Law and Orde

The president of the Association of Chief Police Officers has warned that protesters may force police to adopt more extreme tactics than mass detention without charge, cavalry attacks against unarmed people, or dragging the disabled out of their wheelchairs. Sir Hugh Orde, who seems to have got his name from a Gothic villain and his brain from a Victorian martinet, proclaimed that kettling was, apparently by definition, done "for the greater good", and that cavalry charges against the unarmed are a "very useful, effective tactic". He ruminated upon a perceptual disorder of certain confined and beaten persons which means that the police are, cruelly, seen as "the physical manifestation of the state"; and he observed with regret that the propensity to violence of such deluded delinquents could increase "the moment the people in a crowd think that we are the state enforcing a certain specific law", rather than just the honest British bobby who would much rather be off clearing the Murdoch name of hackery charges. Orde also appears to have tried to drag British policing into the twenty-first century by conflating demonstrations organised via Twitter and Facebook with "cyber crime", and to have single-handedly re-written the statutes on trespassing and breach of the peace to include people who "walk into Boots and do nothing".