Riots in England: Summer 2011

Britain’s urban rioting of August 2011 strengthened the hand of the state, the police and the political right.

The riots were not the work of a single social group with one cause. The spark for the initial Tottenham riot was the police shooting a young black man sitting in the back of a taxi. Matters were made worse when the authorities claimed that he had fired at them when in fact he hadn’t. The situation was further inflamed by the police refusing to discuss the death with the dead man’s family, who were peacefully assembled outside the police station in a small demonstration made up of relatives, friends and community leaders.

A local ethnic riot of rage in Tottenham could not have spread across the land, engulfing several English cities, particularly London, if the country hadn’t been a tinderbox waiting to go up in flames.

In parts of London and then some other British cities (Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham), the young unemployed - impoverished, and alienated, but brought up in a society in which consumer possessions were elevated to the purpose of life - revolted and sought to steal electronic goods, designer clothing and much else from High Street stores. An orgy of rioting and looting ensued.

In the mayhem criminals and criminal gangs entered the fray engaging in systematic looting, arson and mugging of passers-by – and in a couple of cases, murder. The situation was further compounded by the creation in many parts of London of a macabre carnival atmosphere as shop after shop was looted and burnt; and funseekers from all social backgrounds joined in.

Some on the political left might even feel an element of Schadenfreude in seeing the poor and the excluded taking to the streets to vent their anger. But the rioters, save for a few small contingents of anarchists, lacked any kind of conscious political purpose. The rioters and looters’ target was not just large commercial property, but also that of private individuals and small traders. The hooded youths were smashing up their own communities in which they obviously felt they had no stake.

Inevitably, the target of much of the violence was the police; for it is the police whose job it is to physically bend bodies so they cooperate with the social order, a social order which is so unfair to so many. But no society can tolerate rampant criminality; so the police with widespread public backing suppressed the riots. By the end, armoured vehicles appeared on the streets of London and permission had been given for discharge of plastic bullets, though these were not used.

After the 1981 riots – the only riots comparable in modern British history - the left still existed as a political force and Tory “wets” still present in the government were apprehensive about a full-scale junking of the post-war consensus. None of that applies today and the reaction of the state has been one of enhancing repression and eschewing any form in social understanding in favour of punishment.

The riots restored the empathy between that "moral majority" and the police. The G20 demonstrations in April 2009 and the killing of Ian Tomlinson had seriously weakened people’s perception of the police, but that has now been forgotten. Opinion polls showed overwhelming support for the police, much more so than they did for the governments handing of the crisis. The future for civil liberties is bleak. When in the future peaceful demonstrators are beaten by police, sympathy beyond small liberal circles will be slight.

Popular punophilia: public lust for punishment

The state reaction to the rioting was swift and brutal, symbolised by the police battering-ram used in dawn raids to smash in the front doors of alleged looters, all eagerly filmed by TV film crews. The police adopted a policy of arrest, detention and the denial of bail to anyone allegedly guilty of any riot-related offence, however trivial.

Magistrates’ courts sat in twenty-four hour sessions dispensing rushed summary justice for the thousand or so people (mostly young, unemployed men) who were arrested during or after the riots. The charges are various: theft, burglary, possession of stolen goods, violent disorder, assault, resisting arrest, etc.

The law was perverted in two ways in its dealing with people arrested during the riots. First, those defendants who pleaded guilty to even minor offences received custodial sentences of around six months when normally such misdoings would incur fines or community service. A penalty supplement was added for crimes committed during the riots. Below is one typical case reported by The Guardian:

At Camberwell Green magistrates, Nicholas Robinson, 23, an electrical engineering student with no previous convictions, was jailed for the maximum permitted six months after pleading guilty to stealing bottles of water worth £3.50 from Lidl in Brixton. He had been walking back from his girlfriend's house in the early hours of Monday morning when he saw the store being looted, his lawyer said, and had taken the opportunity to go in and help himself to a case of water because he was thirsty

The severity of sentences for offences committed during the riots was later approved by senior judges. Thus opportunist theft against commercial retailers during civil disorder was regarded as more serious than the burglary of residential property. The pro-business bias is obvious.

