Merrick, I was just reading this on Norlonto (prompted by Paul's posting):
http://norlonto.net/index.cfm/action/articles.view/itemID/49
and I was very struck by the way your opinion of the police seems to have hardened in the time between that article and the recent "Why I Hate The Police" piece. In the Norlonto article you say that "one of the big lessons of the Newbury bypass campaign in 1996 has been to see the person inside the uniform". You describe how security guards and police officers ended up as protestors, and stress the humanity of those wearing the uniform. This is something CND always made a point of emphasising at the Faslane demos - that we should appeal to the humanity of the police, because that way we could hope to win them over (a WPC I spoke to there once admitted that she agreed with our cause but could not join us without losing her job - police officers aren't allowed to be members of CND, ridiculously). Yet I find this hard to square with the "Why I Hate The Police" article - surely if we write every police officer off as morally bankrupt then we've stopped seeing their humanity? In the Norlonto piece you say that "a lot of people joined the police cos they thought it *would* help the community and the country" - a very different position to seeing them all as morally bankrupt. I wonder what has caused your opinion to change? Or perhaps it's not changed, and I'm missing something?
Personally I think that the appeal to the police's humanity has got to be worth it, even if it only wins over one in a million of them.
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