Some notes on the dog whistle cop

There’s been a lot of nervous energy following a Kill the Bill protest in Manchester, after the sighting of a police officer with a curious patch on his front, and another on his back alongside the “thin blue line” patch which has been increasingly common among Manchester’s constabulary despite frequent protests that this is an import associated in the USA with racist cliques within the police, as well as symbolically representing a wacky idea of the police as “the thin blue line” between civilisation and “anarchy”.

From other photos showing his shoulder number officer number 15655, a tall white bearded man wearing a mask at the protest, was also wearing a small square patch on the back of his uniform. This photo as we can see from the flare is less good quality — taken through a pane of glass with a lot of reflection coming back from it.

I cropped these symbols and then patched them to help with reverse image searching.

The Flash and Circle

There has been a lot of speculation online as to what these mean, I’ll lay it out as plainly as I can without speculating too hard. The first one to note is the Flash and Circle. This bears a striking similarity to the logo of the British Union of Fascists, which drew a lot of criticism online. Protesters present immediately asked police officers why the officer was wearing a fascist symbol and were told that it was a patch for being taser trained. Some protesters online reported that other officers present with tasers had no such patch.

I was unable to find a source for this particular patch online which is a little frustrating although I did successfully identify that it had been rendered using a relatively common clipart image as a source, with the circle dilated likely so as to comply with manufacturing limits of embroidering.

There are patches used for taser which are publicly documented (and around which there’s a small online industry trading them as collectibles among cop fans) but these taser patches bear no resemblance to the patch on the cop’s back. One common design has a picture of a taser, under the word taser, with the police shoulder number and a thin blue line Union flag.

The other one simply has a picture of a taser. After spending a fair amount of time scouring existing media and news photos of the Greater Manchester Police, if this is a patch for taser trained officers, it must be very new.

Intrepid cop-watchers have issued a Freedom of Information request to Greater Manchester Police requesting the design and commissioning documentation that led to this badge being adopted by the force. I’m looking forward to seeing how they answer.

The Kotwica (anchor) and Polska-Walcząca (Fighting Poland)

I’d like to thank Polish friends for advising me on this. I reconstructed a perspective corrected photo of the police officer’s Kotwica patch below.

Traditionally the Kotwica used on a flag like this would be white and red, and initially Polish friends I asked about it suggested that it might be colour distortion but looking at the wider picture above and the series it was taken from I don’t believe that is the case.

The Kotwica is a symbol of the Polish underground army that fought the Nazis in the 1940s, combining the P for Polska and W for Walcząca into an anchor. With the perspective corrected image it was not hard to find an exact match on army surplus stores (mainly Poland and Ukraine).

It’s possibly of interest that this version is sold as a sort of tacticool variant with the red and white replaced with black, olive and tan, presumably for better larping around the forests of Poland pretending to be a warrior.

It’s also worth pointing out that every single one of the shops I found these things being sold at was also selling nazi symbols including Valknuts, Totenkopf and so on. This isn’t definitive evidence in itself that the police officer is a fascist of course. The symbol itself is associated not just with the resistance to the Nazis, but in recent years has become associated with nationalist anti-immigrant groups (presenting the migrants as an invading force). This has been the subject of protest by older veterans angry at their fight against the nazis being coopted by their modern day ideological descendents. With that said, the Polish people I asked said that they would have worn the symbol 10 years ago but would consider it suspect presently.

Manchester’s history of faltering confidence in the police

It’s possibly worth laying out some of the reasons why people might be so keen to be asking whether an officer of the Greater Manchester Police is wearing symbols associated with the far right. I’ll list a handful on incidents to set the scene.

Lack of accountability over racism and tasers

GMP have engaged in some incredibly egregiously racist things over the last few years, not least tasing a man in a petrol station who had just put down his child. GMP have faced further criticism about how the numbers of taser usages they report to community liaison groups dealing was less than half of the actual figure of taser deployment reported with the Home Office.

The Swastika cop still hasn’t been caught

In July 2020 it was reported that an officer with the GMP had had his belongings and his locker vandalised with Swastikas. Greater Manchester Police said they were doing everything they could to find the culprit but so far the investigation does not appear to have gone anywhere.

Regular use of excessive force including the excessive tasering of an autistic man

Michael Gilchrist was tased for over a minute, with a judge later finding the use of force “unnecessary and unreasonable”. It’s worth pointing out that a lot of the incidents raised are focused on the black community or targeted at ethnic minorities. This is part of a wider pattern observed by Resistance Labs, who also discovered that the police were lying to community liaison groups about how often they were using tasers in comparison with the rate they report to the Home Office. [Full disclosure, I have sometimes wrangled data or made graphs for them]

Rather than addressing the numerous concerns that have been being raised for years new chief commissioner Stephen Watson has simply rejected the idea of institutional racism in the force.

The Colonial Chief Cop

Greater Manchester Police was absolutely failing in 2019 leading to the loss of 80,000 crime files among other disasters for the service. This resulted in the Greater Manchester Combined Authority deciding to apoint supercop Stephen Watson as the chief of GMP. Stephen Watson grew up in was at the time was Rhodesia, during the peak of the war of independence against white colonisation that led to the country being renamed Zimbabwe. He became a cop in the 1980s, but came to public prominence after his handling of the Tottenham riots in 2011 as gold commander. These riots were triggered by the police “hard stop” killing Mark Duggan and the considerable lack of clarity that followed in their wake about whether it was necessary to shoot him dead. A fair number of questions still remain about the killing which eyewitness evidence raised questions about, later somewhat vindicated by professional attempts at forensic reconstruction of the sequence of events around it.

Immediately on taking office Stephen Watson dismissed the idea of support for the Black Lives Matter movement out of hand, saying the public were “getting a little bit fed up of virtue-signalling police officers”, and he “would probably kneel before the Queen, God, and Mrs Watson, that’s it”.