Dawn Butler has been in the news again, which is always a nailed-on opportunity for absurdity and a good giggle. This time it’s some stop-and-search shenanigans. If you need a good laugh, just get Dawn on it. Whatever has occurred, it will doubtless be a matter for some up-and-coming cop to unravel while maintaining his desired trajectory for the higher echelons of top plod.

But that’s for others to get throat-deep into.

Either way, this bijou combustible nugget of social interaction is not going to make a lasting contribution to the collective healing process in the wake of the Black Lives Matter furore. Leftwaffe stalwarts have predictably jumped to DB’s assistance to offer, you’ve guessed it, solidarity, on a matter about which they have no first-hand knowledge at all.

Sol-id-ari-dee.

The Starmbannführer himself managed to get up off his bended knee and elbow his way into the fray for a spot of naff showboating and thanked her for reporting the ‘incidence‘ (sic), again on the basis of absolutely no factual first-hand knowledge. Others sent hugs and kisses via Twitter. That would be other Members of Parliament, not even the superficial, bantamweight, airhead Twatterati. God help us.

Back on the manor, a lickspittle demi-top cop (who looked young enough to be out there delivering the morning papers) thanked Dawn for her ‘balanced account‘ of the matter. Surely, that should be ‘account‘, with the ‘balanced’ part coming later in the investigator’s assessment when all perspectives and evidence have been gathered?

You can see how news becomes twisted on the basis of assumption and supposition. Cops of all levels shooting from the hip. Perhaps, by the time the Old Bill had come to hear her out, the psycho-needle in her nano-brain had wound round full circle into the ‘sanity’ segment.

Hey, I’m kidding, but just as the police will tell you that a person carrying a knife will end up looking for trouble and using it, so will somebody with a camera-equipped smartphone.

I’m not sure about you, but if I’m cruising through the streets, or a passenger in such circumstances, I’m not usually filming the environs. Then again, if you’ve been the victim of harassment, perhaps you go out expecting it. Forewarned is forearmed as they say. But even if deft Dawn had caught a tit-headed, dipstick, plod tiddler in her net who fat-fingeredly botched a simple keypad task, nothing could prepare us for the words of Norman Brennan, professional cop mouthpiece and all-round rozzer short-fused tossball. On Twitter, he was quick to provide his assessment of the Hackney, or by now hackneyed, incident by banging out the following missive:

BREAKING NEWS; Tomorrow I shall be making an official complaint to the leader of House of commons & Information Commissioner about @DawnButlerBrent For abusing her position as an MP & with Intent to cause racial Hated which could also Incite BLM Narrative to cause Public Disorder

Woah, that’s peak wacko freak-out fare, right there. Some lame cancel culture handbags followed by red raw and unhinged kitchen-sink vitriol. Imagine if, as a police officer, he’d presented something like that to the CPS in the evidence bundle? More titillating still is the context of the rant, which was to rail against the MP for allegedly fabricating a racially motivated incident.

Now that’s the pot calling the kettle black – while of course taking care not to profile it beforehand.

Even the ‘Breaking News’ bit – at which point he’d not even worked up a half-decent froth – had comfortably passed the benchmark for all the meds you can handle in your local laughing academy’ long before he put his foot down on the full Trump freeway.

Bottom line, and hilarity aside, all this malarkey simply ratchets up adversarial bitterness, but the key issues remain unattended on the sidelines. For all their respected technical expertise, these characters talk about anything and everything except solutions. Instead, it’s all about the fingernails and the ranting.

Why not tap into the well-established corpus of work that has already unpacked the complexity and offers durable and effective resolutions? Dawn might then not need to run down her smartphone battery waiting for some hapless dibble to pounce, and Norm could then ease himself off his reduced-salt regime and take a whopping gert chill pill.

You never know, they might even pool their collective wisdom and start addressing the issues that they both claim to care so much about. They’ve just got to get down on it.

If they really want it.