When you’re hit by the police

This was part of my column in The Malta Independent on Sunday, yesterday.

A man who hit a police officer has been given a suspended prison sentence. The comments-board beneath the report is awash with the views of fine upholders of the law, who think this absurd.

Hitting a police officer is not like hitting any ordinary person, they shriek. The fact that this is a police officer is an aggravation of the crime.

They’re correct, of course. But it also works the other way.

When a police officer hits somebody else, that too is far more serious than one ordinary person hitting another ordinary person. The fact that he is a police officer – and it generally is a he – makes the crime worse.

Yet I have noticed that the sort of people who object, on the internet, to drunken police officers beating up French students who have photographed them drinking in uniform with the bar-owners they are supposed to police, are very different people, using very different language, to those who object when it is policemen who are assaulted.

The latter sound like totalitarian right-wingers who would have been all for the arguments employed by Sir Oswald Moseley in the 1930s.

You are left with the feeling that, to them, upholding the law is an end in itself, and not the means to an end. They would have been willing Fascists.

Those who object to the police beating up students (and others) are different. You can sense by the way they argue, however semi-literately, that they have an intrinsic suspicion of police authority and feel revulsion for the mere thought of its being abused.

The strangest thing, I find – or perhaps not – is that the same people who are usually out in force rooting on the internet for Progressive Joseph and his Labour Party are the very ones who raise hell when somebody hits a policeman, but who stay silent when three policemen hit a French student in his 20s.

The Labour Party might not think of itself as right-wing and negatively conservative (political conservatism is generally a good thing), but the bulk of its supporters are generally just that.

Isn’t it peculiar? Or perhaps not.