A Matter Of Perspective

On Saturday night there was a running battle on the streets of Derry.

On Saturday night, there were a few dozen drunks making trouble.

Same time, same place, same incident, so who saw things as they were? The police, or the bystanders?

According to Chief Inspector John Burrows, a crowd of fifty attacked his officers when the nightclubs shut down. Beer bottle and paving stones were flying like snowflakes in a blizzard, and if not for their riot gear, the police would surely have been injured. As it was, two officers were hurt in the melee. Over the course of two hours, the police had to deal with looters and rioters. And this on the evening after Nigel Dodds of the DUP insisted that police powers could not possibly be devolved to the authorities duly elected to Stormont.

A BBC display in Guildhall Square was damaged during the course of this wild night. As far as the staff member who was called in to set things to rights was concerned, it wasn't such a fuss at all, at all. The tables and chairs on site were tossed around, a plasma screen was broken, but a two-hour running battle? That's a bit of an exaggeration, according to the staffer. A large crowd, yes, but it was only a few dozen who made trouble. What he heard on the news, he couldn't quite believe, as it didn't fit what he had witnessed. Safe to assume, so, that he was not listening to the BBC because he wouldn't go biting the hand that feeds him, would he?

A local publican noticed more police around than usual, but that was about all that he noticed. Could it be that drunks leaving the local nightclubs might be rowdy every Saturday night, if he failed to see a riot while it was boiling up outside his door?

There is, of course, plenty of video tape to examine from all the CCTV cameras. Some will see a drunken riot, some will see a bunch of drunks behaving like boors. Depends on how the mind is filtering what crosses the retina.