Riots and Baguettes

Rioting in France continued over several days.  There will be many experts giving their reasons why things have come to this.  Having family living in France, I get another view of what is going on behind the scenes and it’s frighteningly similar to the UK.  Don’t think for a minute that anti-police feeling, knife crime, immigration, a lack of trust in their government and democracy as a whole is just a UK concern.  It’s the same far and wide, especially in Europe.  More and more people are throwing their hands up in despair at the current situation, but I comfort myself in the fact there has always been some crisis going on in this country since I’ve been alive.  The minor detail of the cold war was far closer to Armageddon than even we thought at the time as we casually considered which kitchen table cloth to use when hiding the family under the table for protection if the nuclear bomb did drop.

I suspect the biggest change has been the internet.  The internet has really not been kind to us when we think how algorithms ensure we see only what we want to see and hides what we don’t currently believe, but now we don’t even get the chance to debate without thinking the person who disagrees with us is some isolated, extreme crazy person.  Huge corporations down to the ordinary person trying to scratch a living, live in fear of saying the wrong thing and being cancelled, so most tip toe around sensitive social issues and either don’t contribute or just go with the masses where it’s safe.  What a sad situation to be in, and the police can have something to answer for this too.

All this can lead to why I suspect we continue to have riots in hot summer months every few years; normally over one individual who crossed paths with the police and ended up dead.  The problems with cancelling and click bait means an individual who is a career criminal who took too many chances and was eventually killed by a police officer, with or without good reason, is put up as an angel.  Their previous victims of vicious and violent crimes are forgotten as they are no longer thought of as relevant.  The flawed human reaction by the police officer is dismissed as all respect has been undermined and reduced to them being considered nothing but the problem itself.  Blame the police.  No one likes authority, right?

In order to stop these things from escalating, there need to be more leaders with moral courage to stand up for those who keep us safe and secure.  They may have to conform with legal restraints on discussing the case, but they should publicly say what they are legally able to.  They can contradict the false narratives of someone having been an angel when their criminal record says otherwise without going into specifics and they need to stop undermining their police officers whilst robustly dealing with officers who don’t deserve to wear the uniform, too.  Officers have long given up on being put before the criminals.   Too many people believe the narrative of all officers being corrupt and it has to be put right, if not to stop riots, at least to raise the heads of those facing the fire bombs.