Golly Gosh!
Irreverent jottings from Staff Officer Stitchley.
A great deal of publicity has recently been given to a case in which a young man who repeatedly swore at police officers who were searching him for drugs was arrested for his swearing, rather than his possession of any drugs, but in court was eventually found not guilty of either.
It looks as if swearing isn’t an offence of itself, unless it causes harassment, alarm, or distress, which didn’t in this case because the presumably ‘robust’ officers, friends of the offender and passers-by weren’t considered offended by the use of an increasingly deployed swear word.
Bugger! Sorry! Anyway, it might not have been than one.
This is a very different situation from the days of my Probationary Service in the early 1970s, when inebriated and disorderly citizens were routinely arrested for being ‘drunk and refusing to fight’, although they were then routinely charged with something else that existed somewhere in the statute books. So? Have times changed? Is it no longer what is said that matters, but how it is heard? What are we to do? Swear carefully! Try not to listen? Try to listen spitefully?
The USA has, not for the first time, failed to bring much clarity into this important and sensitive issue. A Rapper by the name of ‘Afroman’ has successfully defended himself against seven sheriffs who had sued him for releasing songs and videos that mocked them after they carried out a raid on his home which failed to find any evidence of his being involved in either drugs or kidnapping. I have watched cowboy films for many years, but didn’t know that there could be as many as seven sheriffs in one town, but there you go. These seven had requested £2.9 million damages for “humiliation, ridicule, mental distress, embarrassment and loss of reputation”. Afroman had responded with a series of successful videos inspired by a deputy accused of eyeing a cake in his kitchen and accusing other officers of a range of personal and sexual transgressions. Afroman has also claimed that he has a constitutional right to make artistic and critical content about government officials, and those officials can’t use courts to silence criticism because it hurt their feelings, that there’s a certain amount of abuse and intimidation that you have to take, it’s part of the duties of the job, it ‘goes with the cloth’. Maybe it’s all for the best? I don’t know. I suppose that I joined the police knowing that I would be abused, and believing that I could do something about it. I think I was right then. I think I might have become wrong now.
Maybe the answer lies before us? Defendants who misbehave in court are swiftly and firmly dealt with, they are admonished, restrained, removed, punished, swiftly and effectively, within the court. Is it too much to ask that police officers on the streets are entitled to the same protection as members of the Judiciary inside the courts? It is? Oh. Sorry! Let me go free!
Yours,
Stitch
stitchley@policeprofessional.com
@SOStitchley
