The public routinely believe that those who enforce the law know the law. They cannot seem to accept that uniformed, fully warranted constables have no proper training and act upon custom and policy, rather than actual law. This article examines this problem and explains why you should never rely upon a police officer’s interpretation of the law.
Defective understanding
I have uploaded scores of videos to YouTube over the years that demonstrate just how ignorant the police are when it comes to basic facts of law. These videos depict police officers insisting that mere suspicion is a power to detain, that people doing no wrong must submit to questioning on the street, that you must prove your innocence upon demand, and that occupants of private dwellings must allow the police into their homes whenever they come knocking. Anyone who dares question an officer’s authority is treated as a criminal agitator deserving of further maltreatment.
Some of the utterances made by the police when justifying these abuses are so ridiculous that they make you wonder whether they are just sending themselves up.
In one video, police officers arrested a Christian preacher outside a Tube station for ‘offending Islam’ and ‘being too loud’, which they interpreted, quite literally, as a breach of the peace. In another video, they search a man in the street for ‘giving the police evils’ and then insist that they have the power to search anyone they don’t like the look of.
There are many thousands of examples of this type of casual abuse of the law uploaded each year to social media, giving the impression that most serving officers seem to get their legal education from Mumsnet. Yet still the public assume these to be isolated incidents, without realising that they are witnessing the general standard of police understanding of the law, not the exceptions
Police-made law
The vast majority of the public, and many police officers themselves, see the police not just as enforcers of law, but as the embodiment of it. The public take for granted that the police know the limits of their authority and will act within them. Their legal acumen is rarely questioned, and somehow they are placed on a par with solicitors and barristers, even though law enforcement training is brief by comparison.
To become a criminal defence solicitor takes, on average, six years of intensive legal training. Joining the police under a Police Constable Degree Apprenticeship (PCDA) allows you to become a warranted, uniformed officer from day one. Training is on the job over a three-year period, much of which is devoted to the police’s own brand of ideological groupthink: ‘understanding attitudes, behaviours, ethics and values; developing community cohesion skills; undergoing race and diversity training; learning social issues, and familiarisation with community safety partnerships’. Training in actual law is fleeting and superficial.
Their real training begins when they are assigned to a police officer mentor, who teaches them the police way of doing things: habit, convenience, custom, and force policy. This is something I call police-made law, a corrupted set of practices that bears little resemblance to the actual law, all of which is designed to make it easier for the police to get things done.
Police custom
Most police work is repetitive: being called out to the same offenders and dealing with the same low-level crimes, such as public order, harassment, common assault, theft, and vandalism. Officers learn these offences by repetition, not by academic training. Most police officers cannot even correctly cite the legislation that creates these offences and can only, at best, understand the most basic of principles behind them.
Not that this seems to matter, as they are rarely questioned on the actual law and meet little resistance from the public. Police officers become accustomed to people doing as they are told, even when the officer operates outside their powers. Those who resist or ask questions are met with further abuses of power. This is because the police see their aims as trumping civil rights. In their opinion, everybody is obliged to assist the police and the only people who ask questions, or attempt to uphold their rights, are criminals.
Invariably, the officer relies upon the public being as clueless about the law as the officer is. They also know that most people will never make the effort to complain, and those who do will find the force quickly siding with the police.
It is the public’s overall unwillingness to challenge the police, their lack of understanding of their rights and the automatic presumption that the police are more likely than not operating within the law, that emboldens the police to abuse the law as casually as they do.
‘Am I being detained?’
In ‘Copper Stopper: How to Protect Yourself From Law Enforcement’, I set out four golden principles for keeping yourself safe from the abuses of law enforcement. These principles are so fundamental that I place them right at the start, as they are the ones most likely to protect you in the vast majority of encounters with law enforcement. However, in theory, there is a fifth golden principle: never take legal advice from the police.
This stands to reason if you accept the fact that the police’s understanding of the law is deficient and distorted. And yet, still the public insist on asking the police for legal advice:
‘Do I have to give you my details?’
‘Am I being detained?’
‘Have I committed an offence?’
‘Do I have to answer?’
These are questions that invite misinformation by way of reply. By all means, if it appears that the police are abusing their powers, ask them to state what laws they are acting under, as any admissions or misstatements they make could be used against them when pursuing legal action later on. But never, ever rely upon a police officer’s interpretation of the law. They are not lawyers. They are public servants. Law is a by-product of what they do. If anything, the law is treated as an occupational hazard by the police, not an objective.
If you are foolish enough to ask the police to clarify the law, you are inviting them to misdirect, or even outwardly lie to you. The police will only tell you what they think the law is, or, more likely, what they want it to be at that moment. The one thing they will never admit is that they do not know. To do so would make them look negligent and weak, as well as diminish their authority.
If you want to know what the actual law is, get informed independently. You may be surprised at just how different it is from what you believed it to be, and from what the police insist that it is.
