Wednesday, April 08, 2009

We Must Understand The Root Causes Of Police Violence.

It is easy to rush to condemn the apparent assault by the police on Ian Tomlinson, however surely we as a society must ask ourselves what are the root causes of violent behaviour. A simplistic argument would be to place the blame on the person responsible but that would be to ignore the complex interactions that lead to violence such as poverty, inequality, US foreign policy, global warming and non organic food.

Seemingly common sense solutions serve to ignore what should be a wake up call to the problems faced by the policing community. Sure it is easier to demonise the individual police officer who hit Mr Tomlinson but .......... Stop.

I've just got the memo 'violence has root causes unless it is perpetrated by members of special oppressor groups' so forget what I just wrote.

6 comments:

JuliaM said...

/applause

Matthew said...

I'm not sure this works as a joke, as it seems plain common sense to look at the root causes of this one. It seems plausible that the policeman is not a naturally violent man.

Mark Wadsworth said...

*duh*

The root cause of this was obviously the evil banking community who pay the poor coppers to risk their lives to defend their temples of capitalism from which they exploit the downtrodden worker.

*/duh*

Ross said...

"I'm not sure this works as a joke, as it seems plain common sense to look at the root causes of this one."

I suppose so. It would have worked better if I'd not switched between referring to the police as a whole and the actions of the individual officer in question.

James Higham said...

When society left the Judaeo-Christian ethic, even as an ideal, it all fell apart in two generations.

Matthew said...

In fact it would be better the other way around.

"The sickening assault by an officer of the ZanuLab State on a harmless citizen should be met by nothing less than hanging, noted Melanie Hefferjohn"

Not sure we'll be reading that.