The deadly shooting of Michael Brown by the police in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 threw light on ‘depolicing’. This is the phenomenon of police officers refraining from enforcement by retreating from public appearance for fear of backlash or demonisation of the uniform.
The research is still in its infancy, including the methodology necessary to gauge this, but at least that subset of police occupational stress has now been given a name.
It is perhaps easier to detect this in non-fiction. George Orwell was Inspector Eric Arthur Blair of the Indian Imperial Police in real life, and was stationed in Burma in 1922.
Orwell ached over the inner hurt of being hated for the police uniform by the natives, a uniform which symbolised colonial oppression, Buddhist monks included. With all their zen, they would stand at corners to insult and throw obscenities at him and fellow officers.
His short story, Shooting an Elephant, reflects the love and hate relationship that eventually took its toll on him, prompting him to go back to England after five years of intense policing, and going straight into journalism.
Orwell recollects how he had to kill a mad elephant that was on the loose with only a .44 Winchester and a scared pony for transport, braving the beast while not having a clue of where to shoot to kill.
He had to be the hero to the same people who were earlier so full of disdain. Although he saved the day, this did not excuse him from facing the furious owner of the elephant later on. Exhausting, on all counts.
The earliest example of a recognisable form of depolicing that I came across in my research was Governor Maitland’s lamentation in his dispatches to number 11, Downing Street, in 1814.
Maitland accurately spotted the behaviour but sardonically equated it with Mediterranean laziness. It’s the same mistake Patton made in mislabelling shell-shock and PTSD.
Depolicing pertains to the institution, by the way, irrespective of who’s in government; but rest assured that misdirected party politics and misgovernment exacerbate it.
As an academic, I recognise depolicing when officers address situations not because of something I’d have said in class but because of my professional secrecy – that confessional obligation of never ratting on them.
The difference may be subtle to the outsider but very conspicuous otherwise. What is normal to the officer is not normal to the public. It is the kind of baggage that reveals an eroded spirit to the point where the officer is reduced to asking oneself: is this what I signed up for?
It’s a mistake to think that, for the recipient of that information, it’s just hand luggage. And if the narcissistic culprit wears a uniform, is dipping his toes in the bloodbath and getting away with it, it makes you, as a police-lawyer, feel like doing a John 2:15: overturning desks and booting out the justice hawkers. It’s not what the Temple was built for.
Okay, it’s not what lawyers usually do either, but when the two genres of policing and lawyering get mixed, then it’s a sui generis form of advocacy. Blood boils differently.
The source of depolicing is rarely singular; it is often intersectional, and that’s when it becomes complicated. When the multiple sources causing depolicing start to overlap, toxicity rampages through the veins, like Orwell’s elephant in the marketplace.
The real danger of depolicing is when it becomes normalised, and outright applauded
The concept of ‘otherness’ is typically the first casualty, which is why whistle-blowers become instant enemies. If my well-being as an officer becomes corroded, how can I recognise and honour yours?
The other is not your equal any more, becoming inapprehensible and threatening. The absence of ‘otherness’ can segregate the decent cop symbolically, relation-ally and bureaucratically. It creates distance and you stop calling him ‘brother’, that eponymous term that is so central to police everyday jargon.
‘Brother’, because it is ultimately a decent family that looks out for each other, and the failure of this kind of society only fosters a different kind of famiglia or even an underground brotherhood.
The real danger of depolicing is when it becomes normalised and outright applauded; when the abnormality takes up residence and makes the rule of law its second casualty.
In an institution based on public consent, depolicing abandons the public. Tragic, because public consent forms the substratum of the institutional fabric of democratic policing.
Failing to understand this phenomenon precipitates failed reforms, and no amount of public relations campaigns would work. PR is not the antidote in this situation because it is not stemming from a public interaction that needs shaping up, a shabby station that needs refurbishment; it is caused by the manipulation of justice. The only antidote for that is advocacy. Fighting fire with fire.
Advocacy redresses depolicing in more ways than one: it handles grievances, it protects what’s right, and advances good practice by ingraining human rights and the rule of law in everyday policing. Once that’s in place, then feel free to paint the town blue. In that sequence.
Prime minister, it’s not a normal situation for the police. There are the rightful hawkers selling their wares at the marketplace but they need protection because there’s a mad elephant wrecking their good work and threatening their existence. Then there are the unrighteous hawkers peddling justice at the Temple that need to be removed but they’re still living it up. And very visibly.
Incidentally, removing depolicing was one of the motives that prompted Maitland to birth a new police force over 200 years ago. What he saw was not normal, and he faced the demons with his military precision. It’s been done before, so let’s learn from the past.
Mary Muscat is a lawyer who spent 13 years as an inspector with the Malta Police Force before moving to academia. She lectures at the Uni-versity of Malta and the Academy for the Disciplined Forces.