As a rule, I hate the practice of drawing general inferences from high-profile individual cases. We should guard against the misapplication of the availability heuristic.
In the case of the attack upon Ian Tomlinson, however, we should draw such an inference - because this was not an isolated instance.
Let’s run some figures*. Since 2000 there have been 361 deaths in police custody, an average of 40 a year - though in fairness the number seems to be falling. During this time there have been an average of just under 1.4 million arrests each year (big pdf).
If we assume each arrested person spends 24 hours in custody, this implies a daily death rate of just under 3 per 100,000. Now, in 2007 the death rate for men aged 20-24 was 65 per 100,000 per year (big pdf), or 0.18 per 100,000 per day.
Deaths in custody, then, seem to be around 16 times the norm. Is this really entirely due to the police being likely to arrest people who have overdosed on drugs?
Let’s be realistic. There is such a thing as police brutality; as Shuggy says, the only people shocked by that video - and this means you Laurie - are those who have spent their lives having tea with mother. And the fact that this goes unchecked only encourages it.
Indeed, in a sense what‘s surprising is just how few such incidents there are; if I thought - as that copper did - that I could hit someone and get away with it, my knuckles would be permanently bleeding.
So, I think we should draw inferences.
It would be easy to say that one of these is that the police must be much more tightly reined in than they are, and must not be given more powers. There is, though, little hope of this. The political class is unlikely to weaken its own army, especially when the victims of its aggression tend, generally, to be the sort of people it doesn‘t care about - protestors, ordinary workers, the mentally ill.
Nor should we expect the media as a whole to act as a constraint. The BBC and Evening Trash have been deplorable here. But this is only to be expected. The police are a great source of stories for the MSM - and you don’t bite the hand that feeds.
Instead, what we’re seeing is what any Marxist has known all along - the police, politicians and much of the media are all on the same side. Which is not the side of liberty or justice.
And, for the lame-brained (non-Marxist) left there’s another lesson - the state is not your friend.
* Thanks to Matt and Anon for pointing out that my initial figures were stupidly wrong. I've re-calculated them now.
In the case of the attack upon Ian Tomlinson, however, we should draw such an inference - because this was not an isolated instance.
Let’s run some figures*. Since 2000 there have been 361 deaths in police custody, an average of 40 a year - though in fairness the number seems to be falling. During this time there have been an average of just under 1.4 million arrests each year (big pdf).
If we assume each arrested person spends 24 hours in custody, this implies a daily death rate of just under 3 per 100,000. Now, in 2007 the death rate for men aged 20-24 was 65 per 100,000 per year (big pdf), or 0.18 per 100,000 per day.
Deaths in custody, then, seem to be around 16 times the norm. Is this really entirely due to the police being likely to arrest people who have overdosed on drugs?
Let’s be realistic. There is such a thing as police brutality; as Shuggy says, the only people shocked by that video - and this means you Laurie - are those who have spent their lives having tea with mother. And the fact that this goes unchecked only encourages it.
Indeed, in a sense what‘s surprising is just how few such incidents there are; if I thought - as that copper did - that I could hit someone and get away with it, my knuckles would be permanently bleeding.
So, I think we should draw inferences.
It would be easy to say that one of these is that the police must be much more tightly reined in than they are, and must not be given more powers. There is, though, little hope of this. The political class is unlikely to weaken its own army, especially when the victims of its aggression tend, generally, to be the sort of people it doesn‘t care about - protestors, ordinary workers, the mentally ill.
Nor should we expect the media as a whole to act as a constraint. The BBC and Evening Trash have been deplorable here. But this is only to be expected. The police are a great source of stories for the MSM - and you don’t bite the hand that feeds.
Instead, what we’re seeing is what any Marxist has known all along - the police, politicians and much of the media are all on the same side. Which is not the side of liberty or justice.
And, for the lame-brained (non-Marxist) left there’s another lesson - the state is not your friend.
* Thanks to Matt and Anon for pointing out that my initial figures were stupidly wrong. I've re-calculated them now.
I'm confused - 40 deaths from 1,400,000 arrests is nearer 3 in 100,000, isn't it?
Posted by: anonymous | April 08, 2009 at 02:30 PM
I don't understand this Marxism business (evidence of lame-brainedness).
