f4f3 | Mr Love and Justice

Not much posting lately, I'm afraid. Partly it's the continuing firewalling of LJ from work, partly my laziness when I get home at night.
So, some randomness, aided by a particularly fine Talisker and Mr Bragg's last album.

I don't know if everyone is following the Ian Tomlinson killing. At risk of spreading information that you're all too aware of, he was someone wandering home through the G20 protests in London who died, apparently as a result of being roughed up by the police. To some here that won't be a hugely unusual circumstance. I mean, the police didn't shoot him, or torture him, they just bashed him about a bit and pushed him over. He took badly to this, and died.
You might think that this was a bit of bad luck - I mean the average person wouldn't die as a result of a baton strike or two and a shove. Unfortunately, I seem to remember a doctrine that says when you commit a criminal act you take your victim as you find them. If there's a link between your criminal action and his death, then that's murder, or at least culpable homicide. I'm not too up on manslaughter, since that doesn't appear in Scots law, but it would seem to fit the bill here.

I was going to post about "Me and the Polis", briefly saying that where I was born and brought up there was no social contract between police and policed - that I thought of the Polis as thugs with impunity, who would steam in, grab my friends from the streets and kick seven colours of shite out of them in their vans. Somewhere in my 20's (probably around the time I took on my first mortgage) that changed, and I started thinking they were there to defend me against anarchy. This past month I've revisited that. If you give a thug a badge, he's still a thug. If you give him licence, he's a thug with impunity. I fear for us this Summer.