I wouldn’t swear by this kind of justice
7:00pm Saturday 10th December 2011 in Colin Baker
Over the decades, judges have provided us with a selection of statements that have served to underline the popular preconception that they inhabit a world slightly more rarefied than the rest of us live in. The most famous (although perhaps, it now appears, apocryphal) example is the judge who in the 60s professed to be unaware who the Beatles were, at a time when even a bushman in the Kalahari might have heard of the fab four. There have been other classic examples of apparent judicial naiveté – the judge in 2007 who didn’t know what a website was and only recently, when Mr. Justice Harman was informed that Gazza was a very well known footballer, he asked “Rugby or Association? Isn’t there an operetta called La Gazza Ladra?”
But these instances of evidence of a judicial disconnect from the real world have decreased significantly as the law has opened up to a wider and more representative intake – and it could now be argued that the pendulum has swung too far the other way.
The appropriately named Mr Justice Bean has shown how in touch he is with popular culture and social behaviour. It seems that swearing at policemen is now so commonplace as to make it acceptable. The expletives directed by a young offender at officers who were searching him for drugs would not have resulted in them being alarmed, distressed or harassed, according to Judge Bean, because they were words the policemen would hear every day in the course of their work.
If Mr Justice Bean doesn’t see the inevitable consequence of the removal of this layer of protection for our police then he perhaps will start to do so when defendants start addressing him in similar terms in his court. After all, why should he be considered as more worthy of protection from verbal abuse than the policeman on the beat?
And if verbally-abused judges hide behind the fiction that it is not them as people but their judicial office that needs to be protected from abuse then the same should apply to Her Majesty’s Constabulary.
I have an aversion to violence in any form and barrages of obscene abuse are a form of violence and often go hand in hand with actual physical violence.
Anything we as a society can do to make public places family friendly again will get my vote. Judges who protect the foul-mouthed don’t!
