I feel genuinely sorry for most police officers. A growing number of people film public interactions not primarily to document or hold power to account, but because confrontation itself is the product. Calm, professional responses generate little engagement or income. A raised voice, a step closer, visible frustration, or any imperfect reaction in the face of frequently extreme provocation can be clipped, captioned, and monetised. That incentive barely existed at scale a couple of decades ago; smartphones, algorithms, and direct revenue streams have made it routine. Officers are placed in an almost impossible position. Respond firmly to someone who is non-white (or can be framed that way) and the clip is sometimes quickly cast as racist or disproportionate, often with institutional and media amplification. Respond with anything less than perfect composure to a white auditor, particularly those on the right who deliberately test boundaries and seek confrontation, and the same clip goes viral as proof of “two-tier” or anti-white policing. The standard of “professional” shifts depending on the identity and politics of the person holding the camera, not solely on the conduct itself. There is also a noticeable and growing pattern of right-wing auditors being especially provocative toward female officers. Persistent crowding, baiting questions, and personal-space invasion appear designed to elicit a reaction from women in uniform that can then be framed as emotional, unprofessional, or evidence of broader institutional failure. Female officers already operate under the same scrutiny as their male colleagues, but these targeted interactions add another layer of pressure: any human response is more readily extracted and circulated as content. This dynamic feeds two-tier narratives from across the spectrum. One side points to perceived leniency or selective framing around certain protests and groups; the other points to over-policing of right-leaning or working-class events and the rapid amplification of any officer’s misstep. In practice, forces and individual officers are making real-time decisions under challenging circumstances, resource constraints, risk assessments, and the knowledge that any response will be litigated online. The result is often minimal engagement, precisely to avoid the viral outcome, which itself carries costs for public order. Legitimate scrutiny of public policy and official conduct remains valuable and lawful. The problem is the subset of content that treats officers (and sometimes the people they are dealing with) as unpaid raw material whose worst moments are the revenue stream. Platforms like @X and @YouTube and advertisers reward the escalation; the people on the ground absorb the consequences. Officers are left managing an environment the law and training were not fully designed for, under scrutiny that is neither consistent nor symmetrical. They deserve better than being cast as the villains in someone else’s monetised narrative. nitter.cf/docrussjackson/status/…