Don't smile, you're on CCTV

Then, in grainy CCTV images, we see her being dragged away, her trousers slowly but surely dropping to her ankles as she goes. Disgraceful, disgusting, undignified and racist, screamed the critics. The police officer concerned was removed from frontline duties to "restore confidence" while his senior officers fielded a string of complaints. Put yourself in the position of this police officer. The person he was trying to subdue had been ejected from the nightclub for misbehaviour and had responded by causing 3,000 damage to a parked car. On the night in question, the young "victim" of police "violence" was not the well turned out young lady who appeared on TV and in the papers a few days later. She was a fighting, screaming, biting, violent, spitting drunk from hell who had vandalised an innocent person's car and was now trying her hardest to kick the nearest police officer in the crutch, or anywhere else that came within range. Faced with an attack from someone in that frame of mind, what would you do? You'd run away, probably, an option not available to the police called out to deal with the situation. And if you did become embroiled, I suspect you wouldn't notice, let alone care, what colour skin your attacker had. A kick in the crutch is a kick in the crutch, whether its ethnic origins be Anglo Saxon, Oriental or Afro-Caribbean. What happened outside that Sheffield nightclub is not so different to Worthing on a Saturday night (or a Sunday night, now I come to think about it). I've seen police officers trying to deal with swaying, braying, aggressive thugs, brains numbed by drink and drugs, who just want a fight. The police will take a firm but reasoning line until something happens to change the dynamic...as it often does. There comes a stage (quite early in some of these unpleasant confrontations) where reason flies out the window. And we can't expect the police to remove these violent elements without allowing them to defend themselves. The CCTV caught the end of a series of events and the "victim" was the sole cause. It was her choice to get blind drunk and her choice to resort to mindless violence and vandalism. Yes, it ended with a police officer hitting her on the arm five times with all his might, trying to subdue her and prevent injury to himself and others. But that young girl has only herself to blame.