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RADIO 4
CURRENT AFFAIRS
ANALYSIS:
THE APPLIANCE OF VIOLENCE
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Andrew Brown
Producer: Zareer Masani
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
BBC
White City
201 Wood Lane
London
W12 7TS
020 8752 7279
Broadcast Date:
12.08.04
Repeat Date:
15.08.04
CD Number: PLN 431/04VT1032
Duration: 27.23

Taking part in order of appearance:


Brian Paddick
Deputy Assistant Commissioner. Metropolitan Police
Peter Hitchens
Columnist for The Mail on Sunday
Author of The Abolition of Liberty
Anna Coote
Director of Health Policy at the Kings Fund
Paul Diamond
Barrister
Roger Graef
Criminologist and Film-Maker
John Gray
Professor of European Though at London School of
Economics
Karim Murji
Senior Lecturer in Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University

BROWN: Our attitude to violence has changed. Our


tolerance of it grows lower and lower. But does this make us a more peaceful

and law-abiding society?

PADDICK:
The government appears to be expanding
the areas of priority for the police year on year, so whilst we have been over
recent years been concentrating on what we call volume crime burglary, car
crime, those sort of offences now the government is saying that we need to
tackle anti-social behaviour, lower level crime, but at the same time maintain
our emphasis on all these other types of crime as well. But government isnt
telling us what we should stop doing in order to do what theyre asking us to
do in addition to what weve traditionally been doing.
BROWN: Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian
Paddick, at Scotland Yard. One of the newspapers, which campaigned to
have him driven from his post as police commander in Lambeth two years ago
because it considered him dangerously liberal, as well as openly gay, was the
Mail on Sunday. And Peter Hitchens is a columnist there.
HITCHENS:
The state is taking far more direct control
over peoples lives. The police used to be citizens in uniform among the
people, enforcing a law which was broadly supported by the people. Now the
police have become an arm of the state, which doesnt enforce the law so
much as the will of the government, which is often at variance from what the
people want. One sees particularly the way in which the police have
withdrawn from foot patrol and the way in which they instead chase after
politically correct subjects, which are perhaps the obsessions of what I would
term the elite state.

BROWN: Is it strange to find the modernising


policeman and the conservative columnist agreeing here that the police are
being asked to do more than they possibly can? Not really, when you
consider that since 1997 there have been 637 new pieces of legislation which
affect the police. There are more police in Britain than there have ever been
before. Yet the need for their services seems only to grow. Does this reflect
something profoundly inconsistent in our attitude to violence?
Nice middle class people, who havent had to hit anyone since primary school,
still tend to assume that the state should have a monopoly of legitimate
violence. Just as the army is the only legitimate armed force in the country, we
feel increasingly that the police should exercise the only legitimate unarmed
force. But could there ever be enough police to ensure that no private citizen
ever had to hit anyone at all? Peter Hitchens again.
HITCHENS:
The English state never in its early years
sought a monopoly of violence. On the contrary; it obliged subjects to bear
arms in defence of law, right back to the Middle Ages, and it assumed that
they had both the right and the duty to do so. Right up to the First World War,
there are instances of the police actually seeking the help of armed citizens in
pursuit of bank robbers. Its only really since the First World War that the
English state has made a sustained effort to obtain a monopoly of violence,
which tends to me to suggest that it instinctively senses a divergence of
opinion about what the laws force should be used for between itself and the
people; and the more that that divergence grows, the more likely it is to
reinforce that monopoly.
BROWN: Even with thousands of new police, there
are more than 450 of us for every one of them. Thoughtful senior officers like
Brian Paddick are keenly conscious of the fact that the police cannot operate
too far outside the general moral consensus of the society they move in.

