The Met Police's water cannon and the dangers of ideology, escalation and suppression

Earlier this week came the news that London's Metropolitan Police want permission to deploy water cannon. On their behalf, London Mayor Boris Johnson has petitioned the Home Secretary Teresa May, and it seems that a public consultation is soon to follow (Dodd, 2014; Merrill, 2014).

If the growing publicity that protests have received in the last few years, and the obvious tensions that there have been between protesters and the police at those events, are taken into account, this response from the capital's police force should not be a surprise. It should, however, make you wary.

The British Police does already employ water cannon, but only in Northern Ireland - and there only controversially. The police of many European countries use water cannon too, alongside their armed officers, their Gendarmes. Yet, so far, since their introduction by Robert Peel, the British Met Police have largely managed to refrain from becoming militarised.

Water cannon being made available for policing in the capital would mark the passing of a watershed. It marks a step towards the abandonment of civilian policing and a step towards turning the police into a paramilitary force. It would be a step towards abandoning the principle of 'policing by consent' that has underwritten law enforcement in Britain, as point four on the policing principles stresses:

'To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.'

Abandoning those principles in favour of a more militarised force risks throwing away consent in favour of suppression. That problem is only enhanced by making the extent to which the police enforce the law a political issue. Unfortunately, opinions on that matter are very much subject to ideology.

Conservatism is an ideology deeply wed to the idea that society is something constructed out of chaos by the imposition of order. The wealth of capitalism, the traditions of the establishment and the dogmas of the church all depend upon that order to function. And so, despite some apparent hypocrisy, it makes sense that the same voices that might decry 'meddling governments' for getting in the way of the unrestricted pursuit of wealth, are also the voices that are now calling for the increased armaments for the police to deal with civil unrest (Watt, 2013).

The widening gap between rich and poor is a source of fear for the poor, but it is also a source of fear for the rich. When the wealth gap is greater, the inequalities of a society are more starkly visible and more likely to provoke bitter resentment.  The struggles of the poor, as Thomas Paine (1797) pointed out, is of the deepest concern to the rich, since their affluence is directly won with the acquiescence of the poor to remaining orderly within an unequal social structure, that offers them little in the way of benefits for doing so.

As such it is unsurprising that those affiliated with conservative ideology, or those institutions such as the police, whose role is to maintain the order that conservatism craves, should want these enhanced weapons for the keeping of order. The problem with the ideologically conservative perception, though, is that it is based on an essentially negative view of human kind. Through that negative perspective it would be dangerously easy to coalesce incidents like the English Riots of 2011, with the massive political protests over the last few years in which a small minority became violent or damaged private property.

We must be wary of allowing conflicts to escalate, as the expansion of the available suppressive weapons to the police surely only encourages. We must be wary of the potential for those weapons to be missapplied, and dangers of injuries and resentments that would follow. We must be wary not to let these steps infringe upon the rights of people to protest in the name of reform, in the name of a cause, or in the name of broad institutional changes - all essential in a political process that continues to isolate people from power that is wielded nominally in their name.

We must not lose sight of the point of order. We must keep in mind what our methods say of us, of what we say to one another when we give a green light to using ever more dangerous weapons and tactics to enforce the law.

References

Vikram Dodd's 'Met police want water cannon ready to use in Britain by summer'; in The Guardian; 8 January 2014.

Jaime Merrill's 'Met police will have water cannon by this summer if Boris Johnson has his way'; in The Independent; 8 January 2014.

Nicholas Watt's 'Boris Johnson invokes Thatcher spirit with greed is good speech'; in The Guardian; 27 November 2013.

Thomas Paine's 'Agrarian Justice'; 1795. [Buy Now]