Who guards the guardians?

In the last days, Spain has again done something repressive (big surprise) by jailing a rap singer. 

Let's not focus on that right now, although it's worth mentioning Spain is the country that has the biggest number of artist in prison. Yeah, ahead of Iran or Saudi Arabia or other places that are repressive dictatorships. And the European Union is not doing anything about it. 

Anyway, there has been protests in defence of freedom of expression, in Barcelona and other cities of Spain. And the police has answered with charges. In front of that, protestors have created fires and barricades to defend themselves, and now the main TV channels and newspapers that support the elites are crying for burned trash containers and making it equal than being beaten with sticks or losing an eye, something that has happened to a protestor when she was shot in the face with a special foam bullet.And I'll redirect attention to my other post of Declaration of War, and say that they expect people to just silently comply to everything bad and we're past that phase, and you can either support the repressed or be part of the problem.

In Valencia for example you could see that a protest was ongoing in a peaceful manner and police with riot gear just went against it at full force all of a sudden. And actually these images are similar to what happened during 1st of October in Catalunya when the referendum took place. 

In all these, police can do whatever they want. There's never any repercussions for them. They're supposed to avoid hitting heads, to avoid shooting in the face, to avoid creating panics or making situations more dangerous, they're not supposed to insult or say racist or sexist crap, etc. And they do, and nothing happens. 

Police is a problem. Society does need some type of mechanism to guarantee that you will not be robbed, raped, murdered, attacked,etc. and when these things do happen there needs to be a mechanism to follow them up, find the authors and deal with them, by re-educating/re-inserting them or, if that's not possible, locking them up. Society does need some type of protection against abuse. In most countries, it has been decided that there's a security force, like a small army, that should take care of that, the police.

However, then you have several other problems. First of the issues is what is a crime. There's evident ones, like if you are on a street and randomly decide to murder the next person that crosses you. Yes, that's a crime. But then, there's a lot of grey areas, like what if you were defending yourself from said murder and ended up murdering the attacker? It was self-defence, right? Well, some countries decide this is allowed, and some others say this is still a crime. And that's just an example that things are never that clear-cut and usually they need to be analysed in detail to understand context. Then there's the matter than robbing a food shop because you don't have food is considered a crime but raising rent to the point where your tenants cannot afford to eat is not, which also shows that crime can be quite subjective and the big powers can make it so their activities, while more damaging to society, are considered not a crime. 

Second of the issues thought, is that, who's going to check that this force is not committing crimes themselves? This is a very old philosophical question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who guards the guardians? If a police officer is a piece of shit that hits his wife, their comrades and friends will gladly stop him from doing so and arrest him, or will they cover for him? If the police decides to beat people up for fun and revenge, who's going to stop them from doing this? If the police is full of bastards, how do we clean  them from the system if we need the same police to arrest them or protect us from them?

In theory police itself should try to find its worse elements inside it and remove them, but why should they? They're being trained to support each other, trust each other and work together. Especially in sections like the riot police, they're trained to act like an army, like soldiers, and you cannot expect that this training does not produce a certain brainwash against reporting your fellow officers. Plus there's the fact that most people that join these sections are more than happy about not reporting them even before the training, but we'll get back to that too.

So, what are solutions to this? Sometimes police departments have what in movies call "Internal Affairs", which is a side that investigates police officers themselves and, of course, in most cultural works they're painted as "the bad guys" from preventing "good officers" from doing their job. Only that will tell you that they're probably not popular if they work well, and that they have huge pressures against them. Plus in the end they're part of the same force, they may have started working with the same people and have friends in there. 

In Spain, I'm not sure internal affairs exist, I think most forces just investigate themselves, but there's a curious kind-of alternative: We have different branches of forces. We have national police, sometimes regional police, and then we also have Guardia Civil, which is like a different force entirely that works also at national level. This solution was initially implemented to have an alternative force from the military, for all the wrong reasons (at the time the military had turned more progressive). 

