What Happened to Systemic Common Sense?

A deficit of common sense in our institutions is having catastrophic and often tragic consequences. In some, this is a deliberate strategy, replace discretion with protocol, but there are consequences

You can watch the incident here..warning.. it will outrage you and depress you.

[* N.B. This is a rewrite of an article I published over the weekend, I had written it in the Substack App - bad idea - which makes it impossible to edit. This is the edited and rewritten version which also corrects several errors.]

There was a time when discretion was considered a virtue in public service. When a policeman could resolve a dispute with a quiet word, when a nurse or care worker could rely on professional instinct, and when judgment wasn’t a liability but an expectation. Today, that era feels as distant as the gas lamp and the village bobby. We live now in a Britain where common sense has been systematically replaced with policy. And in the case of Donald Burgess, it ended with tragedy.

Burgess was in his 90s, frail, he had one leg, was wheelchair bound and suffering from advanced dementia. On top of this he had a severe Urinary Tract Infection and anyone with elderly relatives knows that infection can significantly impact mental functionality in the elderly. Aged relatives describe the impact of an infection on the geriatric mind: like being drunk without the fun, and also experiencing total amnesia whilst under the influence of the infection, a symptom of the elderly body shutting down all necessary activities, including memory, to fight it.

Mr Burgess was a resident was in a care home, confused, possibly frightened, and holding a table knife flicking food demanding to speak to the manager and apparently threatening that he would stab him.. with a stainless steel table knife suitable for spreading butter on a roll. Once, this would have been met with kindness, patience, or a gentle redirection. Today, in the age of “zero tolerance,” that butter knife became “a weapon,” and the police were summoned. To support their subsequent actions the police report described the knife as ‘serrated’ no doubt to invoke the public terror of ‘zombie knives’ and the serrated bayonets of popular WW1 memory, which were shunned by the actual soldiers because being caught with one by the enemy would result in swift retribution.

The rest is now a matter of a criminal trial currently being held in Sussex. Officers arrived, immediately concluded that Mr Burgess was a dangerous threat and over the next 82 seconds used such violence to disarm him from this eating utensil that they used a whole canister of pepper spray, before the same officer, the 51 year old burly PC Stephen Smith deployed his telescopic truncheon, so nasty is what follows most news channels including the report for C4 News I link to below, blur out the events. But you can hear the whacks and the screams.

It doesn’t take much to imagine the effect of such a baton, which is such an effective weapon the general public are banned from owning them, at force, on the wrist of a frail old man. A 6 ft tall copper who uses such on violent rioters in their 20’s now applies it to the delicate and brittle bones and paper thin skin of the aged wrist, in a shattering break. So blinded with pepper spray Mr Burgess suffers the quite unique pain of a broken wrist. Now, whilst PC Smith was laying about Mr Burgess with his baton, his erstwhile colleague, PC Rachel Commotto decided to join in shouting ‘TASER! TASER! TASER! and shooting him in the chest delivering 1500 volts almost at the same time as as the baton smashes the bones of the wrist.

Mr Burgess was taken to hospital for his injuries where he passed away 22 days, we were assured by the authorities that his subsequent death had nothing to do with the assault and violence of two weeks earlier. Really? Rarely have I seen a more blatant example of semantics and cherry picking to justify not charging these two thugs with manslaughter. Anyone who has spent any time with the elderly and frail knows that an event like this in their lives can be utterly devastating, and at such age life is like dominoes, all it takes is a relatively minor fall or incident in the lives of those in their thirties to start the dominoes falling. These two Uniformed Civilians are currently on trial for the assault of Mr Burgess, the manslaughter charge clearly being too difficult to prove. Here the law showing its inadequacy, yes, Mr Burgess was in his 90s, yes, he was in poor health but the link is obvious.

PC Stephen Smith is on trial for assault following his actions during the arrest of Donald Burgess.

