Hey Tiki

So it seems like a bad week for individual rights and freedoms, in the news has been the arrest of Tiki Tanne is a singer apparently of some renown, I say apparently as before he got arrested I had no idea he existed. I doubt he would be bothered by that as I don’t think I am his target demographic.

He was arrested for “disorderly behaviour likely to cause violence to start or continue” which is my first point, isn’t this a somewhat doubtful charge? The phrase “likely to cause” is a bit problematic for me as you appear to be arresting someone for something that might happen in the future. If the charge was “possessing a car likely to be driven above the speed limit” how would we feel about it. Should we be arresting someone for something they are “likely” to do.

The behaviour in question was singing a song which I believe is called and presumably has as part of the lyrics “F... the police”. Exercising what could only be termed as dubious judgement Tiki did this while some members of the police force were in the bar. Although unknown to me as I wasn’t there the likely sequence of events after that point is probably fairly obvious.

So what happened to Article 14 of the Bill or Rights? Which says, “Freedom of expression: Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.” What happened to Tiki’s freedom of expression?

Now as with all things there are limits to your right to Freedom of expression and although I don’t like the phrase you can’t go around spewing forth “hate speech” which is where the above charge comes in, not withstanding my disquiet about its drafting.

However the song in total is not a pleasant one and not my taste however it is talking about the experience of black Americans dealing with police officers and implies racism within the American police force and the line in question is an openly rebellious retort to what the writer perceives as injustice. In context that doesn’t really sound like something to be to bothered about. It isn’t after all even talking about the NZ Police force.

But ignoring all of that a bigger question for me is how we have ended up with a society that finds this sort of material acceptable. No matter how you dress it up it is at the very least disrespectful or impolite to be singing such a song, but I suspect it represents at least to a part of our society a disenfranchisement from the main stream as represented by police officers and other society authority figures. Isn’t that the real problem, because if they don’t respect the police who have powers I will never have then what’s the chance that the rest of us will be respected by this group. And this disconnected group is growing and not simply represented by those that listen to Rap music. This is the social ill, societal fracture and it won’t be fixed by throwing Rap singers into Jail.

To prove that we are not the only ones looking at symptoms rather than causes, France has this week outlawed Muslim women covering their faces in public. Hands up any one who can thinking of something wrong with that idea. Anyone without a hand up, I don’t think you are paying attention.