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“Most of our community don’t have to deal with the challenges that police officers have to deal with,” Guernsey’s Head of Law Enforcement tells me, “not everybody we deal with wishes to be arrested.”
Those who take on the most difficult jobs often face the most scrutiny, usually because those jobs are for the public service. Teachers, nurses, police officers. If the community pays your wages, you can expect to get grief, and with the advent of social media, it has only become easier to criticise.
It has also become easier to identify, and scrutinise, those instances where power has been used inappropriately.
In this climate, it has become harder and harder to pick out the actual problems. Post anything about the police online in recent weeks and the comment section becomes awash with vitriol directed at law enforcement. Is this tidal wave of criticism reflective of a service crippled with corruption or is it the amplification of a handful of issues that are in fact being dealt with?
That’s the problem. If you take social media at face value, it’s hard to know. Upholding the law is essential to a community, and when that trust is eroded, everything looks suspicious.
Police officers are granted powers the general public don’t have. The power to arrest, the power to remove liberty. It's only right that the magnifying glass is held closer to them, but by who? And to what extent?
I reached out to Guernsey's Head of Law Enforcement, Ruari Hardy, to better understand the criticism the force is currently facing, whether it’s warranted, and what is being done to build public support in one of our most important institutions.
Mr Hardy is speaking out following several weeks of acute criticism of Guernsey Police on social media, triggered by the release of two videos, one of an arrest and one of a man being restrained in a cell.
Both videos were shared widely on Twitter and Facebook, garnering thousands of views in the islands and further afield. One led to a complaint being ‘upheld’ and the other is still being investigated by the Professional Standards Department.
In an extensive interview, Mr Hardy fields questions on the videos and how they came to be released. He talks about officers making mistakes, moves to alter the law to ‘deal with vexatious complaints’, trial by social media, and why officers are ‘working in my name providing they are working within the law’.
You can listen to the interview in full below, or wherever you get your podcasts:
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