Another day, another IPCA report finding unlawful use of force by the police. This time, its a police officer who saw a woman give him a thumbs-down signal while driving, chased her nearly a kilometre to her home, violently assaulted her and tore her clothing under the pretext of "arresting" her, tried to break in, and pepper-sprayed her in the face when she surrendered. The IPCA found that none of that was legal - none of it. The purported "traffic stop" in response to the gesture was completely unjustified:
In our assessment, Officer A stopped her because he was annoyed by her gesturing to him in what was no doubt a rude and disparaging way. Therefore, in our view, the stop was unlawful....which means there was no basis for an arrest, and so no basis for use of force, so all if that was unlawful too.
This happened three years ago. In the interim, the victim pleaded guilty to failing to stop when signalled to do so, refusing to give an officer her details, and resisting arrest. The IPCA concludes that as the stop and arrest was unlawful, the conviction is unsafe, and recommends that the police use an available legal mechanism to ask for a rehearing of the sentence, then offer no evidence. Which is a way of letting them back away gracefully, without a formal judicial finding of wrongdoing on their part. But naturally, the police are having none of it. The Blue Gang always stands by their man - whether they're a child pornographer, a rapist, an evidence-planter, or just a petty bully in uniform.
And then the police wonder why the public don't trust them. This is why. Naked abuse of power shielded by official corruption. No accountability. A commitment to being unreformable. Its enough to make you think that abolition is the way forward. Certainly, we should be stripping powers and functions from them, and giving them to other agencies, without inherently abusive coercive powers, to reduce the harm police cause. To point out the obvious, the police can't do abusive bullying traffic stops under a pretence of legality if its absolutely not their job.
Meanwhile, the police simply saying "no" to the IPCA's recommendations makes it clear that we have a problem with accountability. The most obvious solution is to let the IPCA do directly what the police refuse to do, whether it is making applications for convictions to be set aside, or bringing employment proceedings or even prosecutions against police officers. The police won't hold themselves accountable, so someone else will have to do it for them.
