The policeman's bifurcation

It is a sad fact of modern life that the police are increasingly playing a pivotal role in society.  But that role is complex; the police force is the ultimate Janus, facing simultaneously in two opposite directions - one half in the light, the other in darkness.  As the interface between a society which mandates power, and the criminal element within it which both subverts that power and yet validates the profession's existence, the police walk daily a knife edge between two modes: the nice and the nasty - a bipolarity recognised and even formalised in the double act used for interrogating suspects.

The nice police-man and woman are the archetypal Mr and Ms Plod.  They are part of the community, they care about people.  They help little old ladies across the road, they comfort lost children, their presence in the street stands as a visible embodiment of society's stability and structure.  More realistically, the nice policeman is understanding when somebody smashes up your car; he is sympathetic, helpful, practical.  Similarly it is always the nice policeman who turns up when you have been burgled; he or she has seen this sadness before, but is genuinely saddened again that the innocent have suffered once more, that the fundamental order of society has been upset, literally and metaphorically, by this intrusion into a private space.  They emerge at such times as hitherto unsuspected good neighbours, friends even.  Like parents, they know what to say, they know what to do.

The nice police are the face turned towards the light, the kindly countenance which greets society when the latter encounters the other side.  But the face turned to that other side belongs to the nasty police.  It is the countenance of an stern parent, of an angry and jealous god.

It is what you see when you are the law-breaker or when you might be the law-breaker.  For example, if you are caught speeding, be you ever so model a citizen in every other respect, you are treated as a criminal, and meet only the hard face of the men and women who must protect the rest of society from such manifest scum.  It is their duty to the necessary fiction of the remaining perfect law-abiders to treat you harshly: you are the dark other, the threat to the order which must be extirpated to protect that order to which until a few moments go you yourself belonged, but from which now you stand exiled, a new, sinful Adam cast out from paradise.

It is this black and whiteness of their view which is terrifying: there are no greys, no mitigations, no second chances.  Also frightening is the suddenness of the change when it happens, and its irreversibility.  For the public, this means that within every police man and woman, there is an imminent bifurcation; it is as if they were all living, walking bombs, primed to explode from niceness into nastiness.
This unstated fact of their conceptual hair-trigger is a major element in the power of the police.  Go even a fraction too far and the Janus face is turned.  The implication for the normally law-abiding is clear: the choice is yours nice or nasty; but nasty is nearer than you think. 

(10.12.89)

Index