. But is it not possible that the latter man had stolen the former man’s phone?
Yet for many commentators, the facts of the incident at Manchester Airport were obvious. The police were definitely and uncontroversially the aggressors. “This incident has remnants of the George Floyd murder,” said Baroness Shaista Gohir, CEO of the Muslim Women’s Network UK and a member of the government’s Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia Definition Working Group, “And is a stark reminder that minority communities are more likely to face police brutality.”
Howard Beckett, the veteran British trade unionist, said the incident entailed “the most brutal of police assaults on two men”, and claimed it represented “thuggery in uniforms”. Claudia Webbe, a former MP, was reported to have described the event as involving “a gang of serving police officers engaged in brutal violence”. Dal Babu, a former Metropolitan police chief superintendent, claimed that the incident was “appalling”, and argued that it was symptomatic of racism.
Akhmed Yakoob, an attention-seeking lawyer and would-be politician who was representing the supposed victims of the police and who is now facing charges of money laundering, claimed that the incident could be described as an “attempted assassination”. These assertions helped to fuel protests in Manchester and Rochdale. Activists brandished signs with slogans like “GMP [Greater Manchester Police] is racist” and “Black Lives Matter”.
Public figures who judged the police officers without knowing the full context should be ashamed of themselves
Yet what had led up to this violence? Footage since released showed that 20-year-old Mohammed Fahir Amaaz attacked two police officers as they tried to detain him over an earlier violent incident. One female police officer was left with a broken and bloody nose. Amaaz has now been convicted. For reasons this author hopes are obvious, this makes his treatment by the police a lot more obvious.
Public figures who judged the police officers without knowing the full context should be ashamed of themselves. It was scandalous to condemn them for their behaviour without knowing what had provoked it. Police officers who had already faced violence were no doubt left fearing for their jobs as well. Communities were also left to face the risk that protests might spill over into violence.
This is not an isolated incident. There is a sense throughout society that all police violence should be assumed to be unjustifiable. When Chris Kaba was shot after ramming his car into police vehicles, while driving a car linked to a firearms incident and while under investigation over a shooting at a nightclub, various public figures made statements implying if not asserting that the officer had killed Kaba illegitimately. (One of them, incidentally, was the veteran trade unionist Howard Beckett.) The officer was acquitted.
The sense that police violence is always unwarranted is clearly pervasive. Watch any video of police officers detaining a suspect and you are almost guaranteed to hear a member of the public protesting that they are being too harsh. A recent video of a Garda being stabbed in Dublin by a man screaming “Allahu Akbar” shows a member of the public attempting to intervene to protect the suspect as Gardaí are using batons in an attempt to neutralise.
My point is not that police brutality never happens. Of course it does. It is right to be concerned when it may have taken place. But we should not assume that police officers using violent measures are unjustified in doing so. It is a dangerous world. When the police are dealing with violent suspects, they might have to resort to violence themselves.
Prejudging the police is especially outrageous when the people forming and promoting allegations are public figures who should know better and who should be aware of the weight of their words. How, for example, can we trust Baroness Shaista Gohir to be a reliable authority on “Islamophobia” when she could not even wait to see if Mohammed Fahir Amaaz was the innocent victim of police brutality or a dangerous assailant? Reader — we cannot.
Violence is always sad to see. It always raises questions. But sometimes there is no excuse and sometimes there is no choice.