PADDICK:
Ordinary citizens have a right to defend
themselves, so they have a legitimate use of violence in defence of ones
property and, up until now, in the moderate correction of a child. So there are
circumstances in which ordinary members of the public beyond the state can
exercise that violence. Conversely, where the state does exercise violence
for example in a police officer making an arrest or, again, defending him or
herself against attack only as much force as is reasonable can be used.
BROWN: Several people have argued that there is a
tendency for the states monopoly of violence, if you like, to expand and for
the sphere of legitimate, private violence to shrink consistently. Do you think
this is in fact happening?
PADDICK:
I think that there is a common standard
being applied across both state and private violence, and you are seeing
some police officers, for example, being prosecuted for excessive use of force
in circumstances where maybe twenty years ago there would have been an
investigation but certainly no public prosecution. Similarly, in the private
arena where we are seeing prosecutions where people have been involved in
a scrap in the street, maybe in circumstances where twenty years ago the
police officer would tell both parties to go on their way, there seems to be a
move towards an intolerance or less tolerance of violence both on the states
side and also in the private area.
BROWN: One complication is that there is no broadly
agreed definition of the kind of violence that the state and society should
prohibit. This is very obvious in the debates about smacking small children.
And there are some people who would extend the idea even further. Anna
Coote, of the health think-tank, the Kings Fund.
COOTE: The state has a role in stopping individuals
doing harm to themselves and to others in some circumstances. Where
violence that people do, either to themselves or to others, incur significant
cost to the taxpayer, to the public purse, then I would have thought the state
had a role in trying to minimise that cost; in other words, to minimising the
harm that caused the cost.
BROWN: Yes, but in this context I assume that you
are using a very broad definition of violence. I mean would it cover smoking,
drug abuse, excessive drinking?
COOTE: If people take risks or undertake activities
that put their health at risk or damage their health, or the health of others,
that
could be described as a kind of violence. It doesnt have to be inflicting
injury
on someone, but it could be to do with incurring a kind of illness or a disease
or something along those lines. So smoking, excessive drinking, taking some
kinds of drugs would be one kind of violence that might harm the individual
who is undertaking the activity, but also might have put the health of others at
risk.
BROWN: The criterion for the state stopping you doing
something used to be that you were doing violence to somebody else. Now if
you want to extend this into a much more general definition of harm so that
smoking and smacking and, who knows, even over-eating come under this
remit, where do you draw the line?
COOTE: Well I dont want you to get the impression
that I think that over eating is a form of violence and you bring in the police
to

stop anybody over eating because I think theres a danger of us lumping all
the kind of health protection, prevention of illness measures in together with
anti-violence measures. I think theres definitely a difference between one
person who is probably more powerful, for one reason or another, harming
another who is less powerful. Theres a difference between that and people
behaving in ways that put their health at risk.

BROWN: Anna Coote, as a feminist, was also part of


the great agitation that redefined domestic violence as
people now would doubt that this was a welcome advance.
considerable extension of state control into areas once
And for some admirers of evangelical Christianity, like
Diamond, this has done more harm than good.

a serious crime. Few


But it did entail a
considered private.
the barrister Paul

DIAMOND:
The intrusion into family life and the use of
state power will have a much more long-term, detrimental effect on the
reconciliation of families. There isnt a perfect solution to this. Its
really the
least worst evil, and I believe the least worst evil is the state to not
interfere in
domestic violence unless its the most extreme nature.
BROWN: So whats a non-extreme way of hitting your
wife?
DIAMOND:
Well theres no necessarily non-extreme
way. The issue is: does it benefit the collective good by the state
interference
in these private relations? And I believe in the long-term it unravels a path
of
state interference, relationship rivalry, overweaning social services
intervening. My personal view is, except for normal criminal laws of general
assault, the state must say its off bound.
BROWN: What happened with domestic violence was
not a change in the law; it was a shift of legitimacy. Laws are not just about
our ideas of harm. They also suggest an idea of goodness and of the kind of
behaviour that needs to be encouraged. The criminologist Roger Graef has
been studying and filming the police for nearly 30 years.
GRAEF: The state has a right to say we believe in
this and we are against that. The twelve or thirteen other European countries
that have banned smacking altogether did so for symbolic reasons. They
were making a collective statement that we as a society disapprove of this
and the child is not yours to do with as you like. Thats fine. Then the
question is enforcement and Im genuinely torn between sympathising with
coppers who are expected to interfere with an area thatll be hell for them and
absolutely believing that smacking is wrong. What Id rather have done is
give the enforcement powers to social workers, health workers and so on
rather than just expecting police to be the ones who are judging what is
reasonable chastisement. I just see trouble ahead. Its the worst of both
worlds.

