Fickle Cycle

There’s a few unsettling stories today relating to police misconduct. The first is a report from Amnesty International finding that “the de facto impunity of law enforcement officials in France is unacceptable” after multiple and regular misconduct get looked past. This follows a report from the same organisation highlighting a pattern of excessive force and misconduct from Greek police. These reports shouldn’t go unnoticed and I hope France, Greece and countries around the world start to realise that police aren’t above the law.

This applies to New Zealand as well where there’s been multiple cases of police misconduct over just the past year. The problem arrises with police feeling physically insecure (and thus more weapons given to them) and more powerful and superior to the NZ public. National seems to be intent on increasing this problem through laws that allow DNA sampling simply because of a suspicion of a crime as well as other unjust law and order policy (including a three strikes and you’re out policy that breaks both international and NZ laws on human rights). Policies like these only give a greater sense of power to the “just” police who gain support by an angry populace wanting vengence.

The second story of note is the unfolding events at the G20 summit, including violence between protesters and police that left one protester dead. I am alarmed at the lack of information on this dead protester. Every media report simply states that a man died after “collapsing”. Collapsing from what? Heart attack? Police attack? The police are doing nothing to help their poor reputation (especially bad in the UK) by giving out so little information as to what happened here. The police force in every single country should be protecting the safety of the people, not the governments that supposedly represent them.