Weds 1st April: G20 protests - discussion, reaction and chat

[SpookyFrank]

The law can get fucked either way, kettling is just downright wrong. It's especially wrong when it's done to 'contain violent protestors' in a place where there are no violent protestors. Arbitrary, collective punishment is wrong for what should be obvious reasons. Arbitrary, collective punishment for something that hasn't happened yet, and that there's no cause to suspect will happen at all...it beggars belief that anyone could consider that to be fair or reasonable.

The only thing police were responding to was their own shit-stirring. It's clear that the whole police operation was planned in advance and fuck all to do with what the protestors actually did or are accused of doing.

 

[agricola]

I see no mention of a jury in that article. Were the claimants denied a jury, or has even this exemption to the sweeping and unjustified removal of jury trial in civil cases gone?

Has the High Court ever had juries?

 

[SpookyFrank]

Not really.

At the risk of sounding like something of a troll, when the Police were able to produce evidence of serious disorder at J18, and the 2000 and 2001 Mayday disturbances, then the police case with regards to people detained at the 2001 kettle was strengthened.

It will certainly be interesting to see whether such evidence can be found regarding yesterday's events. By all accounts the climate camp acted about as violently as a stoned bunny rabbit, and yet they were kettled anyway; do you think that was a fair, necessary or proportionate response?

 

[agricola]

It will certainly be interesting to see whether such evidence can be found regarding yesterday's events. By all accounts the climate camp acted about as violently as a stoned bunny rabbit, and yet they were kettled anyway; do you think that was a fair, necessary or proportionate response?

I dont know, I wasnt there and nor have I seen any footage from when they (the climate camp) were kettled; though admittedly earlier on they did look fluffy.

 

[_float_]

Regardless of what the law says, I see no justification for mass-detention. If the law supports it then, as with many things, the law is an ass.

I can see the argument for allowing the police to have this power in case of serious emergencies where it might be justified on the grounds of saving people's lives (I can think of eg. keeping people in one place if you are searching for a gunman on the loose in an airport) but like a lot of powers it shouldn't IMO be abused or misused for random purposes. There should be some kind of contestable legal grounds re. necessity, as there also should be for using anti-terrorist powers which are also misused by police.

In the case of April 1st it is even worse if it is used to engineer confrontation and ramp up violence that could have been avoided. Beating people around the streets as if they were cattle or punchbags is just disgusting, and the imprisonment was just part of this rather than some last-ditch necessity.

 

[Roadkill]

I dont know, I wasnt there and nor have I seen any footage from when they (the climate camp) were kettled; though admittedly earlier on they did look fluffy.

I wasn't there either, and I'm not normally an anti-police type. But I believe the reports I heard from the Climate Camp, and right now I hope all of your pensions were invested in something that goes the way of the Titanic.

If the police wanted to alienate otherwise relatively supportive citizens, they've gone the right way about it.

 

[Azrael]

Has the High Court ever had juries?

Section 69 of the Supreme Court Act, 1981, mandates jury trial for any case before the Queen's Bench Division for suits of false imprisonment "unless the court is of opinion that the trial requires any prolonged examination of documents or accounts or any scientific or local investigation which cannot conveniently be made with a jury."

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1981/pdf/ukpga_19810054_en.pdf (warning: PDF is over three megs)

The Queen's Bench Division is one of three divisions in the High Court of Justice. I can't see how jury trial could be denied on the above grounds, so unless both sides waived it, I don't see why the case didn't go before a jury.

If both sides did waive it, the people "kettled" this time around could make a fresh claim and push for trial by jury.

I can see the argument for allowing the police to have this power in case of serious emergencies where it might be justified on the grounds of saving people's lives [...]

I can't see any way you could frame a collective detention law so as to ensure it wouldn't be abused. If the police feel it mass detention justified in an emergency, let the Chief Constable or Commissioner go to court and argue the common law defence of necessity.

 

[SpookyFrank]

I can see the argument for allowing the police to have this power in case of serious emergencies where it might be justified on the grounds of saving people's lives (I can think of eg. keeping people in one place if you are searching for a gunman on the loose in an airport) but like a lot of powers it shouldn't IMO be abused or misused for random purposes. There should be some kind of contestable legal grounds re. necessity, as there also should be for using anti-terrorist powers which are also misused by police.

In the case of April 1st it is even worse if it is used to engineer confrontation and ramp up violence that could have been avoided. Beating people around the streets as if they were cattle or punchbags is just disgusting, and the imprisonment was just part of this rather than some last-ditch necessity.

Good post. It's function creep yet again, and it stems both from the govt's willingness to pass incredibly vague bits of legislation and from the dismal lack of independant scrutiny and oversight of policing.