BROWN: The worst of both worlds because the idea


that children are defended with rights, which may at any moment explode into
legal action, has had unintended consequences. Its harder and harder, for
example, for the churches to do youth work, because they have had to make
rules that no adult may ever be alone with a child. This is not just to protect

the children involved. Its also to protect the organisations from lawsuits. In
the
other direction, measures like the Data Protection Act are making it harder for
some children to be protected. Ian Huntley found a job in Soham because the
police officers who knew he was a bad man felt constrained by the law from
passing on their understanding. It seems that the boundaries between the
state and the individual are drawn today along lines that satisfy no one. So
how did we get here?
GRAY:
There does seem to be a shift underway
from the liberal consensus that seemed to have been established in the
1960s.
BROWN: John Gray is Professor of European
Thought at the London School of Economics.
GRAY:
In that consensus, it was argued that there
are activities and spheres of life where the state has no business at all. It
was
a version of John Stuart Mills idea that in things which affect only persons
themselves and their agreeing or consenting partners, the state has no role.
The core of Mills liberal philosophy was to do with harm to others. If there
was harm to others, then restraint of freedom could be right, but harm to
others was never a sufficient justification because the harms of prohibition
and legal intervention could be greater. And I think that its this notion of
harm, which has mutated. In many ways the state has become more
paternalistic and more concerned to protect people from the adverse
consequences of their own behaviour. And thats partly because, I think, the
sphere in which what people do affects only or primarily themselves and their
agreeing partners has been seen to be rather narrow or has even shrunken
as societys become more complicated.
BROWN: A more complicated society needs more
versatile policing. And some new laws have radically changed the way in
which the police are seen. Peter Hitchens most recent book on the subject
was The Abolition of Liberty.
HITCHENS:
I describe them in my book as paramilitary
social workers jangling with clubs and handcuffs and all kinds of other
equipment because an awful lot of what theyre trying to do now is not to
enforce the law or to impose a general idea of what is wrong, because there is
no general idea of what is wrong supported by the government any more.
The police themselves believe that theyre mediators between offender and
victim words carefully chosen to avoid any kind of moral freight - so youre
not supposed to actually think that the offender is a bad person or necessarily
the victim is on the side of good. And there are instances of a police force
writing to somebody who complained about her car being trashed and telling
her that the people involved were suffering and therefore needed some
sympathy. The police have entirely swallowed the Guardian ethos of the
1960s and actually believe that crime is a social disease committed by people
who are in some way disadvantaged and who, therefore, need to be managed
into behaving better, rather than the old idea that if people broke the
commonly accepted rules of society, they ought to be caught and punished.
The police, when they were free to do so, used to use informal violence on
people they regarded as miscreants and, as a result, the streets were
relatively peaceful. What happens now is its the miscreants who use informal
violence and get away with it. You have to choose whether its the police who
are able to use informal violence in pursuit of enforcing a law which is
generally accepted, or whether its the bad guys on the streets who can get
away with being violent and nothing ever happens to them.

Informal police violence of the sort that Peter Hitchens enthuses over fell out
of fashion partly because of the often unnecessary relish with which it was
practised on suspects of a different race. And a lot of people would now
believe that restraint on the polices appliance of violence improves the
quality
of policing, even if it does make it more like social work. Karim Murji, a
sociologist at the Open University, is also a newly appointed member of the
Metropolitan Police Authority, though he was speaking to us in a personal
capacity.
MURJI: The argument runs that somehow the police
are concerned with this thing called law enforcement, which is the hard edge
of the law, and there are these other group of people social workers,
probation officers, education welfare officers and so on who are concerned,
if you like, with the soft end. My own view is that that distinction has always
been untenable. The police have always done some social work type activity;
in fact theyve even been called the secret social service because this aspect
of their work has not been recognised. Now its a bit of a contradiction
because one of the things that perhaps attracts people to police work is
sometimes the idea that theyre going to be in there catching big time
criminals and so on, and perhaps some of the disaffection when people get
into it is they actually find that the job is not like that at all. So I dont
really
accept the kind of hard-soft distinction in the way its kind of set up. If you
are
asking me has the balance changed more recently, thats kind of harder to
answer. There probably are things happening in the name of partnership
working, which have brought police and other agencies closer together, and
around things like child abuse and case conferences and so on.
BROWN: So how soft and cuddly can a policeman
get? Brian Paddick.
PADDICK:
Police officers now are encouraged to bring
into the police service their own identity, their own moral code in a way in
which when I was at training school twenty-seven years ago we were never
encouraged to do that. One had all ones individuality beaten out of one and
then came out of the production line like everybody else and also, having
gone through that process, very susceptible to the perhaps not ideal values
that were held by operational cops at police stations. So there is much more
of a definite strategy to allow people to be more individual within the police
service, and I think to some extent that is healthy. On the other hand, there
needs to be a balance between ensuring that police officers have certain
standards of conduct that are accepted by all members of the police service
and that there are limits to the individuality that one can express. So, for
example, no matter what ones views are, if one is a police officer one cant go
out to clubs at the weekend, taking recreational drugs just because everybody
else is. There are definite limits.

