SO FAR, so good for the two Met police officers who gave a suspect a dose of boot leather to the head, after he (allegedly) stabbed two men in Golders Green, while already being pursued for an alleged knife attack earlier in the day.
I say this mindful of the ongoing trial after the clash between Muslim brothers and police officers at Manchester Airport, where there was an outbreak of mass hysteria after one officer also applied footwear to the cranium of his attacker and was promptly suspended. So far as I’ve seen, Met chief Mark Rowley hasn’t – yet – hung his Golders Green officers out to dry. Fingers crossed.
It’s easy to condemn from the side-lines and in these days of ubiquitous video capture, it’s perhaps understandable, lacking the overall context. It is at least for people not familiar with fight or flight, possibly the most elemental of human conditions. Run away and avoid harm, or stand and risk anything from a momentarily painful black eye to an untimely death? Fight or flight is possibly the reason modern mankind survives today and equally, in civilised societies like Britain’s (at least until recently), why a great many critics are unfamiliar with it.
On this occasion the social media response was pretty unanimous – attaboys, give him one for me! Given that the suspect was refusing to yield his knife and appeared to have just tried to kill two men, with apparent intent to keep on doing so, most citizens at increasing risk of being a victim of these street crazies would probably concur. Here’s a thought. Who’s to say that man wasn’t trying to detonate a suicide belt?
If I’m brutally honest I have a minor problem with the officers’ head-kicking that I saw on socials. Speaking as a rugby goal-kicker of modest note back in the day, I’d have preferred to see a longer backlift and accelerated follow through. But hey, I guess you can’t have everything – it was all in the heat of a moment after all. Fight or flight. But for sure he needed rendering incapable of inflicting any more damage. So well done, officers.
If you’ve not experienced imminent, unavoidable violence, it’s difficult to explain what happens to both your mind and body. Brain-frazzling, nerve-jangling, adrenaline-charged fear of imminent physical confrontation. Your heartbeat’s pounding, you may be sweating – I’ve seen men crying in anticipation of the onslaught, despite having conquered the ‘flight’ option. Knees can shake, heads and hands too. And then the fury of the combat, unless you’re Bruce Lee or Jason Statham, cool as cucumbers. Yeah, right.
Fight or flight? I’ve faced a man with a knife down a darkened alley in a remote part of Crete in the depths of December, and even speaking as someone who has chosen the former option far too many times for my own good, the latter preserved my life that night. Literally.
Indeed it’s a good thing that so many people have grown up through generations of gradually sanitised and civilised society, where fight or flight is far less prevalent or necessary. But I worry that our anaesthetised management and political classes no longer have a virtuous grip on what constitutes acceptable defence of what is morally right or wrong. When people choose sometimes necessarily to fight while doing right, when flight (or doing nothing – fright) would be so much easier.
The Golders Green incident bears no resemblance to far lesser recent instances where employees have lost their jobs for doing the ‘right’ thing, trying to prevent brazen criminality. Still, it invokes the same moral dilemma. As responsible citizens, let alone police officers or simple working men and women, do we stand by and let criminality reduce us with the silent permission we imply?
If our retail sector is so broken that stores need security guards complete with police-like uniforms, are that man’s employers really going to punish him for keeping their property/goods secure? If an employee does the same thing, apprehends a criminal and summons the police, should he be thrown out on his ear? Clearly the reality-detached management at Waitrose and Morrisons think so, having recently sacked long-serving, dedicated employees for trying to do just that. It’s a disgrace.
They can cite ‘health and safety’ or ‘company procedures’ till the cows come home but it’s about something far, far simpler, than that. It’s about right versus wrong. And when ‘wrong’ refuses to comply, escalates what should be a simple, transactional encounter to a violent dispute, the entirety of our moral code should defend the man or woman doing the right thing.
If the Golders Green suspect had behaved in New York as he allegedly did in London, he wouldn’t be waking up with a headache. His body would be on a slab, simple as, problem solved. I’m not advocating for that by the way, because heaven forfend our majority of nervous-nellie police constables are given the choice of exchanging blows or simply pulling a trigger. You don’t have to think too deeply about surging adrenaline and fight or flight responses to see the potential issues there, but using a boot instead of a fist makes eminent sense to this knuckle-deformed commentator.
All of that notwithstanding, we are increasingly witnessing a civilisational line in our sand being eroded not by illegals nor our own domestic wastrels, but by the very people either promoted or elected to preserve and protect both it, and us. I despair. We all should.
