Men and women behaving badly
What tricky times for both etiquette and language: Pole dancers can’t show their scanty stuff at a family-friendly fair, and you can’t abuse city councillors online without the cops getting dragged in. Those wokesters and Karens are at it again.
It makes you yearn for the days when the cops would have kicked them all up the jacksy. Even the pole dancers. Especially the pole dancers probably.
The performers at the Petone fair in Lower Hutt had a good time in spite of Karens, and put on more layering after a G-stringed artist caused consternation. Fair’s fair. They were good girls really.
Police decided not to charge protesters targeting some city councillors with online threats, but what do you expect?
They’ve got a wokester police commissioner, and people in public life will get loopy mail.
Opposition justice spokesman Simon Bridges was chirpy taking Andrew Coster to task in Parliament over what he called the commissioner’s wokester attitudes.
He was having fun for once, trying to rile the unflappable commissioner, who isn’t much like his predecessors. He’s young, for one thing, and he’s talking about policing by consent, an approach which Bridges, from the weary old law-and-order party, seemed to find hilarious.
Coster gave a lucid account of what it means.
Basically, the public has to believe in their police, who can’t operate successfully without public co-operation.
As he suggested, we don’t want to end up with the police looking like enemies; that leads straight to the trouble America has with Black Lives Matter.
An Independent Police Conduct Authority inquiry into bullying and related issues in the police, published this week, backed his approach with perfect timing.
It was tempting to see it as an attack on the cult of masculinity, but macho behaviour and bullying aren’t limited to men.
It was also tempting to dwell on the accounts of bad behaviour as its main finding, confirming any prejudice you might have about police culture, until you read it more closely.
All police were asked to fill in a survey and 40 per cent of them did.
Then 40 per cent of those police said they’d personally experienced nastiness in the past year.
That suggests 16 per cent were affected (said my Google search), possibly the same number as would report it in any hierarchy from the schoolyard through to the workplace anywhere, Parliament, and the professions.
Many people in the workplace will experience, at some point, intolerance of questioning or dissent, favouritism and protectionism, marginalisation and ostracism, abuse and intimidation, sexist and racist behaviour, inappropriate office culture, and a lack of empathy and caring.
We probably expect too much of people working at the coalface of horror. They need to be selfprotective at the time, but afterwards may crumple.
It’s why someone in every office block weeps in the loos.
This unpleasantness makes a pretty sociopathic package, and we’re told sociopaths do well in business and big organisations.
It’s more concerning in the police, though, because they deal with people in crisis, injured, mentally ill, stoners high on drugs, and gang members for whom machismo is the ideal strut.
No wonder some fail, fall back on jock role plays, or become cynical.
The report found inadequate training in the police for management and appointment and staffing processes. Sometimes police need what’s called a ‘‘direct and demand’’ mentality, much like the military, as in the Christchurch mass killings. But not always, which can be a problem.
We probably expect too much of people working at the coalface of horror. They need to be selfprotective at the time, but afterwards may crumple. Real men don’t cry. Only they do, and possibly they should.