Police are damned if they do and damned if they don’t

Sir, – I read with interest the vociferous public and political response to the police handling of two recent events.

The first was a large mob gathering to celebrate their football club’s cup victory.

They “celebrated” by loud chanting and setting off fireworks and, on this occasion, the police were criticised for being too lenient and generally not doing their job.

I suspect that this was a case of treading on eggshells as to police robustly and make many arrests could have led to an escalation of violence.

Any film I saw suggested that the police were vastly outnumbered and therefore a few strategic pragmatic decisions were probably necessary at the time.

The second was with regard to a vigil marking the horrific and tragic murder of a young woman.

The police attended and arrested a few people. The tabloids don’t help by the use of emotive language such as accusing the police of “wading in”.

On this occasion, the police are being accused of being too heavy handed and there are calls from people who should know better for the commissioner to resign.

Clearly, I fully agree that to detach raw emotion from both events, particularly the latter one, is a difficult thing to do.

If we can, it’ll show that the police are in an invidious if not impossible position.

Of course both events risk triggering an upsurge in Covid, overwhelming the NHS and endangering the police officers the majority of whom have not been vaccinated.

In our democracy, emergency Covid legislation has placed the police in this impossible situation. We have been, since time immemorial, used to generally going about our business and peacefully demonstrating against pretty much any issue without interference.

If it is illegal to gather then it follows that you cannot “police” any such groups of people – as they shouldn’t have been gathering.

To police it would be to condone it and allow the justifiable perception of treating groups differently. There lies a snapshot of the dichotomy facing the police on a daily basis.

Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.