If there was a real emergency with people's lives at risk and where coralling members of the public was the only safe way to deal with the problem then I suspect police officers would do just that whether there was a law that allowed them to or not. If it was genuinely necessary then they would undoubtedly be forgiven, indeed commended, after the fact. As it is the law leaves so much open to interpretation by the police that it's hard not to suspect that the legislation was deliberately designed that way. We also have no bill of rights to provide the 'interpretation' of the law with clear and unbreachable limits.

 

[Azrael]

If the police wanted to alienate otherwise relatively supportive citizens, they've gone the right way about it.

This is exactly why any sensible supporter of law and order should oppose the police tactics from the past week. We're supposed to have policing by consent, and indiscriminate, draconian actions by the police invite contempt for the law. As I said earlier in the thread, this threatens order as much as it does liberty.

 

[Azrael]

If there was a real emergency with people's lives at risk and where coralling members of the public was the only safe way to deal with the problem then I suspect police officers would do just that whether there was a law that allowed them to or not. If it was genuinely necessary then they would undoubtedly be forgiven, indeed commended, after the fact.

This is what the common law defence of necessity is designed for. A codified power of mass detention, on the other hand, is inherently excessive, regardless of whether the codification is by precedent or statute.

 

[_float_]

Some of the police officers on duty have grounds to be pissed off with their bosses - they were stationed in stupidly-placed lines and ordered to stop large crowds of people at the last minute just yards from their final destination. Even an amateur event organiser could see the stupidity of doing something like this. In a similar way, crash barriers placed at wierd locations creating pinch-points that would otherwise not have been present. You never get anything like that at normal publics events such as the Notting Hill carnival which kind of begs the question of who the hell was running the show on the 1st and what were they thinking?

The embarrassment of the police having to clamber over them to try and get out of the crowd is one thing, but idiotic "planning" and orders like this looked almost like a set-up: the single thin lines of tall-helmet officers were inevitably going to get swamped, have their helmets fall off in the crush, have to desperately fight to get out of an impossible situation with people coming from two or three directions into the junction. It seems that the plan was to 'manage' the media - give them the correct TV shots - to justify as rapid an escalation to a 'riot footing' as possible. 95% of the police were already in their riot clothing (with helmets/shield in vans about 10 metres away) with the other handful of poor sods put right in the path of the crowds and told to 'hold the line'.

I think the whole planning and management of the event needs to be investigated and whoever was in charge asked what the hell they were playing at (not that we'll get anything more than the usual bollocks answers of course).

 

[Roadkill]

This is exactly why any sensible supporter of law and order should oppose the police tactics from the past week.

In principle I agree, but I'm posting out of frustration and the reality is that the majority of people are likely to say something along the lines of, 'Oh well, if those silly troublemakers will insist on protesting then it's their fault if they get baton-charged.' The sad reality is that there aren't many sensible 'supporters of law and order,' and a lot of very stupid ones. That's why the police usually get away with behaving like this.

 

[laptop]

It's function creep yet again, and it stems both from the govt's willingness to pass incredibly vague bits of legislation

It's supposed to be Parliament that passes the laws.

As far as I can tell, most MPs don't even read the Bills they're presented with, let alone go through them with a cynical eye looking for how they'll actually be used, contrary to the spirit of the wording.

They leave lobbyists and campaigners - the likes of us - to do that for them.

Look at the stop-and-search provisions of the Terrorism Act 2000. Some MPs protest now that they never thought that London would be "designated" by the Chief Constable continuously since the Act came into force (apart from an accidental fortnight when he forgot).

But that was bleeding obvious and it's the kind of thinking they're paid for...

 

[_pH_]

Some of the police officers on duty have grounds to be pissed off with their bosses

I thought that about the BTP who, from what I saw, had no riot gear/helmets or anything but were still on the front line at QESt.

Not that I really give a toss, but it showed a substantial lack of duty of care

 

[Azrael]

In principle I agree, but I'm posting out of frustration and the reality is that the majority of people are likely to say something along the lines of, 'Oh well, if those silly troublemakers will insist on protesting then it's their fault if they get baton-charged.'

Even if you're right, and you probably are, it can only help change their minds if arguments against collective detention come from law and order supporters who aren't from "the usual crowd".

I'm on record as disagreeing with most of what the demonstrators were protesting about, but that's by the by. I support free speech, the right to protest, and freedom from arbitrary detention, so I think what happened this week was wrong, and has no place in a common law country.

 

[_float_]

I thought that about the BTP who, from what I saw, had no riot gear/helmets or anything but were still on the front line at QESt.

Not that I really give a toss, but it showed a substantial lack of duty of care

It would be really ironic if the whole thing ended up being investigated because of pissed off police officers!

 

[Roadkill]

Even if you're right, and you probably are, it can only help change their minds if arguments against collective detention come from law and order supporters who aren't from "the usual crowd".

