Even as recently as the mid 80s, using your truncheon was not something you did lightly and it (rightly) always resulted in lots of hard questions by supervisors. Many officers simply did not take them on patrol with them. It was not at all unusual for an officer to go through their entire service and never have to even draw their truncheon, let alone use it in any significant way.
It seemed pretty simple to me. The police are never the first to use force, but they may use force in order to stop something that is about to happen. Have you not seen Minority Report?
Containment is a tactic which is intended to prevent violence and disorder. There is no requirement for any previous violence before it can be used. The Courts acknowledged that it could be used as a preventative measure (though they suggested there should be sound grounds for doing so). Violent resistance against the tactic cannot be justifed on the basis of the containment being "violent" any more than an attack on a simple police line across a particular street could be justified on the basis of that line being "violent".
It was your apparent reference to a Judicial Review into overall tactics by gold and silver commanders which confused me. You mixed up three different details (what it was, what it was about and by whom it was done) into an unintelligble whole.
Any chance of you dealing with their obsessive posting of frequently content-free rubbish, aimed only at having a pop at me, and stalking me from thread to thread to do so?
)
I draw a distinction between using some level of force and using "violence".
Any chance of you dealing with their obsessive posting of frequently content-free rubbish, aimed only at having a pop at me, and stalking me from thread to thread to do so?
And any chance of you counting up the number of such posts and comparing it to the number of responses I eventually feel moved to make? (which I will guarantee is at least ten to one)?
(Funny how I am always the first to be pulled about this, isn't it ...
Sooner or later someone (police or protestor or even innocent passer-by) will die in a violent protest. And those who encouraged it will be to blame.
So, by noting that superior training "helps" make the decision for the individual, you acknowledge that there will still be instances where, no matter how good the training, an individual may get carried away ... which is what we have been observing time and again in the footage of the polciing of the demonstrations.
No, but it looked entirely consistent with being one (I specifically noticed because I had personally never previously encoutnered, or even heard of, snooker balls being thrown at demonstrations and when I read the reports of that I was surprised).
Please provide ANY example of a situation (a situation as a whole, not on a one-to-one basis) in which there is evidence of the use of violence by the police happening before any use of violence by any of the protestors ...
Which is exactly as it should be. There will always be situations in which unexpected / unforeseen (for whatever reason - changes in circumstances, lack of local knowledge or simply incompetence) things happen when any tactic is used. We need to reach a position where that sort of communication and cooperation between police and protestors is the norm and not the exception.
No, but it looked entirely consistent with being one (I specifically noticed because I had personally never previously encoutnered, or even heard of, snooker balls being thrown at demonstrations and when I read the reports of that I was surprised).
And I made no comment whatsoever about how it got there - I simply answered editor's question "Has anyone seen these snooker balls?" or whatever it was. Why imply that I did?
