“The police are treated with a tenderness not afforded to other professions.” The police are not a profession. Doctors are a profession; lawyers are a profession; any highly-skilled job with restricted admission with strict qualifications controlled by the membership and internal self-government is a profession. However, like true professions, but with more immediate effect, the police tend to identify with one another against evryone else. In fact the “professionalisation” of the police force seems to have reduced their competence at demonstrations like this by destroying lines of command and tactical responses and removing the shared definition of “reasonable force”. The number of police officers from different units mixed together with different tactical orders and with no clearly designated senior officer to take responsibilty meant they were often operating at cross-purposes: there’ve been videos off some police restraining others from using truncheons; I’ve been at demonstrations where two different sets of police were giving directly contradictory orders to the public.

” I suspect that this… has been receiving all this attention and protest because white, middle-class people have realised that they are targets now as well: ” More likely because they have received attention like this and so realised what usually happens.