What we didn’t learn from the Manchester Airport police ‘attack’

There’s a famous 1986 TV advert for the Guardian (remember when newspapers had TV adverts?) which shows you footage of a rough-looking skinhead pelting down the street and appearing to grab at the briefcase of a startled-looking city gent. Just as the viewer is digesting this scene and drawing the conclusion that suits his or her prejudices, the screen cut away to another, wider shot: the young man, as we discover, wasn’t trying to mug the older man, but was wrestling him out of the way of a pallet of bricks collapsing overhead. Despite the improbable, Wile E. Coyote quality of the imagined peril, it was a cute idea for an ad. We read into a snippet what we choose to read. 

Had that ad been screened in the age of social media, dollars to donuts the first half of the clip would still be circulating among the anti-skinhead-o-sphere, with no number of forlorn ‘community notes’ or fact-checks making any difference to its virality. Perhaps the actor who played the skinhead, or someone who looked a bit like him on their Facebook page, would have had their house burned down.

Just look at what happened, for instance, to the horrible, messy story of the attack at Manchester Airport. A clip of the incident last week showed a police officer appearing to first kick and then stamp on the head of a suspect who had already been tasered and was flat on the ground. Much outrage followed. Then a longer clip from CCTV emerged – showing the man and his brother viciously attacking the armed police officers just a few seconds before – and much counter-outrage followed. The narrative spun on a pin.

Manchester Airport last night This can not go unchallenged. This is absolutely brutal and disgusting. Make this go viral

These officers need to be fired pic.twitter.com/OyVkQapnbV

— Imam Ibrahim M Noonan of AMA Ireland & NI (@ImamNoonan) July 24, 2024

First the ‘progressive’ internet had bet big, and with shocking irresponsibility, on the idea that here was a classic incident of unprovoked Islamophobic brutality from an institutionally racist, quasi-fascist police force. Then, with the emergence of the second clip, the ‘we want our country back’ mob were crowing as if thoroughly vindicated.

‘These animals need locking up,’ thought Reform MP Lee Anderson. Threatening to take ‘an army of patriots to Manchester/Rochdale’, Tommy Robinson demanded the reinstatement of the police officer who kicked and stamped on the man’s head, and charges brought against these ‘Muslim thugs’: ‘No more 2 tier policing,’ he added – implying, I suppose, that a kick in the head is the sort of shamefully soft treatment woke coppers give to minority suspects.

It seems to me a paradigm instance of how fatuous, and how dangerous, looking at everything through a culture wars prism can be. Some of the various reactions to this incident, in their most strident forms, made something of the man’s Muslim faith – not because (as far as I know) there’s any concrete indication that it had to do with either his attacking a police officer or being attacked by one, but because it allows us to make an incident of weird and horrible particularity into something representative: that’s the thing that slots him into one of two pre-made categories we enjoy getting outraged about.

Can we, maybe, take a deep breath and say (with the excellently level-headed Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham, who points out that ‘everyone who’s having their say, nobody has got all of the facts. Nobody is in possession of the complete picture’) that this is a situation that looks complicated, and about which we the public don’t yet have all the information? That it’s at least possible that this ugly scuffle at an airport doesn’t – except in the online reaction – represent anything at all about our wider politics or culture? And that we can speculate all we like about what police officers might need to do in the moment, what pressures they are under, or what provocations anyone involved in the altercation was subjected to – but that we don’t, in fact, know.

Can we agree that it’s possible to hold two thoughts in our head at once? The first being that if you physically attack armed police officers without any apparent provocation (it’s reported that a woman police officer had her nose broken) you can expect to get a violent response, and you will have thoroughly deserved one. The second being that kicking and stamping on the head of an already restrained suspect on the ground looks, at least on the face of it, like suboptimal policing. It’s not utopian or woke to hope for police officers to have higher standards of behaviour than the criminals they arrest.

In reacting with such powerful certainty to partial information people tell on themselves. They show a deep incuriosity about what happened. And by making the story one of ‘police brutality’ or ‘inhuman scum who deserve anything they get’ they knock all of the particularity out of it. They cram it into a pre-existing narrative that suits their preconceptions and agreeably inflames their own tribe. Tommy Robinson saying ‘it’s exactly as we knew it would be’ seems to me rather telling. Knew how?

So, as Andy Burnham says, the wise thing to do might be to take a step back and wait till all the information is in. And I know it’s a bit against the spirit of the social media through which we now conduct our political arguments, but we could withhold judgment, just for a little bit – or even leave judgment to others better qualified.

There are two ways, it seems to me, of doing this. On the one hand, we could mount an internet howl-round demanding that all bodycam and CCTV footage be released so that a million people called Barry07985 can repost the bits they find exciting and share their instantly acquired expertise in crisis policing and restraint techniques for armed units.

Or, on the other, we could let the Independent Office for Police Conduct and the Greater Manchester Police – both of whom have a bit more experience than Barry07985 of actual policing and, what’s more, have powers to interview witnesses and access police disciplinary records – to conduct a patient and thorough investigation into what happened and draw a measured conclusion. That, after all, being what they are for. Me, I favour that course of action, even if Plan A would be more exciting and generate more clicks for Elon.