"what any Marxist has known all along - the police, politicians and much of the media are all on the same side. Which is not the side of liberty or justice.... - the state is not your friend.
Sounds like overheated nonsense to my lame ears. Sometimes I'd expect these three to be on the same side, and rightly so. Say, on the side of law and order. Other times these three are clearly opposed. How often do you think the police like what's written about them in newspapers? How much love is lost between politicians and the media? Ah, you're going to tell me that even though the individuals involved see themselves as opposed and for all the world appear to be at loggerheads, underneath they're really on the same side. You see, too clever for me.
Of course their are veins of mutual self-interest etc. that run through the relationships between the press, politicians and the police, but what's Marxist about saying that? I think their are similar relationships all over the place, and I'm not a Marxist (too dim).
How would things look in a Marxist world? What would the relationships between the press, the police and politicians look like in a Marxist society? Would the state be my friend then?
And the media does act as a constraint - just not a very effective one. Sometimes the media makes a fuss, the fuss results in an inquiry, and the inquiry results in a (small) change. Just the other day you were linking to a paper about newspapers and democracy. I'd bet that all else held equal, the press acts as a constraint on police conduct. Why do you think worse governments than ours shut down newspapers?
Certain newspapers are biased toward the police and against protesters, and most journalists lack the wit and/or opportunity to challenge the police version of events until somebody makes it "a story" and then the pack follows. Certain people are biased toward the police and against protesters, never mind the press. There's bias and witlessness and self-interest and back-covering etc. all over the damned place. I don't see how you build a grand Marxist class conspiracy out of it.
Posted by: Luis Enrique | April 08, 2009 at 03:50 PM
"the police, politicians and much of the media are all on the same side"
come to think of it, are you sure that's not a quote from Milton "Lenin" Friedman?
Posted by: Luis Enrique | April 08, 2009 at 04:08 PM
What's all this Marxist bollocks you are throwing in recently Chris? Not sure you need Marx to adequately analyse the behaviour of the boys in blue.
Posted by: nm | April 08, 2009 at 04:26 PM
"Let’s run some figures. Since 2000 there have been 361 deaths in police custody, an average of 40 a year - though in fairness the number seems to be falling. During this time there have been an average of just under 1.4 million arrests each year (big pdf).
Dividing one into the other gives us a death rate of just under 3 per 1000. This compares to a death rate in 2007 for men aged 20-24 of 0.65, and for men aged 30-34 of 1.02 (big pdf)."
You are comparing two wholly different statistics here. In the case of deaths in police custody you are calculating deaths per arrest. In the case of the general public's mortality rates you are providing deaths per person per annum. They don't even have the same units.
To get something more meaningful we would use the number of incarcerated persons at any given time in the UK rather than the number of arrests. The incarceration rate in the UK is ~145 per 100000 meaning that at any one time there are approximately 145 * 60 million / 100000 = 90000 incarcerated persons in the UK. If there have been 361 deaths in police custody over a period of 8 years, then the number of deaths per incarcerated person per annum is calculated by 361 deaths / (8 yrs * 90000 people) = 0.0005 deaths per person per annum. Scaling up to deaths per million per annum (statistic given in the pdf linked in blog post) we get 500 deaths per annum per million. The number for males 15-24 is 542 and for males 25-34 is 894.
Please note that in addition to containing a conceptual error, the original figures contained a severe arithmetic error (as pointed out by anonymous at 2:30 pm).
So, does being in police custody make you safer (as these numbers seem to suggest)? Probably not. Perhaps healthier people commit crimes more often. Perhaps the police release very sick individuals to the hospitals and these deaths are not counted as having occurred in police custody. And even if being in police custody DOES protect you against death, how much of this effect is due to reduction of traffic accidents (you can't drive in prison), how much due to reduced availability of certain drugs etc?
Police brutality is like a much smaller effect than any of these major causes of death.
Posted by: Matt | April 08, 2009 at 04:50 PM
Last sentence should contain the word "likely", not "like"
Posted by: Matt | April 08, 2009 at 05:19 PM
Ian Tomlinson was not under arrest nor had he committed a crime. He was assaulted by the police for walking home on a route that brought him into contact with them.
The context that is important is not deaths in custody but the undirected, casual violence against protesters on the day.