BROWN: The police are more diverse today. And


there may also be greater differences between local forces. But moral
conservatives like the barrister Paul Diamond are outraged by the loss of an
important principle.
DIAMOND:
The primary duty of the police is criminal law
enforcement, particularly personal safety, and they are miserably not
succeeding in that and there has been a significant increase in violence in the
yob culture and I dont think people have any confidence in police statistics of
reducing crime levels.

BROWN: But, for example, if we take in Brixton the


decision not to pick up people who are smoking dope on the streets and
instead to use policing resources on other things. Isnt this again just an
expression of societys changing ideas of what is legitimate?
DIAMOND:
Well the very idea that the police can
determine what to enforce, and the arbitrary enforcement of what they
determine to enforce, is the end of the rule of the law. Only Parliament can
make the laws and the police must apply those laws across the board without
partiality. What discretion they do have is the discretion on how to enforce
the
law, but they have no discretion on how not to enforce the law, which is
actually taking place in Brixton, and theres a subtle difference between the
two. If the police, say, were not going to enforce lets say drug legislation
without parliamentary approval - that is frightening, very, very frightening.
PADDICK:
It was in Lambeth at the time a simple case
of rationing of police resources where far more serious offences, which were
of much more concern to local people, needed police attention, and police
attention was being diverted by arresting people for very small amounts of
cannabis. And at the end of the day, what we did was we seized the cannabis
and warned people.
BROWN: Brian Paddick, who took this controversial
initiative as Borough Commander.
PADDICK:
It was simply a question of a change of
priorities in the face of pressing crime levels with relatively few police
officers.
So one could imagine other police chiefs making similar decisions in other
parts of the country faced with similar pressing and contradictory demands.
BROWN: And this is a process that you think is
inevitable because there are simply too many laws for all of them to be
entirely policed?
PADDICK:
Ive been the Police Commander in two
different parts of London. In a leafy, suburban area, there wasnt really a
question of having to prioritise too much around which laws were enforced,
which ones werent. In a very difficult inner city area, then it very much was
a
case of having to prioritise. So it does depend on the circumstances.
BROWN: Implicit in what you were saying about
priorities is the idea that these must in fact vary from place to place.
this
also true across cultures?

Is

PADDICK:
I think there can be variations in terms of
priority within a legal framework which is commonly accepted. You cannot get
into a situation where with one particular community group or religious group
certain laws are enforced rigidly and in others theyre ignored completely.
There needs to be some sort of consensus. You cannot have completely
open season in terms of what the police do in one area compared to another.
BROWN: The law may be invariable and fixed. But if
priorities must be fluid, then the demand for the police to enforce all laws
with
equal zeal is contradictory. Perhaps all policing must in some sense be
community policing. Otherwise its just an unarmed military occupation. But
some communities are more difficult to police by consent than others. Is there

