The acquittal of Sergeant Martyn Blake, the firearms officer who shot and fatally killed Chris Kaba in 2022, has produced the expected flurry of agitation by those who seem predisposed against any use of force by police, irrespective of the circumstances. 

Blake shot Kaba after a “hard stop” in Streatham, because the car he was driving had been linked to a firearms incident the previous day. After the police had stopped Kaba’s car, exited their own cars and identified themselves, Kaba refused to surrender, and instead tried to force his way out by driving his car into the officers. Fearing for his and his colleagues’ lives, Blake opened fire. The other officers testified during the trial that they were on the verge of doing the same.

Much of this information was available before the trial, and the possibility that this was an instance of trigger-happy policing always seemed vanishingly remote. That it met the threshold for prosecution is dubious, and the exploitation of this incident by the usual cohort of MPs, commentators and activist groups to further their narrative of living under a racist police state is shameful.

It is a perverse result of a society where lethal force by police is extremely rare and police oversight functions fairly reliably, that when such rarities do occur, it appears to many people to indicate a resurgence of police brutality. A widely felt squeamishness about any use of lethal force by police, and a societal naivete about the occasional necessity of such force, is largely responsible for the default suspicion on the rare cases where it is used. This suspicion, of course, does not help the dangerous and apparently thankless task of policing. Officers making split-second decisions hardly need the thought of being prosecuted for murder hindering their decisiveness in such moments. It is also worrying that Met officers have since reported difficulties recruiting to their armed units, due to fear of prosecution. As Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said after the trial, “the more we crush the spirit of good officers, the less they can fight crime”.

This squeamishness also seems to be behind some of the opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza and now Lebanon. There is legitimate debate to be had about the ends and means of Israeli policy, of course. At least some anti-Israel rhetoric, however, seems to have very little to do with the specifics of Israel’s fight against Hamas and Hezbollah but more to do with a wholesale rejection of the use of military force. 

Novara Media’s Ash Sakar exemplified this implicit pacifism last week on BBC Question Time. When asked what Israel should have done after Hamas’s attack on October 7th last year, Sakar responded that they should have immediately negotiated. How Israel could have effectively negotiated the release of its hostages without leveraging its military force, she didn’t say. 

It is understandable that people do not have the mental energy to dwell on just war theory when watching footage of infants being pulled out from rubble. But it is nonetheless true, regardless of one’s position on Gaza, that pacifism is a luxury only afforded to societies who are accustomed to peace, and is unlikely to survive any resurgence of serious security threats of the kind Israel faces.

A similar sentiment is at work, I would argue, in much of the agitation over the previous government’s attempt to implement an effective deterrent to illegal boat crossings. Again, there is much to say about the now defunct Rwanda scheme. However, much of the opposition to it wasn’t so much about the details of the scheme, but about the very notion of creating a deterrent against illegal migration — as such a deterrent would entail utilising the state’s monopoly on force to take people against their will to a third country. The fact that many of these people are genuinely deserving of sympathy makes this idea particularly unpalatable. Again, one can sympathise with the moral instinct at work here. But the question of how to enforce our borders without such a deterrent remains unanswered, and it may be the case that the only viable way to achieve this is by policies that are liable to offend these moral instincts. And as the American writer David Frum has put it, “if liberals don’t enforce borders, fascists will”.

While Western liberal societies are good at protecting human rights and freedoms, we can be less good at doing, or being prepared to do, the sometimes dirty work necessary for enforcing laws, protecting borders and ensuring security, as it can offend our liberal sensibilities. However, these failures could risk creating further disenchantment with liberal democracy. The autocrats’ case against liberal democracy is that its culture of human rights is enfeebling, and incapable of maintaining stability and security. We should worry that these arguments will be given credence by the failures of liberal democracies on issues like crime and borders.

I am not arguing that we should compromise our values; rather that we are sometimes liable to misinterpret these values to imply overly burdensome constraints on our ability to achieve these things. If we are to maintain the credibility of our values and system of government, we must prove they are compatible with enforcing laws, borders and security – lest we give space to those demagogues who would persuade us otherwise. As George Orwell wrote in “Notes on Nationalism”, those who reject force can only do so because others are using — or threatening — force on their behalf.