Posted by: Jim Jay | April 08, 2009 at 05:59 PM
One of the outstanding and sickening cases of a death in police custody in the recent past as reported by the BBC:
"A former paratrooper who died in police custody with his hands cuffed and his trousers around his knees was unlawfully killed, a jury has ruled.
"Christopher Alder, 37, was arrested on 1 April 1998, and died on the floor of Queens Gardens police station in Hull, East Yorkshire, without regaining consciousness."
24 August 2000
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/894587.stm
"Following Mr Alder's death, five police officers - Sergeant John Dunne and Constables Martin Barr, Neil Blakely, Nigel Dawson and Mark Ellerington - were suspended from duty and charged with manslaughter and misconduct in a public office.
"Another man, Jason Paul, was charged with grievous bodily harm after voluntarily contacting the police as a witness to events outside the hotel. Charges against Mr Paul were later dropped and in January 2006 he was awarded £30,500 damages against Humberside Police. . .
"The five Humberside officers went on trial at Teesside Crown Court in April 2002, but two months into the case the judge ordered the jury to acquit the officers of all the charges.
"Mr Justice Roderick Evans said there was conflicting medical evidence about why Mr Alder became unconscious and what had killed him.
"An independent hearing subsequently cleared all of the officers of neglect of duty allegations. And in December 2004 it emerged that four of the five officers had been allowed to retire."
26 March 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4849210.stm
Posted by: Bob B | April 08, 2009 at 06:39 PM
Matt, Anon - many thanks for pointing out my appalling figures, which I've recalculated.
Matt - your figures on the incarceration rate refer mainly to the prison population, not police custody.
Many more people die in prison than in police custody - which is a different story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/sep/22/ukcrime.prisonsandprobation
Posted by: chris | April 08, 2009 at 06:47 PM
Chris, your new figures are no more meaningful than the last ones.
"If we assume each arrested person spends 24 hours in custody"
If we assumed that the the incarceration rate of the UK would be
1.4 million / (60 million * 365) = 6.4 per 100000
In actuality it's 20 times higher than that. The incarceration rate for UK is given as between 130 and 140 depending on the source you check.
You are applying deaths among those in police custody to a population that is FAR too small.
I have already done the actual calculation for you in my earlier comment. It does not assume anything about the average length of captivity; instead it uses the MEASURED rate of incarceration to get the proper divisor (incarcerated population at any one time).
Posted by: Matt | April 08, 2009 at 06:50 PM
Indeed, we can easily get the average (mean) length of incarceration under any given arrest from the data:
length of stay in years = incarceration rate * population / number of arrests per year
and get that the average length of stay after any given arrest is (140 / 100000) * 60 million / (1.4 million per annum) = 0.06 years or 21.9 days
Posted by: Matt | April 08, 2009 at 06:55 PM
EDIT: chris, I did not see your earlier comment. Please ignore my last two comments. Thank you for the correction
Posted by: Matt | April 08, 2009 at 07:01 PM
as Shuggy says, the only people shocked by that video - and this means you Laurie - are those who have spent their lives having tea with mother
And I thought I was misanthropic. Since when was being shocked by someone's death something to take the piss out of? It's the treatment of humanity as an abstract concept that leads to this kind of shit.
Posted by: Justin | April 08, 2009 at 07:37 PM
Not sure what Marxism has to say about this, but there's a wealth of analysis from the non-Marxist, libertarian left on this.
The police were instituted by the political class to enforce their aggression against the poor, to ensure they became the working class.
They carry out similar functions today. Just look at the laws being instituted on behalf of the music and film industry to enable the police to act against copying of media.
It is no surprise that this is how the police act - a monopoly of force will always be prone to abuse.
Posted by: Tristan | April 08, 2009 at 08:21 PM
"The police were instituted by the political class to enforce their aggression against the poor, to ensure they became the working class."
Sorry, but that's just nonsense. The really interesting thing about the police (before as well as after Peel) is just how autonomous they are with respect to both capital and the state - neither of which cared very much about the G20 demo, let alone the free movement of pedestrians in the region of the demo. They don't actually embody the state's monopoly of force, either (that's the Army). Constitutionally speaking, the police are weird.