a danger that if the police are too sensitive, their role as enforcers of order
may be usurped by local gangs? Roger Graef.
GRAEF: Well, its always been true. I mean the
Capulets and the Montagus are good examples of that. Territoriality is
managed locally whatever you may do for the police. But you know in Tokyo,
in Spain, in Barcelona, for example, they have these local police stations that
are actually sometimes just caravans. They make absolutely sure that the
bobby lives in the caravan with their family. We used to have that, especially
in rural villages and towns, and I think the loss of that kind of intimate,
local
connection is why people now say we want bobbies on the beat. But if they
lived there and were able to be agents of change, working with the grain of
the community instead of parachuting in when theres a crisis, I think wed find
a far more effective relationship with the police and the public. And bear in
mind, at 450 to 1, we have to police by consent.
BROWN: Theres an interesting convergence here
between left and right. Both agree that the police, if they are to do their jobs
properly, must be rooted among the people they try to control. And both also
agree that the police, representing the state, need to do things that ordinary
civil institutions cant accomplish and shouldnt attempt. Peter Hitchens.
HITCHENS:
The whole idea of a prison system and a
court system and a police system is that it actually embodies the moral wrath
of an offended society. The idea this should be contracted out to people who
are merely paid to do it as if they were taking away rubbish or sorting library
books seems to me to be morally outrageous. Im completely against it.
BROWN: But arent they part of society too?
HITCHENS:
Well they may be part of it, but the sworn
police constable who has sworn a very specific oath to uphold the law of the
land fulfils a completely different purpose from the paid security man or
security woman. The history of the constable in English life is one of a very
important distinction between England and other European countries; that we
have among us these people who are sworn to uphold the Queens peace,
the law which we all support, on our behalf. And the respect given to the
police uniform in this country, which is sadly diminishing as the years go by,
is
a symbol of the fact that we recognise in the police officer with the crown on
his helmet the existence of a man whos enforcing our own sovereignty over
ourselves. Im afraid a security man cannot conceivably do that.
BROWN: Does it make sense to think that the state
had or ought to have a monopoly of legitimate violence?
HITCHENS:
Its a function of a free society that the law
does belong to the people, so a monopoly of force is actually a bad sign in a
society which claims to be a democracy. You have this absurd use of the
phrase taking the law into their own hands as a criticism of citizens. The
law
belongs to the citizens of this country. Theyre entitled to take it into their
own
hands if it needs to be enforced. They shouldnt have to wait around for
someone in a peak cap or a helmet to come and do it for them.
BROWN: The logical end of Peter Hitchens argument
is a relaxation of gun control. As in the United States or even tidy
Switzerland,
citizens should be trusted to defend themselves and uphold the law with their
own weapons. But since the Hungerford shootings in 1987, successive

British governments have moved in the opposite direction and the legal
ownership of handguns is now a state monopoly. The state cant have a
monopoly on all violence; but a monopoly of armed violence has seemed a
desirable goal. Is it receding? Karim Murji.
MURJI: One could argue that over about thirty or
forty years in Northern Ireland the state or the police didnt have such a
monopoly and whatever violence they practised was never accepted as
legitimate by large parts of the population. Sometimes theres a kind of
tendency to thinking of the British as a kind of uniquely pacified nation, as
having a particular kind of tradition of the unarmed bobby, policing by consent
and so on. I think historically some of these things are myths which have kind
of helped the police to try and, if you like, do their work, part of their
legitimation strategy. In terms of whether the police can or cant intervene in
particular areas, I mean I think its worth thinking back to the 1980s, because
when law and order broke down in particular black areas like Brixton, Toxteth,
Moss Side and so on, it was quite common in those areas for the police
monopoly to be contested. So, for example, when the police tried to arrest
somebody, a group of people might literally try to snatch this person back
because they were contesting that legitimacy. In terms of whether thats
happening now, Im sure it kind of happens at some low level all the time
everywhere, because I think legitimacy is kind of always in doubt.
BROWN: Well, theres the question of what criminals
can get away with - exemplified by efforts to pull your friends away from the
arresting officers - and the wider question of what they should be able to get
away with. A failure of force has to be distinguished from a failure of
legitimacy, even though both force and moral authority are necessary for
successful policing. Both get desperately tangled and overstretched if we
demand that the police intervene to stop every infringement of the law from
murder down to smacking.
In the conflict between our desire for personal
freedom and our demand that the police enforce more and more laws,
something will have to give. But what?
GRAY:
The best guide to how to negotiate these
complex issues is a revised and more pluralistic and negotiable version of a
harm principle.
BROWN: The philosopher John Gray.
GRAY:
There is only one way in which fundamental
disagreements about whats harmful or most harmful can be resolved and
thats the long haul of political debate. We might be able to get agreement,
and to some extent I think we do have agreement, that being at risk of death
or severe injury from criminals or terrorists is a major obstacle to a
worthwhile
human life. After all, that goes all the way back to Thomas Hobbs and I think
its well rooted in human experience, so we can get some agreement and
from that agreement we can get priorities. In areas where we cant get
agreement but where passions are deep, theres a lot to be said for the
traditional British approach of going for compromise.
BROWN: Politics is intrinsically messy and
inconclusive. It wont end disputes about legitimacy, any more than it can put
an end to crime. In fact the two are umbilically linked in the violence of
terrorism. Terrorist networks are hardest to deal with when they shelter among
populations with whom the state has lost legitimacy; and legitimacy must
constantly be renewed. Even if we could all agree about smacking and gun
control, the liberal hope that we can compromise our way to the right balance
of lawful force is not the end of the argument, and never could be.

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