Sadly, it’s not just the UK police. In France, the Netherlands and Denmark, there were police officers firing water cannons and grenades at their own citizens, the people they had sworn to protect. It was so bad in the Netherlands that there were Dutch soldiers protecting civilians from the police and fighting against the police.

In Ireland, the police aren’t as bad, but they’re still bad, and they were even worse decades ago. Up until the 1970's, if a mother died while their kids were still under 16, the children were kidnapped from their widowed father by the state and held hostage in institutions where they were abused by nuns, priests and monks. And the father had to make an appointment just to see the children he’s raised and the children he would have been well able to raise if the government would have just left him and his family alone. There were also people who were molested by priests who were threatened by the police into silence. The Catholic Church rightfully got condemned by Irish society for these atrocities, but the police officers who protected these paedophiles and kidnapped these children got off scotfree and retired with pensions. Those particular cops should have been shunned by society or at least pressured into giving away their pensions as compensation to the families they’d helped to destroy. Nowadays, Irish police officers are better, but they are still corrupt, and since the pandemic they have been getting nastier and more authoritarian. A policeman once kidnapped a child just to spite the kid's father for criticising the policeman’s handling of the pandemic, and although the child was eventually returned to his father, it is proof that old habits die hard.

Sadly, in a lot of countries, some people become police officers because they were bullied in school, and they want to take their anger and trauma out on civilians who look like the kids who used to bully them. While I sympathise with people who were bullied hard in school, it’s not an excuse for someone to take their anger out on innocent people. People who were bullied and still traumatised from it need to go to therapy if the trauma is still interfering with their work, especially if they are police officers. I also think that police officers should be required to go to martial arts lessons at least once a month, not so that they become stronger, but so that they remember what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a hit and so that it humbles them.