The severity of sentencing led to some interesting contrasts. Shortly after Nicolas Robinson was jailed for six moths for stealing a bottle of water, Rebecca Balira was jailed for the same length of time for keeping a Tanzanian woman as a slave and assaulting her.

Second, some 60% of those pleading not guilty in court were remanded in custody rather than being given bail. In normal circumstances only around 10% would be remanded. The accused were incarcerated before trial, not because they might abscond, interfere with witnesses, etc, but simply to punish them. This is contrary to to the basic rule: innocent until proved guilty.

The scenes of rioting have engendered fear and anger among ordinary people, so there is a popular demand among the public to crack down rioters and looters with 70% of the population supporting harsher sentence for offences committed during the riots. However, the behaviour of the government and magistrates is itself undermining the the independence of the judiciary as judges respond to political pressure from the state and the government. One judicial official even went as far to describe emails from civil servants requesting exemplary punishments as “directives” to impose stiffer penalties on riot-related offences.

But this kind of arbitrary severity is unlikely to be effective. In the next six months a thousand young men will emerge from prison, angry, unemployed and in many cases homeless. So the fuel is being made for yet more disorder.

Children and the riots

Among those arrested and charged during and after the riots were 269 children. Over 40 percent of these children had been held in pre-trial detention: a majority (some 60 percent) had no previous criminal record. According to Britain’s obligation under international law, the imprisonment of children should only be considered as a last resource. Instead children were used as pawns in Cameron’s law-and-order populism.

Britain has the highest rate of juvenile incarceration in Europe.

Welfare and social housing

The lust for punishment of riot-related offenders is not satisfied by long prison sentences. Government is promoting two further measures with much popular backing. Local councils are being encouraged to evict the whole family of the offender from their social or council provided housing. Thus not only is the offender to be made homeless, but his (or her) whole family. Such collective punishment (i.e. of the innocent with the perpetrator) is contrary to every principle of justice. At the time of writing, several evictions are under way, but none has so far been endorsed by the courts. The second policy is to withdraw unemployment and other social security support from offenders. To date, legislation to do this has not yet been passed.

England is thus currently caught up in a hysterical loss of proportion. Opportunist thieves who picked up looted goods from the street or entered already broken into shops face many months of imprisonment and loss of social security entitlements on their release. If they live in social housing, they and their families risk being thrown into homelessness. It is pure folly to think that such measures will improve the social fabric of so-called “broken Britain.”

Gangs

Since the riots the Cameron government has declared war on gangs and gang culture. It is true that a minority of those involved in the rioting were members of criminal gangs, but the majority were not. They were opportunistic thieves.

Suppressing gangsterism in Britain’s poverty ghetto estates is no easy task. Yet every step that has been taken so far has or will strengthen the gangs. Two thirds of those imprisoned as a result of the riots have been incarcerated for the first time in their lives. Evidence is already emerging that many young men in prison are joining gangs for their protection, a practice likely to continue after they leave jail.

On release from jail, nearly all the former prisoners will be unemployed; and if the government fulfils its plans to remove public housing and welfare benefits, many will be destitute. The only source of support for these miserable people will be by way of association with criminal gangs.

Is the Cameron government aware of these rather obvious points? They probably are, but they also know, if they want to win populist recognition for being tough on crime, there is no need to worry about rising crime rates.

And the future?

Apart from strengthening the hand of state repression, what the riots have done is to confirm the process of the Americanisation of the under-class. They become utterly impoverished; its youth violent and totally excluded from society. The “moral majority” demands and justifies ever increasing punishment against them. The idea of a “working class” as a class “for itself” has gone. The political right wins.

Some truisms regarding the police

Here are a couple of points about the police which tend never change.

