I think the police are fairly irrelevant to what they are trying to do - except in so far as they can be used by letting them do their job. I'm not saying I think XR's current tactics are right, but I understand what they're trying to do. If you get arrests and police violence against peaceful protesters on a large enough scale it becomes qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from arrests on a smaller scale.
Let's say their ambition is to get 10,000 people arrested. This will start to clog up courts, be a burden on the state. Media will start to do running tallies of the numbers of arrests. Let's say each person knows roughly a 100 people (friends, relatives, work colleagues etc). If 10,000 people get arrested then roughly a 1000,000 people will personally know someone who has been arrested (I know there will be overlaps in social groups, just doing rough numbers).
If police start beating peaceful protests this can become another way of forcing people to pick a side (think miner's strike), particularly if they know someone involved.
This all means that huge numbers of people will be talking about the protests, to the point that it is a social phenomenon on which people will be expected to have a stance, and on which governments and political parties will be expected to have a stance.
I'm not saying I think all this will work, just that it is not related to the tactic of getting arrested on individual protests, and I don't think they expect anything to come of any given arrest of encounter with the police. It's all about trying to make it happen on such a scale that it forces society-wide debate on e.g. whether climate change is urgent enough to justify such methods.
Great post here about how the police will play this
C&Ps for the facebook averse:
Hi everyone, my name is Kevin and I am the coordinator of the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol), a coalition of organisations, researchers and lawyers challenging violent or excessive policing in the UK. Green and Black Cross is one of our core members.
I wanted to share a few thoughts on the likely police response to Extinction Rebellion based on almost 30 years monitoring the police and most specifically, working with the anti-fracking movement on this issue since 2014.
In Netpol’s experience, public order policing is driven entirely by intensive intelligence-gathering. Central to this is the creation and use of personal profiles to “provide a detailed picture of the (potential) offender”.
As a result, what we have seen from the anti-fracking movement and other campaigns is concerted police efforts to build personal and organisational profiles on the size, structures, leadership and alliances of campaign groups. At its most basic level, this means filming attendance at meetings and protests and routinely monitoring social media.
The "control strategy" used by the police also places a particular emphasis on "disruption" and "network demolition". For the last ten years, individual campaigners have repeatedly expressed to us their concerns about personal targeting or ‘picking out’ for having their photograph taken, facing identification checks by police during a stop and search and police officers publicly naming them (what one described as ‘aggressively saying hello’). We have had reports too of detention and searches under Schedule 7 anti-terrorism powers at ports or airports.
This “overt” activity constitutes far more of the surveillance conducted by the police – and should have a far greater priority for activists – than the inevitable concerns about undercover police spies (who in any event are incredibly difficult to identify).
Many might imagine that because this approach is borrowed from the policing of organised crime, its focus is on protest that is “violent”. That has not what we have seen.
Instead, the police have tended to target new social movements where they have little existing intelligence; groups who challenge powerful corporate interests; and those using direct action tactics.
This is why this matters to Extinction Rebellion.
Campaigners in other social movements have told us how obvious or conspicuous surveillance alienates people from others, including communities they are trying to connect or engage with, by creating the impression they are criminal or ‘trouble’. They have also said they believe surveillance is intentionally divisive, calling attention to those who are allegedly ‘extremists’ or whom the police want to isolate or alienate from other protesters.
If anyone experiences any of the following, please contact me in confidence at
kevin@netpol.org:
- the singling-out 'organisers' for particular attention
- visits to individual campaigners at home
- concerns raised or referrals made in schools or colleges for “vulnerability to extremism”
- concerns raised about parents taking their children on protests
Finally, a heartfelt plea:
The apparently friendly police officers in blue bibs are intelligence gatherers. This isn’t speculation, it has been repeatedly confirmed, including in evidence to Parliament.
You may think chatting to them doesn’t reveal anything but they are not primarily interested in you – and they certainly aren’t interested in your views on climate change.
What they are interested in is the scraps of information that, when combined and analysed, help to build their profiles on the movement you have joined.
Please, please, please… for no other reason than respecting the safety of your comrades, please do not engage with them.
Kev x
