Reasonable Suspicion; Reasonable Doubt

So the police have shot someone on the underground. This is the No-Man's Land, the territory none of us want to think about much, the grey area where our civil liberties collide. The police have a procedure designed to prevent just such a tragedy from taking place, and yet are criticised for following that procedure. They asked for someone to stop, and for whatever reason, now unknowable, the person did not stop, and now they are dead. This only has become a problem in that the person in question, as far as has been ascertained, is innocent. It was circumstance alone that allowed him to leave a house, one already under surveillance in connection with the failed bombings, in a winter coat. The police are caught between the reality of shooting innocents when they have reasonable suspicion that they are in fact terrorists, and failing to protect commuters from genuine suicide bombers. I doubt very much anyone is going to get into hot water over the incident, but that makes it no less an embarrassment, and no less a tragedy. I foresee more sniffer dogs, and a confrontation with the problem of exactly what armed police officers are supposed to call out to people in such a diverse city as London.

Ian and I went to the last screening of the Alan Clarke season - a double bill of Elephant and Made In Britain. Elephant consists of about thirteen Sectarian killings - no plot, and about three lines of dialogue. The film seemed to be a challenge to find meaning in each death, when there is none. It is an unflinching film and it needs to be. It forces us to take note of the elephant in our living room - a lesson we could still use some twenty years later. However, I found myself examining the structure of the film, or waiting to see if an assassin from earlier in the film would end up a victim later on - this is the struggle we face, to accept that these deaths are meaningless when our instinct is to hunt out order and explanation.

Made In Britain follows the story of Trevor, a skinhead who is sent to an assessment centre. The brutality of the film is in the fact that the system in which Trevor finds himself is committed utterly to attempting to save Trevor from himself, but Trevor is committed to being himself, at whatever price. Neither can help or learn from each other - and the points that Trevor raises, painting a picture of authority that is just as fascistic as his own dubious politics, ring uncomfortably true. This, like Psy Warriors, seems to work by pitching two flawed stances against each other, catching its characters in the middle. The irony of seeing these films, and Psy Warriors, at this moment in history, is not lost...