The Death of Peaceful Protest

The G20 summit recently started, and finished, and along with it the protests. What there is to say here is not a new and revolutionary pattern of behaviour from the police, but rather, what seems as though it may well be one of the final nails in the coffin of peaceful protest - time will tell. This is, after all, a pattern of behaviour that has been present at major protests and events from long ago. The Battle of the Beanfield, or the Miners strike are examples, but perhaps the best example is that of the Southall Race Riots, which I’ll leave you to look up for yourself. Particularly notable in that last example of course is the death of one Blair Peach, 33 years old, whome 11 witnesses saw struck by police, but to this day no police officer has been charged, no public investigation has occured (in spite of a continuing campaign for one, with no less than 79 MP’s calling for one at the time.

Well, recently it was Mr. Ian Tomlinson’s turn, who at the beginning of this month was batoned by a police officer while he was facing away and indeed walking away from a charging police line. The investigation was initially to be performed internally by the City of London constabulary, and has since been taken over by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, who we are supposed to believe are independent merely by the existance of the word in their name… and yet, these are the very same people who conducted the inquiry into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, with the well known result that no individuals whatsoever were held accountable, the removal of evidence after corroboration between involved officers was deemed acceptable, the story all along changed many times, but a completely innocent man remained very very dead.

So what can I say about the recent G20 protests? Well, I suppose I could go off on a tirade about how the protestors were perfect and the police were all demons, but I won’t. The fact is, some protestors did indeed cause trouble - but they were in the minority… that much can be seen by the fact that ony approximately 131 arrests were made over the course of the protests, and we don’t know how many were charged out of those because the police won’t release the figures - by comparison there were upwards of 5000 protestors. The fact is, also, that police tactics not only contributed to the violence (which was actually minimal on the part of the protestors, despite what they faced) and it could be well posited that had they not used those tactics, there’d have been very little problem… what I will do here instead is challenge the standard narrative, and will do so largely by using video of the protests. I’m sure that a great many of you will have seen the violence on the TV news, and the ‘evil protestors and good job by police’ narrative, and the later reports on Ian Tomlinson’s death, and the woman who recieved rather similar treatment at his vigil. Never the less, I will repeat the footage here.  I will also post the full footage of the incident where the woman was hit in the face and smacked to the floor with a baton… and I will comment on it all. I will also comment not on the actions of individual officers, but on the police operation as a whole. Finally, after all my comments and after all the videos, it’s time for you to make your own mind up.

Remember, nomatter what we think of the behaviour of the minority of protestors, that does not mean we can tar them all with the same brush - likewise individual police officers participating in group actons under orders (though ‘just following orders’ is no defence in cases of prima facie wrongdoing). So lets start with the current (rightful) outcry…

Well, to say that that’s disturbing is pretty obvious. It doesn’t need much further said about it. There is something that DOES need to be said though, namely regarding the officer responsible and the reasons behind his actions. You see, after the incident came to be seen in footage supplied to the media by a financial worker from overseas (it says a lot that he trusted our media more than our police, and rightly so, it turned out), it took him a 2 days to come forward - a full week after the event which was immediately publicised. According to an article that was published by the Daily Mail, but has since been edited to tell a completely different story (not even a different version of events! googling the exact phrase will bring it up where the article was copied on other websites prior to it’s alteration), on hearing about the death after coming forward…

“A Met source said: ‘He genuinely didn’t know it was him until he saw the video. His wife came home to find him unconscious on the floor, having had some sort of panic attack.”

So what does that mean? The man used his baton at full force to try to bring Ian down, and when it failed, he pushed him over at full force. There are a few possibilities we can deduce from this, and none of them good…

1. The officer concerned was a bit of a thug and thought nothing of it, nor did his collegues
2. The officer concerned was just doing his job as ordered, and gave the same treatment to so many people that day that it was all just a blur to him
3. The officer concerned was incapable of carrying out his role as a police officer properly, and should not have been on the job… but never the less was on the job, and his collegues accepted it
4. The officers collegues had hit so many people in such a way that day, and so there’s no way he could realise it was him
5. The officer concerned wasn’t bothered about the assualt in the slightest, only the death.
6. The officer concerned wasn’t really that bothered by the event, but realised that his whole life could come crashing down once he’d heared about the consequences of his actions.

It doesn’t look good does it? I’ll let you decide which, but reserve your judgement for a while, but do note that he’s not wearing his number on his shoulder as he should, and is thus unidentifiable….

The Ian Thomlinson vigil, and we see similar behaviour to that which Ian Tomlinson recieved. The excuse for the policing, and possible excuses regarding the Tomlinson incident itself, revolve around violent protestors, and the need to contain and subdue the situation… so what happens in this video?

A bunch of protestors were sitting and standing around doing little more than chanting slogans. A black man was talking with a female police officer, and insisting on whatever it was he had to say to presumably get a satisfactory answer, and did so without violence. Meanwhile, a white man was also talking with a police officer just a few yards away. It would then appear that two large male police officers took it upon themselves to roughly manhandle the insistant but non aggressive black man back into the small crowd having become tired of whatever it was he was saying. The small crowd took exception to it and cried out about it. The police responded by adopting an aggressive posture, irritating people further. A woman approached a police officer in a non-violent manner (if with some non-violent agression in her gestures befitting her understandable anger), and she got slapped in the face by a 6 foot giant in a high-vis jacket wearing some manner of gauntlet on his arm. She then got up to do no more than argue the toss over her being so clearly and wrongfully hit for no good reason, and got smacked to the floor with a baton by that same officer for little reason other than the officer not liking it.

