WHEN 10- and 12-year-olds had the audacity to stone a police station it ought to have sent alarm signals throughout the society. Regrettably most of the commentary about the recent actions of the students at the Denham Town Police station has been confined to condemnation of the children. There has been very little by way of analysis, no real attempt to discover what could have prompted the action, no effort to answer the important question, why?
We are not in the throes of an intifada, there is no declared civil war, so we are left to wonder what could have prompted the children to do what they did, acting on the basis of a rumour which turned out to be false. An answer in part, has come in the form of a letter to the Editor last Friday by a journalist, Arthur Hall. Mr. Hall makes it clear that he is not in support of the action of the children and condemns it as wrong. But he concedes that as an 11-year-old growing up in an inner-city community in the 1970s he could have been involved in a similar incident.
Mr. Hall gives a telling account of the hostility that the youth in the inner city feel towards the police, a hostility that is prompted by the actions of the police. During his formative years he had come to regard the police "not as human beings but as 'pigs' who were around only to terrorise the people of the inner city, law-abiding or criminals".
These feelings had their origin in seeing his 50-year-old father reduced to tears after he was boxed by a young policeman, barely out of his teens, because he had not responded to the call, "boy come yah". The feelings came from the knowledge that many unarmed young men were killed in 'shoot-outs' with the police, of being held by the police for processing. As Mr. Hall explains, the children of Denham Town live in communities where the police have "acted as an invading force disrespecting their parents and friends, people these children admire and respect."
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