The question of how to deal with truly violent people is something which divides society.
But dangerous naivety isn’t the answer.
The incident involving armed police at the Hilltown multis on Monday made me think of all those people who are prepared to maintain your safety and mine by heading into the unknown to face down uncharted dangers.
I thought of George Orwell’s quote.
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men (and women) stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
It’s a salutary reminder to the soft hearted – and soft headed. That others are prepared to face the dangers that they won’t or wouldn’t.
At the front line of dealing with the dangerous and the violent are police officers and other emergency service workers, whose jobs require them to place themselves at risk to protect us.
The armed police who raced to the Hilltown multis did not know what they were dealing with when the call went up.
But they and their colleagues go willingly into threatening situations and face perils which few of us can envisage
Police understand violence better than all the armchair pundits
The question of how to deal with truly violent people is something which divides society. But dangerous naivety isn’t the answer.
The world is full of amateur psychologists and, even worse ex cops, pensioned off and free from dealing with menacing individuals, who are happy to throw those who have to handle the dangerous and the violent under a bus, with their ‘hindsight for hire’ opinions.
The scale of violence – and the casual ease with which some perpetrators employ it – can be horrific and indiscriminate, as seen in recent incidents in London and Liverpool where innocent bystanders outside a church and in a pub were shot.
Few of us will ever have to face drink or drug crazed individuals wielding knives or other weapons, as emergency services and police often do.
And I have little time for those who have no solutions other than infantile posturing about how to confront and deal with the violent in society.
These people are clueless about the callous and vicious threats posed by some malevolent individuals.
They offer pound shop theories on how to handle situations which they’d run a mile from themselves.
But they expect someone in a police uniform or a doctor or nurse in an A&E department to accept the threat of potential harm in their job.
Others are ready to respond to threats of violence
The grim realities of violence can be gauged in conversations with those who face it as a daily occupational hazard.
Paramedics, A&E staff, fire-fighters, security workers, and others deal with the very worst in folk, who are free of any self-imposed limits of restrained behaviour.
There’s widespread and blissful ignorance, for example, regarding the effects of drugs in the ferocious behaviour of some offenders.
I spoke to someone I know who worked security on pub doors.
His tale of five bouncers trying to control a drug-addled individual bent on havoc, but weighing in at half the size of each of those trying to restrain him was almost laughable. Only it wasn’t.
The wee ned may have weighed in like a wet fish. But he posed similar dangers to a great white shark, biting, kicking, scratching, and threatening them with a weapon.
Having ingested concoctions which dulled his body’s pain receptors, making him impervious to the effects of attempted restraint, and giving him inordinate strength relative to body weight and size, he posed a serious threat to both bouncers and customers.
Paranoia fuelled by drugs plus drink creates a clear and present danger for anyone in the vicinity of such folk.
Ultimately violent offenders can often only be restrained by controlled violence to keep others safe from the risk they pose.
An in the heat of battle, where serious risk of injury is present for those trying to keep order and safety, controlled violence isn’t an exact science.
But in febrile and menacing situations I stand with those who stand ready to do violence on our behalf.
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