Police Constable Stephen Smith, he of the enthusiastic baton use and pepper spray, told the court, in a remarkable revelation that observation is obviously no longer a criteria for recruitment that: “he did not see that (Donald Burgess, 92,) was disabled and in a wheelchair before he used Pava spray, and then a baton before making an arrest. Really? And what other chairs have ruddy great spoked wheels? Meanwhile PC Rachel Commoto blubbed on the stand as she tried to argue that she had used her taser on Mr Burgess because she was horrified that her colleague was about to clobber him with a baton and she decided it was the ‘best way to keep him (Mr Burgess) safe.’ An incredulous prosecutor asked her why she did’t simply tell PC Smith to stop his assault.

Segway - has anyone else noticed modern policing’s passion for ‘keeping people safe’ by subjecting them to their licensed state violence? This is how they justify the arresting of counter protestors and their violent arrests of Christian evagvelist and former Muslim, Hatun Tash at Speaker’s Corner of all places.

Now unless we have started actively recruiting psychopaths into our care homes and police forces, no one meant for this to happen. Not the care home staff. Not the officers even. But intent is beside the point. This tragedy wasn’t caused by malice; it was caused by systems. Systems that no longer permit discretion. Systems that value protocol over humanity. Systems that, unless you constantly challenge these protocols and test them for relevance, become systems of inhuman psychopathy.

Now, I don’t know the exact policies in place at that care home. But as an HR professional who has worked extensively in the care sector, I can say with confidence that what happened is consistent with the norm: zero-tolerance policies, strict safeguarding frameworks, and employee training that stresses box-ticking over judgment. If there's even a theoretical risk, staff are instructed to escalate. So when an elderly man flicks food with a butter knife, procedure inevitably dictates: call the police. Add on that the weaponisation of victimhood in employee/employer relations. Now no one deserves to have food flicked at them at work but when caring for the vulnerable such scenarios are inevitable. It goes with the job. We don't hold the very young or the insane responsible for crimes because they are unable to take responsibility for their actions.

And the police? They follow their own strict protocols. When Harry Miller won his Court of Appeal case over the Orwellian concept of a “non-crime hate incident” (NCHI), he visited the Chief Constable of Humberside Police. There, he was told the quiet part out loud: The last thing we want is common sense in the field or words to that effect. Let that sink in. The police, as a matter of institutional culture, are trained not to assess, but to apply rules mechanically. Tick the box. Follow the flowchart. Don't think. Don't feel. Just comply.

This bureaucratic religion is not confined to policing or care. It pervades every institution. Consider the case of the man fined for rescuing a drowning child in lockdown because he had breached Covid regulations. Or the pensioner charged with criminal damage for trimming a hedge that blocked a road sign. Or the countless teachers suspended not for misconduct, but for momentarily exercising professional instinct in a system that no longer trusts professionals.

In this culture, the rules must be followed to the letter, not the spirit. Why? Because no one wants to be blamed. Bureaucracy is a fortress against accountability. And common sense? That’s a risk. It can’t be audited. It doesn’t produce a paper trail. Worse still, it suggests personal responsibility. So instead of empowering people, we infantilise them. We turn professionals into clerks, carers into call handlers, and police officers into protocol bots. When something goes wrong, the institution will say, "We followed procedure." But who will ask if the procedure made any sense?

Britain used to be rather good at this. We didn't need to be told how to deal with a butter knife and a confused old man. The bobby on the beat would have known what to do. So would the matron or the orderly. But they have all been replaced—not by people, but by systems. Systems that are cold, performative, and, in cases like Donald Burgess's, fatal.

We do not need more regulation. We need more judgment. More courage to empower front-line workers. More trust in the experience of those who deal with real human beings. Because systems without sense are not safe. They are dangerous.

So a man dies, a life of 92 years, a life of memories from childhood, memories of love, friends, partners, children, the highs and lows of a life life, of grief, of stress but of joy and happiness. Until he encountered two people we pay to keep The King’s peace. The tragedy of Donald Burgess should remind us all what happens when we forget that.