Posted by: Phil | April 08, 2009 at 10:15 PM
In simple terms, the Police are out of control:
"Officer cleared after killing a man carrying a table leg"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/may/13/ukguns.hughmuir
"Three Sussex officers avoid prosecution over fatal operation and subsequent cover-up which was damned by two separate inquiries
"In a small Sussex seaside town, at 20 past four in the morning, James Ashley was sleeping naked in his bed. Seconds later, he was on the floor, shot dead at a range of 18ins, by a police officer using a powerful Heckler & Koch carbine."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/secrets-lies-and-.htmlit-after-police-shoot-naked-man-in-bed-685719.html
Posted by: Bob B | April 08, 2009 at 10:30 PM
Justin,
I think he just meant nobody should be shocked to see the police shoving over, and using batons on, an innocent bystander at a protest. Something we've seen hundred times before.
Posted by: Luis Enrique | April 09, 2009 at 08:37 AM
Perhaps the challenging question to ask is: What really motivates the kind of people who join the police force nowadays given the press that the police get?
Posted by: Bob B | April 09, 2009 at 09:52 AM
"What really motivates the kind of people who join the police force nowadays given the press that the police get?"
Spite.
Posted by: Neil | April 09, 2009 at 10:10 AM
There are three types of people in the police:
1) bastards who enjoy exercising power
2) people who aren't very skilled or competent, and hence are willing to take a shitty job in exchange for decent-ish pay, job security and a pension
3) community-spirited types who believe they can genuinely make a difference.
What's less clear is the % split between the three types...
Posted by: john b | April 09, 2009 at 11:01 AM
I became involved as a bystander in a vicious fight that broke out in a local commuter train. Waiting to give evidence as a witness at a local magistrates court in a subsequent trial, I struck up a conversation about police-public relations with a member of the Transport Police who was also waiting - and who quickly reminded me that we mustn't discuss the particular case.
One of the especially memorable things he said was that the public tends to forget that the police spend much of their time dealing with the nastiest members of society.
He worked out of the HQ of the Transport Police near to Victoria Station in London. So concerned was he to protect his family from potential pressures generated by his work that he commuted to work from the family home kept well away from London in Milton Keynes.
Posted by: Bob B | April 09, 2009 at 01:34 PM
john b on who would be a copper: "3) community-spirited types who believe they can genuinely make a difference."
Twenty odd years ago, I knew two lefty liberal types who had joined two different constabularies (Met and Nottinghamshire) with the ambition to make a difference. Both failed their probationary period and felt that it was down to their low arrest rate. I reckon that their careers would have been even shorter today.
Posted by: charlieman | April 09, 2009 at 08:07 PM
"And I thought I was misanthropic."
You thought correctly...
"Since when was being shocked by someone's death something to take the piss out of?"
Who's taking the piss? Not me - not Chris, as far as I can see. This video: if anyone finds this behaviour by the police extraordinary, then they have, you have, lived a very sheltered life and that is that.
Posted by: Shuggy | April 10, 2009 at 12:15 AM
A mate of mine is trying to join the police, and his motivation is probably number 2, it's either work in the police or work in a supermarket on minimum wage. For people who don't mind a bleep test, it seems like a no-brainer to me.
I think you can add another number to the list though, people who join the police because they have an ego the size of a garage.
"Well if you must know, I'm a policeman..." [pauses for impressed looks of idolisation]
Saying that, I looked at joining the police about 6 months back, and my motivation was good pension (which you get after 30 years if I'm not mistaken), variety in your work and, yes, a decent chat-up line.
Posted by: Tom Addison | April 10, 2009 at 09:56 AM
It's just gets me how you can have a situation recorded on video with obvious implications of police brutality and the response is to cover it up by saying that the officer was doing his job and not out of line. When a suspect is not combative and is surrendering, is it necessary to kick him in the head or shove him into a wall causing him to go into a comma....lets think long and hard on those instances.
Posted by: Ajlouny | August 14, 2009 at 04:09 AM
And a lot of it reflects a switch from bank deposits to securities; foreigners “other investments” in the UK, http://www.watchgy.com/ mostly bank deposits, fell by £143.2bn in Q1. And of course there’s no guarantee such buying will continue.
http://www.watchgy.com/tag-heuer-c-24.html
http://www.watchgy.com/rolex-submariner-c-8.html
Posted by: rolex replica | December 27, 2009 at 04:13 PM
Can anyone tell me does a police officer still receive his full pension after he has committed a crime and spent several years in jail for it?
Posted by: Margaret | February 21, 2011 at 12:23 AM