Ideal Standards

I had not heard of Mona60000 before this business with the police came to light.

The TikTok user posted a commentary describing the Malta police without holding back on expletives or insults. Her cause was not helped by the fact that she is not Maltese, dark-skinned and evidently Arabic. Social media was alight with patriots calling for action to bring Mona60000 to order, and then the Police Union stepped in, filing a criminal complaint with the Police Commissioner.

Now, I am not a fan of Mona60000’s TikTok content, nor do I particularly applaud her choice of words to voice her complaints about what she deems to be the inefficiencies of the force. I do find, however, that the filing of a criminal complaint by the Force’s Union because they are offended by a person’s mode of expression, is more than over the top.

Fans of the erudite American poet Andre Romelle Young (known in some circles as Dr Dre) will remember his gangsta rap years with N.W.A. and their evergreen ode titled “F*ck tha Police”. In that masterpiece of articulated social critique, Young and his colleagues bemoaned the treatment reserved for men of their ilk by the cops and passed judgment in a very aggressively poignant way on the force.

The substance of Dre’s rap was not too different from that presented less artistically by Mona60000 on TikTok: The force is shit, it always comes down on the wrong side, you call them to report a crime, but you end up getting booked instead and so on et cetera. Dre was writing and rapping this in 1985, and events in the US since then have shown to a great extent that the criticism he proffered was coming from the right spot.

The point I am making here is that no matter how crude and caustic the content of Mona60000 could have been, we might be better off discussing and debating the accusations rather than coming down on her with the full force of the law to shut the TikToker up. And yet that is what the unionised part of the force wants to do.

That, I’m afraid, is what passes for Ideal Standards in this country. I would have expected a Union such as the Police Union to be vociferous in other areas much more deserving of their attention. Take, for example, the weakening of the Force’s specialised fields, such as the anti-fraud police. Wouldn’t we be better off concentrating on this lack of resources than focusing on a citizen critic?

What about the months of police work down the drain due to the public prosecutor’s proneness to error? Is not the Union irked by these shortcomings that would tarnish the reputation of law enforcers in Malta? Shouldn’t their attention be on these matters rather than on issues such as the low hygienic standards at police stations?

It must be hard to be on the Force when all around you, the standards of justice are backsliding faster than Ice Cube can rap. The Transport Malta corruption case is before the courts thanks to diligent police investigation. We know that a minister and a political party were involved in the case that led to criminal charges being filed against three Transport Malta officials. We do not know who the minister was or which political party it was because the prosecution chose to omit those not too trivial details from the case.

If the prosecution is not sufficiently weak, then it takes some creative reading of the law to nullify the work of the police investigation. Just look at this article by The Shift: Questions raised on magistrate’s acquittal of former minister’s aide.

On second thought, I cannot blame the Police Union for losing its bearings and focusing on inconsequential things such as a TikToker’s outburst. The Ideal Standards of this nation are rendering real police work redundant.

Undertrained, understaffed and undermotivated, there is no hope for the arm of the law. As the culture of impunity introduced under disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat is extended under this new government, the custodians of the law are transformed into a sterile, spent force whining about the angry yelps of a lone woman on TikTok.

“F*ck the police comin’ straight from the underground

A Young nigga got it bad ’cause I’m brown

And not the other color so police think

They have the authority to kill a minority”

(N.W.A – ‘F*ck tha Police’)