State Machinery

Ben Wildsmith

Listening to the Policing Minister, Diana Johnson, explain the government’s strategy on knife crime this week was an unnerving experience.

Trumpeting a fall in incidents of 6%, the minister’s achievement seemed rather slight to warrant media appearances, but such is the Westminster government’s predicament now, anything that counts as a win is worth shouting about.

Within the headline figure, the minister pointed to a far more solid statistic in the West Midlands, where knife crime has fallen by 25%. Operational success in that region, she said, will be rolled out across the country. The success had been driven by the use of ‘drones and dogs’, the minister chirped.

Now, I grew up around Birmingham and the city is already a futuristic dystopia without incorporating policing methods as imagined by Philip K Dick. The thought of being chased round the Bull Ring by mechanical K9s operating under the guiding intelligence of West Midlands Police acts as a powerful counterweight to the city’s ‘more miles of canal than Venice’ marketing slogans.

No thanks, bab, I’ll go on holiday to the darkest recesses of my own nightmares instead.

Science fiction

This is how politics works now. Devoid of anything hopeful to sell us, our politicians evoke fears and then offer us solutions to them. If those solutions seem to have leapt from the pages of a science fiction novel, then all the better. Technology is portrayed as our saviour, even as it hems in our freedom, replaces us at work, steals our creativity, and devalues the concept of humanity itself.

Of a morning, I often find myself queuing up for a sandwich at Greggs with members of the South Wales Police Armed Response Unit. They seem like cheerful fellas, but you can’t help noticing how overtly stormtroopery their uniforms have become.

They bristle with tasers, radios, coshes, pepper sprays, and ray guns, as if ready to wage war on invaders from another galaxy. It’s a dangerous job, no doubt, but the optics of this suggest state power rather than policing by consent. Are we sure that this is an effective way of persuading people to behave, or does it create distance between the people and the law which encourages contempt?

Very few of us now live near enough to a police station to visit one in person. We are encouraged to report crime online or via the telephone. Again, the monolithic power of the state keeps us at arm’s length. We see its tooled-up operatives around and about, we receive speeding tickets from its automated cameras, but in our time of need we must type out our injuries or navigate a telephone menu before being told where we are in the queue.

None of this suggests a partnership between the citizenry and the state. As transgressors we are automatically censured by machines, as victims we are pushed-back by them.

Dehumanising

The dehumanising of our relations with the state has also reached A&E. We must stand at terminals typing in our conditions in order to be checked-in for triage. Our initial contact is no longer with a receptionist or nurse, but a screen that asks us impertinent questions with no facial expression to soothe our discomfort.

Only then can we take a seat and wait to see a human being.

As politicians ascribe blame for the breakdown of civic values to immigration, or widening inequality, are we not missing the obvious? If our collective face, the front doors to civic experience as individual citizens, is not human, then what do we expect people’s response to it to be?

People working on the front lines of these professions despair at the disrespect and abuse they receive whilst doing their jobs. They are ill-served by a civic apparatus that treats you and I as an inconvenience at best, and a threat at worst.

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