Getting Off the Pot

By AM Saturday, March 28, 2009

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Seems some people from widely varying perspectives, for their own reasons, have managed to get annoyed about my previous piece Against the Odds. Whether giving off about shaking the hands of PSNI members or claiming offence as a result of the rights of a 17-year old being defended against police abuse, the responses shared a common theme, a resentment of democratic sentiment.

I have purposefully chosen to highlight the following comment from someone posting as Mark because of the attitude it provides for furthering discussion. The comment is not selected because it is particularly insightful; it is not. Nor because Mark is a bigot or a fool; he seems neither. It is chosen because it is a concise political opinion situated at the opposite end of the spectrum from where I find myself. Subsequently, there is much in between the two positions that can be cultivated and explored in pursuit of a better comprehension of the issues involved rather than a better understanding by each of the other’s stance.

It is not my intention to home in on Mark but rather to use his suggestion as being representative of arguments out there that cannot be dismissed as being irrelevant or without substantial support. His advice is:

Sh*t or get off the pot Anthony. Either support peaceful democratic methods, which include co-operating with police investigations into murder, or don't. If the youth had fully co-operated with police after his arrest, there would have been no need for an extended period of detention without charge.

This is an authoritarian impulse masquerading as democratic discourse. The first challenge to a democratic tenet contained within it is the bias it shows against the rights of citizens in favour of a police already shown to have behaved illegally in its holding of some members of the public. The only people we can at present be sure have behaved illegally are not those in custody but those holding them in custody – the police. The courts have ruled against no one else – just the police.

In the ‘get off the pot perspective’ peaceful democratic methods are postulated as exclusively meaning an absolute requirement to cooperate with police investigation into murders by answering any questions police ask during interrogation. Nowhere is there the slightest understanding that it is a detained person’s democratic and legal right to remain silent. And these rights exist because the police are not to be trusted to behave legally. And in behaving illegally they undermine the democratic ethos. Yet it seems that this right, from the ‘get off the pot perspective’ is not in fact a right at all, merely something for the optics; there only to be broadcast to the wider world as evidence of British police best practice.

There is also, not very well shielded, within the ‘get off the pot perspective’ a typical presumption of guilt which has echoes of the old British maxim, ‘innocent until proven Irish.’ The only way to shorten the time of detention we are told is to cooperate. But to cooperate by disputing one’s involvement is likely to ensure a longer stay in custody as a means to squeezing out the confession the police seek to obtain. It is a long established view that the police instinctively presume guilty everyone they arrest. Why would they release early those they believe to be guilty? Is there anyone so naïve as to believe that a denial will lead to an ‘ok, on your way, mind how you go’ response? Only someone who has never undergone police interrogation. The democratic duty to cooperate in the ‘get off the pot’ perspective really means the authoritarian right to extract a confession.

Moreover, that perspective’ seems hopelessly blind to the tension that exists within the legislative system whereby a 17 year old youth is on the one hand considered too young to be identified, yet on the other not young enough to avoid being detained for anything up to 28 days, the most stringent application of detention procedures in the democratic world; a practice described by Mike Ritchie of the Committee for the Administration of Justice as outrageous. This must mean that Mr Ritchie too should get off the pot or face being branded a fellow traveller of those against peaceful democratic methods. When it gets to this point it becomes easy to see how ridiculously self-serving the argument in favour of more powers for the police and less for the detainee has become.

The pot we are asked to either foul or move off is one which sits atop the moral sewer of draconian legislation and police abuse. The stench it emits comes from decaying justice. Those able to sit on the pot indifferent to the putrescence it contains will inevitably add to it as they fill it with a pollution all of their own. Sitting on that pot causes a smell that suffocates the porous culture of civil liberties. The ‘get off the pot’ perspective is little more than an authoritarian assault on civil liberties and human rights. I want to ensure as much ethical distance between it and me lest it contaminates my thinking. If the pot fits …

Democracy is about strengthening rights of citizens within society, not usurping them. It includes empowering citizens against the state. It gives citizens rights against the police. Lest it is forgotten David Mamet hardly hit the wrong note when he intoned that: ‘Policemen so cherish their status as keepers of the peace and protectors of the public that they have occasionally been known to beat to death those citizens or groups who question that status.’