The cop riot

So, first things first, a big congrats to Angus Taylor. Fantastic. Great move. Well done, Angus. We’ll let him cook for a bit and see how that goes.

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It’s a busy time here – I’ve got the next Axis of Time novel coming out next week and a lot of buttons to push on the ol’ publish-o-matic first, but I wanted to get down some quick-n-dirty thoughts about what happened in Sydney earlier this week. Because, as best I can tell, what we saw was a cop riot.

Thousands of reasonably well-behaved protesters turned up to peacefully object to the presence of the Israeli president, and hundreds of New South Wales police officers attacked them. People are understandably upset about this, maybe even surprised.

Perhaps because I grew up in Queensland in the ‘80s, I’m more often surprised when police don’t attack demonstrators. So I’ve had that familiar feeling this week of watching people come to a difficult truth: when you see a rally or a demonstration turn ugly, it’s almost always because the cops decided that’s how it was gonna go.

Likewise, if and when the cops decide there’s nothing wrong with your Nazi cosplaydate, everything will run smoothly.

Most people don’t think of the police as their enemy, because for most people, they’re not. Even my friend Pete, once upon a time a paid-up member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, forever banging on about armed revolution, was shocked the first time he was arrested at a street demo. He testified under oath, told the truth as he recalled it, only to have, as he put it, “some nice young police constable step into the witness box and lie his fucking arse off for the next hour” to secure a conviction for a bunch of stuff Pete totally had not done.

For many, the worst police oppression they’ll experience is a speeding ticket they didn’t think they deserved, because that big curve coming out of the airport has always been ninety, and that stupid truck got in the way of the temporary speed sign the cops erected, dropping it back to sixty, and what the fuck was even the idea of that and anyway people are in a hurry, officer.

It’s a different story for marginalised groups with long histories of state oppression, of course. They instinctively recognise the role of the state’s heavily armed agents in keeping the boot on their necks.

I remember my first real moment of surprise, covering some protests at the University of Queensland for Rolling Stone in 1989. The campus radio station, 4ZZZ, had been attacked by a newly elected right-wing student union. A couple of hundred students staged a sit-in, which turned into a riot when the police arrived.

I had a press pass and followed the cops when they stormed in. Right at the back of the line, there were two probationary constables, and they’d been whipped into a fucking frenzy by their colleagues. They charged in, desperately looking for someone to kick the jelly out of, but all the protesters were already subdued. One of them, almost levitating with rage, spied an old rotary phone on a desk, snarled, grabbed it and smashed it to the floor.

Take that, hippy phone!

It was one of the weirdest things I’d ever seen.

And I think it goes some way to explaining Sydney. Cops are like any gang; they’re tribal. An attack on one is an attack on all. With a couple of their members horribly wounded during the Bondi massacre, they would’ve still been seething at the Herzog demo. It’s not rational, but I’m guessing that in their tribal rage, some of them at least almost certainly looked at the protesters as somehow siding with the attackers.

But on top of that, Chris Minns’ Labour government (with a little help from Albo) set everything up for a clash. By imploring protesters beforehand to remain “calm and peaceful,” they were already framing the event as potentially violent – preparing the battlespace. So the cops carried their tribal rage into a confrontation where the political leadership had already predetermined the likelihood of a violent outcome.

They created the perfect conditions for a cop riot. I’m not gonna go into pulling apart individual instances of police targeting vulnerable citizens and dogpiling them, because better journalists than me have, somewhat surprisingly, already done that work.

I say ‘surprisingly’ because more often than not, the media plays a role in both creating the conditions that give rise to cop riots and then explaining away the violence as a necessary corrective to anarchy.

That failed in this instance, for the same reasons that it failed in Minnesota when the Trump regime attempted to cast citizen resistance as domestic terrorism. That bullshit was much easier to do when news channels were quite literally just two or three channels. But when you have thousands of people all filming what happened and uploading the unfiltered video, it’s a lot harder to control the narrative. Everybody can see the truth of what happened.

The cops turned up looking for a riot, and they got what they were looking for. And thanks to thousands of people filming them, this time, everyone else can see the truth of it too, unfiltered by editorial choice.

Of course, none of this would have happened if Albanese had not brainspasmed and invited the representative of a genocidal aggressor to pop in for tea and sympathy.

But anyway, apologies for these half-formed thoughts. I really do have to go get this book together. And next week, in my sneaky way, I’ll write an essay about reading or something as a very poorly disguised sales funnel.