Ella Marie

There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don’t have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren’t lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

In Britain between 1998 and 2009, there were at least 333 deaths in police custody, 87 of them after restraint by officers. Not a single officer was convicted. Of all the more and less unsubtle ways young Londoners — those not from Chelsea, from Bloomsbury; those not rich — are told that they are not terribly important, none are as overt or as cruel as this.

Standing so straight on a raised dais, in so immaculate a uniform that he looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the Metropolitan Police Service’s new commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, tells the conference in an avuncular voice about his plan for “total policing.” He is enthusiastic but nebulous. Details are vague. He enthuses about large forces zooming into small areas and clamping down on minor infractions. He mentions uninsured vehicles.

Helen Shaw, co-director of Inquest, an organization dedicated to the investigation of contentious deaths in official custody, has a different understanding. She suspects that total policing will mean “a much more aggressive police presence, a stance that’s more aggressive, and more about fear.” Indeed, Hogan-Howe says he wants “to put fear into the heart of criminals.” Shaw is more stark: “We think we’ll see more deaths.”

The police have not had a good couple of years. Constituencies not traditionally antipathetic have been shocked by its fervent enthusiasm for “kettling,” corralling demonstrators tightly without charge, food, water or release, for hours. The brutal policing of student protests on Dec. 9, 2010, left one young man, Alfie Meadows, in the hospital with brain injuries. At that same protest, the police hauled Jody McIntyre, a 20-year-old with cerebral palsy, from his wheelchair, dragging him across the ground. At a demonstration on April 1 the previous year, an unresisting and uninvolved newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, was hit by the police and died shortly after. And then Mark Duggan, about whom each rumor initially leaked — that he shot first, that he shot at all — was shown one by one to be untrue.