Maybe, but there are people putting forward those arguments and so far they seem to be bouncing off the ivory skulls like so many stones thrown at tanks.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Some of the police officers on duty have grounds to be pissed off with their bosses - they were stationed in stupidly-placed lines and ordered to stop large crowds of people at the last minute just yards from their final destination.

My heart bleeds. In a police cordon it only takes one officer to decide that the whole thing is stupid and break the chain to let people escape. I've never seen that happen personally.

It's not the bosses we can see hitting people in the face with the edges of their shields in that video. Maybe the bosses dreamt the whole fiasco up in the first place but without lots of people willing to blindly follow the script then all those plans would have come to about as much as my frequent plans to take over the world, namely fuck all. And then, god forbid, people could have been allowed to protest as they saw fit with the police only stepping in if and when, according to their own judgement and the evidence provided by their own senses, it became necessary to do so.

 

[Paulie Tandoori]

It's supposed to be Parliament that passes the laws.

As far as I can tell, most MPs don't even read the Bills they're presented with, let alone go through them with a cynical eye looking for how they'll actually be used, contrary to the spirit of the wording.

They leave lobbyists and campaigners - the likes of us - to do that for them.

Look at the stop-and-search provisions of the Terrorism Act 2000. Some MPs protest now that they never thought that London would be "designated" by the Chief Constable continuously since the Act came into force (apart from an accidental fortnight when he forgot).

But that was bleeding obvious and it's the kind of thinking they're paid for...

i don't disagree with you at all but i do question whether political pressure of the kind that you describe really has any effect anymore. politicians and responsibility for the society/legislation/agitation seems as bad as its ever been to me tbh.

 

[SpookyFrank]

I thought that about the BTP who, from what I saw, had no riot gear/helmets or anything but were still on the front line at QESt.

Not that I really give a toss, but it showed a substantial lack of duty of care

Were the protestors being violent? Well then they didn't need riot gear did they? No doubt the police weren't issued with anti aircraft missiles either but you wouldn't call that a failure to care for their safety would you?

 

[Azrael]

Maybe, but there are people putting forward those arguments and so far they seem to be bouncing off the ivory skulls like so many stones thrown at tanks.

Maybe so, but what's the alternative? Support for law and order has become synonymous with authoritarianism. If people are to be persuaded to get off that dangerous road, they need to feel there are more than two options.

 

[Paulie Tandoori]

some protestors were instructed to bring pillows which could construed as....well, no they couldn't be actually, they could never be used as justification for cracking heads and splitting skulls, inshallah.

 

[_pH_]

Were the protestors being violent? Well then they didn't need riot gear did they?

The police themselves said they expected it to get violent (and were predicting far worse than anything that occurred).

what's your point caller

 

[lopsidedbunny]

The Rising of the Flags above the Bank of England please do not try this at home kids.

 

[SpookyFrank]

The police themselves said they expected it to get violent (and were predicting far worse than anything that occurred).

Yes but they also knew they were making it all up

Any way you slice it it's gonna be while yet before I can think of anything more to say on the subject of coppers being put in danger than "fuck 'em".

They weren't handing out helmets to protestors either remember, and they have a duty of care to the public as well as their own fat arses.

 

[free spirit]

The Rising of the Flags above the Bank of England please do not try this at home kids.

I'd so have been up on top of that horse statue if I'd been there...

 

[_pH_]

I dunno, it's hard to say whether they believed it or not. Just seemed a bit odd the the Met were fully tooled up (as were massive reinforcements drafted in from Sussex/someotherconstabularyican'tremember), whereas BTP weren't.

BTP sergeant: "careful out there lads, it's gonna get nasty so we believe"

BTP PC #1: " so where's our riot gear then sarge?"

BTP Sgt: "erm.............."

BTP PC #2: "don't we get nice blue helmets like the Met?"

BTP Sgt: "erm...................."

But, like i said earlier, not that I give a toss, just seemed a bit strange to me

 

[N_igma]

You think any of that exists at the moment?

Nah and that's the problem with you'se, go on about your revolution and shite but none of ya's are willing to do anything about it except march thousands of people onto a narrow street (great thinking). The G20 are probably laughing at ya's.

 

[_float_]

My heart bleeds.

My point isn't to try and generate sympathy for some of the police...

...my point is about the level of cynicism and immorality behind a plan that would deliberately put officers in trouble and engineer unsafe crowd conditions as a pretext to kit everyone else up and start hitting people.

The utterly stupid initial deployment patterns and instructions served to generate TV pictures of police being swept along by crowds as early as mid-day, enabling the rest of the 'crowd management' to proceed according to their pre-planned timetable.

 

[_pH_]

My point isn't to try and generate sympathy for some of the police...

...my point is about the level of cynicism and immorality behind a plan that would deliberately put officers in trouble and engineer unsafe crowd conditions as a pretext to kit everyone else up and start hitting people.

same here really.