Perhaps the most surreal aspect of viewing the news coming from the UK whilst spending 4 months in America in the second half of 2011, was my perplexed observance of the London riots that ricocheted out around the rest of the country.
In hour-long stints in the Santa Monica Public Library, surrounded by elderly people bemoaning their internet confusion and the odd weirdo brazenly watching porn, I tried to keep up-to-date on the unfolding chaos that appeared to have erupted in my home country but found it a struggle to fully anchor the images and footage in reality.
The incendive spark that was the police shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham was the leading story of the week again as the jury returned a verdict of 'lawful killing', and there were renewed calls for an overhaul of police policy amidst cries of corruption.
My thoughts on this issue are two-fold. The central bone of contention is whether Duggan had the gun in his hand as he was fatally shot, whether he had thrown it just before, or even whether he had a gun on his person at all. Whilst its tragic that a young father was shot dead, I do believe that some personal culpability must rest with him.
People do not own guns in cities or elsewhere for any reason other than to cause harm to someone else. Anyone walking the streets armed with a gun, regardless of whether they intend on using it, must have the implicit understanding that they risk being shot at by police trying to disarm them. Since no one in a civilised society should be carrying a gun, those who choose to do so make that choice knowing that they could potentially be shot themselves.
The major caveat to this is in the possibility that the police could have planted the gun in order to frame Duggan or to cover their own backs. In highlighting these troubling questions, the whole incident is another in a long assembly line of events that are said to erode away levels of trust communities hold in the police. The police appears to be, like the NHS, in an almost perpetual state of crisis, with one shambolic affair after another, from recent Hillsborough revelations, the death of Ian Tomlinson, and the whole 'Plebgate' debacle.
Which leads me to pose the question - why is there this equally perpetual cry that people can't trust the police? Call me cynical, but I believe trust to be a precious and often scarce currency that I most certainly wouldn't hold to any great degree in large institutions.
Trust in large institutions is damaged everywhere you look, whether its the Catholic church's abuse scandals, the banking sector (even a so-called 'ethical' bank can't be trusted not to hire a crack fiend as their CEO), government expenses, elderly care homes, Comic Relief investing funds in arms manufacturers, Amazon and Starbucks dodging tax, and so on. The list is depressingly long, and yet this is the reality of the way the world operates.
Large institutions, at the end of the day, are nothing more than groups of people, subject to all the foibles, tyrannies and lapses in moral judgement that every individual person is subject to.
Of course, in an ideal world, the police would be completely transparent and trustworthy, free from corruption, and tragic cases such as Mark Duggan's would not come charged with such an institutional resentment and doubt. But this isn't an ideal world, and therefore, the question 'will this damage trust in the police?' is misguided and naive.
The police is a large and faceless institution; why would you blindly place your trust in it?
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