This idea could work, if implemented properly: You have two forces that are independent, with different uniforms, different training, different circles. You divide the forced by region, so depending on the region one applies or the other, and you then make any crime that one does to be investigated by the other, plus having each other in checks so no one gets corrupted or does something bad, some type of friendly rivalry for being the best and more clean. Since they're not connected or part of each other, this would reduce the feeling of "betraying one of us" that lots of them seem to have. Spain hasn't implemented this correctly, of course, but it's something that could help. 

However, Police has also another problem, a third one, that is in the end the root of everything that's wrong with it: The profiles of the people that want to join and are accepted. In theory and in an ideal world, police should be formed by people that want to defend society from bad elements that live in it. Compassionate strong people, with a high moral compass, that even if they're not a judge, they can decide when someone is worth arresting or if it's better, for example, to pay for their meal once, or just warn, or well, really understand the situation and do what's best for society in the long run.

That's not the case at all, at least in Spain and in plenty of other places. Here the main focus is to find people that will obey commands. That's the most important detail. Then, people that will uphold laws regardless of if they're unjust or not. So it's better if they're not too bright or moral or they may see the problems in persecuting poverty without addressing the root causes. They have to be loyal people, loyal to their partners and bosses, not loyal to real legality or morality, but to the force. And in the case of the riot police, they have to be people that are happy to hit others. 

So, who then applies to these positions? Well, bullies. Fascists. Military fanatics. Violent people. And then you end up with forces made up of sexist neo-nazis that are quite happy to beat these progressive protesters, grope women as they arrest them and bully pacific people into submission. Or they're quite happy to ignore the openly neo-nazi that works with them because he's a "nice guy" and they have beers together later and he's a companion. And then it happens that when real dangers to society, when actual fascists are marching around saying we should kill all jews and leftists, these police officers are happy to defend them, because they're their friends. Hell, in Spain lots of times with different forces, in these fascist marches one force is defending the other force, because the other is marching but without the uniform, not officially.

And it's not me saying this. It's lots of ex-cops, ex-military, ex-security forces. There are people that joined these professions with real care and, when they protested about the situation, were directly expelled because they didn't "fit in" and such things. Which means that any good people left in there may disagree with these things but they're not willing to say it out loud either and accept it as something that just happens inside police. 

The power that these positions offer corrupts, and attracts corrupted and violent people, apart from people that just want to defend others. And for very long the elites have accepted the bad ones because it was useful for them to have mindless violent guard dogs that they could send to anyone that bothered them.

Not every police officer is like this and it also depends on what they do, if they investigate murders, are just information analysts, or are patrolling or riot police. However, there's way too many, it's not just a few, it's a big majority inside that prevents any real change. Most Spanish police worker unions are openly supporters of VOX, for example. Another example: a lot of domestic violence cases are caused by police officers themselves, in a proportion much superior to any other profession.

Recently two police officers in a bar decided to say sexual things to a 14-year-old, and when his dad protested they put him in the hospital. This case was so evident, so bad, that they have been arrested, but we'll see if they're really condemned. And when a similar thing happened in Euskadi, the police officers said the others were terrorists and they're currently in jail for terrorism, when they just defended themselves in a bar fight. 

The worst offenders are Riot Police, as I said. Riot police should be there to defend us from, for example, the fascists groups that were roaming the streets recently and hitting people. But the reality is that it's impossible for them to do so, for the same reason Spiderman can never be seen saving Peter Parker. Riot police shot live ammo against protesters, after the 14-year-old incident I mentioned before caused locals to go to the police station to protest. Riot police shot to the face a girl and she lost an eye, this week. Riot police hit people voting on 1st of October during the referendum. And riot police have again and again been abusive, violent, brutal without reason, not following laws themselves at all. And they've faced very little repercussion, or even being awarded for their "brave" service of hitting people in groups while wearing full-body armour.

Riot police as it is, should be disbanded in Spain. And the profile and philosophy of  police needs to be reassessed in order to have proper democracy, otherwise we'll keep having huge problems with them. 

Any party that says they're progressive should defend that and do it if they have the chance. Otherwise, they're not.