heads up londoners!

[h-crimm]

i think melchior doesnt mean that policing causes gang culture, but that the isolated police group adopts a gang-like mentality.
they want to rule thier streets, they protect and cover for each other even when theyre wrong, thier ideas become closed.

i dont think his bad experience invalidates his concerns about the effectiveness of policing either, its evidence to support them.
by the nature of an exclusive police force who (however accidentally) enforce norms and conventions and check outsiders some people will experience problems and others wont.

policing obviously isnt harrassment if you have legal property to protect, but if your property is borderline legal or a concept (graffiti-art, a squat, a shanty dwelling, your sexuality, access to public space) and somehow the way you want to enjoy it is not normal, the police, grounded in the conventional, will naturally tend to harrass you.

 

[Melchior]

As for the whole action of policing being harrasment and causing gang culture, I don't think I want to bother going into it. Safe to say, I think it is a strange viewpoint.

You slightly misunderstood, as h-crimm pointed out. The idea that police exist primarily to protect property and as a result harrass nearly automaticallly those who are not propertied isn't an original idea. It's a very common marxist/criminology critique of policing.

Obviously, no reason that you should agree, just saying I'm not all by myself on this one.

I think my point was that my experiences (and I coem froma very easy middle-class background) with the police (as police, when I've met off duty cops socially, I haven't had these issues) have been uniformly bad. I didn' grow up in a police hating environment, I wanted to eb a cop as a kid. But All my experiences have been bad. I'd hate to think what they would have been like if I was poor and black.