That’s what I see in the video. The initial provocation came from the police simply by their manner, and any questioning it resulted in the manner of the police getting worse untill the protestors had accepted that the police were the ones holding the sticks, and they’d better remember it, else feel the end of them. A bit of a “don’t upset us, or else” situation.

The other things of note is that the officer responsible has also hidden his numbers, making himself unidentifiable to the public present… and that clearly, the Tomlinson incident did not happen in isolation. Something seems somewhat amiss with the behaviour of at least some police then, but I’ll let you decide on how widespread it might be and it’s implications.

So anyway…

… aaaand it seems that this officer, having just performed/supervised a section 60 search, refuses to give his number (illegal, unless there is reasonable suspicion that a person is carrying weapons - and the search is only FOR weapons, with no requirement to give name and address, though none the less the maker of the video claims that the officer said that ID should be looked for in the search which is thus also illegal.) ANY officer, regardless of rank, is required to give his or her number on request should they stop and search someone… and he refused. Being an inspector is no excuse. Further, note the pattern in the videos so far - in all cases, the officers in proximity to the incidents obviously know full well what’s going on but close ranks by turnng a blind eye. Again… make your own mind up, but it seems clear that hiding or refusing to give police ID as required of them is another problem that’s far from isolated.

Equally concerning is a video I cannot embed in this page, but is freely available on The Guardians webside, where police use Section 14 of the Public Order Act to instruct the press to move away from the area for “half an hour”, and threaten the press with arrest.

Finally, (though by no means exhaustively) there’s the issue of the Climate Camp. The protests that day were made up of a number of different factions each with either a different form of protest, or a different message of protest. The Climate Camp is something that happens every now and then, where a bunch of people descend on somewhere and set up tents for a while… it doesn’t get much more peaceful, and indeed it was… that is, untill riot police charged them.

At that point, the protestors put their hands in the air in a show of entirely passive action, while being hit with batons, pushed back (trampling over their tents and belongings!) and hit with the edge of riot shields from time to time. It’s worth noting here that riot shields are to be used defensively, and to push with their full face - using their edge to hit people with is entirely against the rules. It’s also worth looking at the question of why riot police were used. After all, the protestors chant “This is not a riot” is quite correct, so just what were they doing there? They weren’t responding to violence, so just why were they charging? The climate camp protestors were later detained for hours and individually photographed and released… all the time wondering how to retreive the belongings they’d been forced to leave behind.

Well, the answer folks is something called “kettling”. It’s where the police take a demonstration, and decide to surround it on all sides, condense it to a small space, and refuse to let people in or out… and that’s what they did to the protestors for hours - confined them in a small space in groups with no access to water, toilet facilities, medical assistance, food, etc. The vast majority of them hadn’t actually broken the law in any way, nor had they done anything warranting caution, detention, or arrest. A great many of them wanted to get home! The only way out was past the police, which would involve some pretty staunch fighting likely to result only in failure. Under those circumstances, and in a confined space within a large crowd getting increasingly frustrated and anxious to get out, how would you feel? If you keep an animal cornered for long enough, what does it do? The following video demonstrates the point nicely…

So now you’ve seen it. That’s the other side of the story, all factual, and it’s not pretty. Is it the death of peaceful protest in the UK? After all, it seems that you can’t freely demonstrate without 6 days notice, and if you give 6 days notice, you can’t freely demonstrate because of police kettling - you can’t say what you want going where you want even if you notify them in advance… and the tactics used by police at the moment only serve to infuriate and ask for violence - and the police are more than happy to oblige too it seems, whether it’s individuals, or just the orders they recieve. In any case, treating everybody as though they were part of a very small violent mnority who may not even be wthin a given kettled group is clearly niether right nor a good idea. These people are the police, and their function is to protect the peaceful and law abiding public, including their right to protest (and do so effectively), and to protect them from any violent minority that may be using any protest as cover. Their job is not to tar anybody that protests with the same brush as vandals and violent thugs. The police are supposed to be professionals… a cut above. It’s in their job description.

(… and just as an addendum to that, in case anybody wondered, yes, the Territorial Support Group (TSG) involved in Ians death and the woman getting hit are indeed one and the same as the Special Patrol Group (SPG) involved in the death of Blair Peach. This special unit is supposed to be a cut above the cut above!)

I’ve been around a number of web forums, and one view that pops up in favour of the police a lot s “if you go to these demo’s, then you know what to expect”, while another common response to specific incidents involves the police being right simply because they’re the police. I guess the question of whether peaceful protest is dead or not is answered partly by one thing: what do you make of the above? Do you find it acceptable?

If you do, then it’s the death knell of peaceful protest in this country, and the alternatives can only be violent protest or an authoritarian state. If you don’t, well, maybe there’s hope yet… make your voice known and stand up for the right to peacefully protest - someone needs to!

In any case, somebody or other is very happy with all this. After all, amongst all this talk of violence and police brutality, regardless of which side it’s focussed on, were you thinking about the message of the protestors? Do you have to struggle to remember what the various messages were? … because “anti-capitalism” wasn’t it, at least not in unison. The message was bigger than that, and it wasn’t an entirely unreasonable one either - but who’s concentrating on it now?