I first came across this slogan in a gallery shop in Brussels. I wasn't there to see Boël's work, but it made me smile, albeit ruefully, so I bought the postcard anyway. Belgium had at the time only an interim government, its partition-predictive zeitgeist typified by statements like this and puntastic badges asking, "to .be or not to .be?" Belgian politics have calmed down somewhat since, but I have lately been ever more haunted by Boël's declaration.

We are no longer as a nation in any doubt that "this system is corrupt". From placard-wielding anarchists to the BNP, the one thing we can all agree on is that the state is, well, a bit of a state. It's not just the recession and the private sector, either; the two institutions to come under the greatest fire in recent weeks are the government and the police. When MPs pickpocket the taxpayer and riot police start the riots, it is hard to see very much to "be happy" about. There has clearly been a lot wrong for a long time, and there is in some quarters a palpable sense of relief that the wider media and public have finally sat up and noticed. And yet as right(eous) as such anger is, I find myself unexpectedly troubled by it.

Take The Expenses Scandal™; MPs' assault on the public purse is indeed outrageous - but so is the way in which it has been reported. It is of course sniggerworthy when anyone is caught with their trousers incongruously down, and I am sure that all over the country men have endured excruciating conversations about utility bills in shared houses for similarly smutty reasons to Richard Timney ("Right, so we all owe a quarter of that then?" - "Er no, because we didn't all watch a quarter of MILFs 3"). If I worked at Virgin Media, I'd probably have a good giggle at some of the things customers were ordering too, and if it's funny narrating such indiscretions in the pub, it's bloody hilarious doing it en masse through the news networks.

Except, it isn't. What should have been a cutting indictment of parliamentary expenses was little more than a Carry-On joke. Yes, it spawned wider criticism that is apparently now going to be acted upon (however rashly inept Gordo's own suggestions) but that's not the point; it shouldn't have taken a good smear opportunity for this to make the headlines.

The most iconically offensive thing about that whole affair should not have been the porn, but the plug (no, not that kind - and there you go again, that's how cheapened the topic is). The sheer exploitative rapacity required to claim for 88 pence spent on a bathplug is far more repugnant than any masturbating middle-aged man. I don't even own my house and I paid for our bathplug, because I couldn't bring myself to demand the landlord come round and "instal" something so totally trivial; the NUS might just as well demand blu-tack grants to fund students putting up Betty Blue, The Blues Brothers, Big Blue and Blue Velvet posters on their blue bloody walls. That is the kind of mentality that merits heaviest censure, but if Ms. Smith had unreasonably claimed for a hundred bathplugs or doorstops it would have been lucky to make the text box above a Page 3 girl. No wonder the press are so quick to deplore political sleaze - it is, after all, one of the only things they're quick to write about at all.

The current Police Brutality Scandal™ provides interesting complement. Of course it is deplorable that a man was assaulted (who knows yet how grievously) by a police officer, but before the tabloids take a break from wringing their hands to pat themselves on the back for their moral outrage, perhaps they should remember how long this has been going on without passing hedge fund managers filming it. One of the greatest sources of popular disgust over Ian Tomlinson's treatment has been the fact that he was not a protestor. Because, what? Newspaper sellers, like swans, can only be killed by the Queen? Some dirty hippie would have had it coming? Riot police have been illegally hiding their shoulder numbers and beating up demonstrators for years, and yet it takes Not Even A Protestor's death for anyone to notice.

But this kind of reporting is irresponsible not only in its selectivity, but also in its vitriol. As you may have guessed, I am not the Met's biggest fan - but at least I have thought about why. I grew up with a highly ambivalent view of the Police, shaped in no small part by being in Belgium at the time. On the one hand, I knew that police officers were generally meant to do useful things like fight crime; on the other, everyone knew they were lazy and corrupt. "Why do policemen go around in threes? One to read, one to write, and one for intelligent conversation," was less of a joke than an empirical observation when they boasted the lowest entry requirements of almost any job; the last time her neighbour got burgled, as my mother doled out hugs and Kleenex, the investigating officer asked her, "Right, so did you do it then?" And it wasn't all comedy bungling and bribes; aged 11, I was one of 300,000 people on the White March, protesting the police errors and corruption investigating the case of paedophile serial killer Marc Dutroux. By my teens, I trusted "pigs" no further, with added yoof kultcha distaste for the fact that the unreasonable bastards sometimes had the temerity to arrest my more narcotically entrepeneurial classmates. The only person I knew who wanted to join up (and, depressingly enough, was recently accepted to train by the Met) was a steroids freak who had to move schools four times to stay one step ahead of expulsions for beating people up. Fuck da po-lice pretty much summed it up for me.

And that's a hard mentality to shake. Back in Britain, my default view remained that even if UK coppers were better than Belgian coppers, a copper is a copper is a copper is probably a nasty piece of work. In some contexts, I still think that. But a year spent in that other most reviled public service, Social Services, also made me realise that they're not all like that. For all the bullies who like the idea of hitting people with the sanction of a uniform, there are others who actually do care about public order and victims of crime - the sort whose reports on domestic violence I used to log daily, the sort who build cases against paedophiles.

The sort who don't decide to go into riot policing. Because what happened to Ian Tomlinson was not just the "police brutality" the red-tops are gleefully denouncing, it was riot police brutality, and there is a difference. It is only right that the IPCC investigate the G20 fiasco, but I for one hope they will be looking not only at riot policing itself, but also at its selection criteria. The Met is a large and varied beast; to opt for any division of policing over another implies some personal motivation. The officer who assaulted Ian Tomlinson must be held accountable for his crime; but so must whoever reccommended him for, or accepted him into, a role for which he was clearly entirely unsuitable.

Police officers are frequently baited and provoked to an intolerable extent that most reasonable people could not nonviolently endure; the problem is, such endurance is part of their job description. How anyone manages the superhuman calm and reason required to be a decent police officer is beyond me - but some people do, and they are the ones who have a place in the uniform. They are, however, also the ones who will continue to bear the brunt of the public antipathy stirred up by their baton-wielding bretheren at G20.

I don't buy tabloids, but am sure there's a codicil somewhere in the Gutter Guild's membership rules that ensures at least one of the red-tops has vented its moral spleen at both police brutality and police abuse in a single issue. Reading the sensationalist front page is probably all some people need to commit the crime featured ten pages later, because sleaze and spleen can only ever make things worse. The current debate on parliamentary expenses is a dirty joke; the very real problems both incarnated and faced by the Police have become a Channel 4 "dossier" on a tucked-in jacket and left-handedness - had they managed to pathologise the combination into a rare disease, they'd probably have kept him for Extraordinary People. It should not have to take porn and death to provoke any meaningful drive to snuff out such systemic failings.

The system is corrupt, but it is also corrupted and corrupting, and it will take more than reactionary rage to change that. We are, of course, right to be angry - but that does not necessarily mean we can afford to be. Our government and police force has let us down, but in failing to holistically examine how, why, and what facilitating role the media and man on the street might have played, we are finishing the job for them. The system is corrupt, be happy - because it's the only attitude that is going to help drag us out of this mess.