Where is the Dignity?

A Christian Perspective on the Policing of Protest

Photo: pro.corbis.com

There is a general assumption that as a Christian, one must respect police officers and do everything they say. As a protester, there is an assumption that the police are scum, that they are merely supporting an injustice-ridden state, and that they are a barrier to progress. But as a radical Christian, I have been wondering where I stand on this issue for some time.

I don’t think anyone who has encountered large numbers of riot police can have missed several key factors about them. They are monotonous, they are usually very stern, if not angry, and they struggle to communicate. I find that there is something decidedly evil about them; an almost demonic spirit that oozes out from their uniforms. Even conventional police, when carrying out so called ‘public order’ activities, begin to show these characteristics.

Perhaps it is their uniforms which are, in a way, dehumanising them. Something of God in them has gone, replaced by the state’s stamp of approval; the decision to grant them power over humanity. They have been chosen to remove liberty from the rest of us; theirs is a role which forces indignity upon those around them. But they themselves have lost something of their dignity too, in choosing to enforce and reinforce the injustices of the state they ‘represent’.

‘Public order’ is an odd concept, and certainly one which I feel uncomfortable about. One might hope that this order which is enforced is similar to Godly order. But I find increasingly that it is the order conceived of by man, inspired not by a desire to make the world free and enjoyable, but to make it serve the greed-inspired designs of an self-ordained elite, themselves lacking in dignity as a result of their self consuming desire to subjugate the rest of humanity to their lustful wishes. (Apologies for overkill in the deadly sin department!)

The monotony, sternness and anger which they present when they line up shoulder to shoulder is definitely not of God. God didn’t create monotony, God is not inherently angry and God is not a killjoy. In short, no matter how convinced they may have become otherwise, these riot police are not experiencing ‘life in all its abundance’, the joy, the myriad changes and variations or the affirmation of the smiles of those around them (just try smiling at them for a response!).

When I think of riot police, somehow, I just can’t get away from that verse in Ephesians 6 (v12, in fact), which talks about our struggle as Christians; not against flesh and blood, but against rulers, authorities and dark spiritual powers. In this way, I’ve come to understand that God can’t be calling on me to physically attack police officers; that would hurt the human beneath the uniform. Instead, the command is to resist them in a way which undermines their authority, and the dark, all pervading vision of a society which perpetuates its own unjust order.

If I disobey a police officer’s instructions, it isn’t simply because I don’t want to do as they say, to comply with the justice which they are trying to protect. It is also because I don’t want them to be in the position they are in. With no sense of perversion, I want to rip off the uniform and reveal the true human within it. I recognise something within them which is intrinsically good; they are after all made in the image of a good and loving God. I want to see them restored to full dignity, as humans free of the chains (the ‘uniform’) which constricts them and moulds them into agents of an inhumane state. To comply with them would simply be to reinforce their role as the dehumanised minions of an inhumane state.

Graham Martin