The police, even in the most liberal state, are the means by which the state physically forces its will onto human bodies. They may carry out subsidiary functions, such as helping children cross the road, but that does not contradict their main role in society.

Police forces everywhere attract authoritarian personality types and attempt to expand their remit. Everywhere and always the police ask for more powers.

In a healthy liberal democracy (which currently Britain is not), government, legislatures, the courts and public opinion together prevent the otherwise inevitable slide into an authoritarian state riddled with police excesses and corruption.

The police can and should have their institutional say although it is widely known in advance what the police will say. They always want more powers, and if they get them they want more. It is up to the people to say no.

Kettling: mass arrest for collective punishment

Mass arrest is now regularly used in Britain to punish political dissent.

Traditionally, when police faced large congregations of people whose actions they wished to impede, they resorted to the selective arrest of a minority and the dispersal of the majority. However, particularly since the G20 demonstrations in April 2009, police have changed tactics and sought the mass arrest of demonstrators in an action known as kettling.

Kettling is a euphemism for the indiscriminate detention of large numbers of people in temporally-created street holding pens. Those rounded up include, of course, the demonstrators, but also journalists and unlucky bystanders who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. All these unfortunate souls are detained for several hours in these street enclosures without medical facilities, food, water or access to toilets, while denied any form of meaningful contact with those who are detaining them. The boundaries of the kettle are controlled by baton-wielding police, aided on occasion by dogs, horses and temporarily erected steel fences. Demonstrators facing the police lines, often suffer kicks and punches, supplemented by blows from police batons and riot shields.

The student demonstrations in the final months of 2010 saw the development of so-called “hyper-kettling,” a further torment inflicted on the incarcerated. The amount of space available to people inside the kettle is progressively constricted until the detained are packed in like sardines in a can. In one case, demonstrators were compressed on Westminster bridge with police lines sealing both bridgeheads.

Kettling was first used in Britain in 1999 to detain anti-WTO demonstrators in London. Initially justified as an extreme measure to deal with extreme situations, the technique has now become standard police practice, particularly in London. In one notorious case on 24 November 2010, teenage children demonstrating in London were kettled. The kettle was only opened after midnight, leaving many teenagers stranded in London on a freezing night.

As a means of causing pain and discomfort to those engaged in political protest, kettling is highly effective. Those beaten at the edge of the kettle, particularly when the incarceration area is being constricted, come off worst, as one journalist covering the student demonstration on 9 December 2010 points out:

“The police started to push back then they started using their batons on protesters. I was caught then and pushed up towards the front. I ducked, my glasses were knocked off my face so I was trying to hold them. Then, basically, a baton strike came to the side of my face and then onto the top of my head. Directly onto the crown of my head. I felt a big whacking thud and I heard it reverberating inside my head….blood was streaming down the back of my head and back of my neck and matting my hair.”

Yet even for those not injured by the police, the effects of street arrest can be severe. Physically, many will suffer from exposure, dehydration and inability to use toilets, leading to people needing to defecate and urinate in their clothes. Psychological suffering centres on the inability of the incarcerated to know when they will be freed; and hence the pitiful chants of “Let Us Out.” The anxiety may be practical, for instance not being able to make an appointment to pick up a child, or it may stem from the claustrophobia of being crushed in a crowd.

Kettling is also used as a propaganda tool.Television pictures show lines of police confronting a mass of demonstrators. The impression is invariably given that it is the police who are defending a line against aggressive street protesters, when the reality is that the demonstrators are being pushed into an ever decreasing amount of space.

The police and conservative authoritarians excuse kettling by arguing that among the demonstrators there are hooligans, who cause damage; therefore the police are justified in kettling hundreds of innocent people in extremely unpleasant conditions for hours as a means of dealing of dealing with the problem. Yet In confronting other crimes the police do not have recourse to mass arrest of the innocent for their own convenience. Additionally, the practical benefits of kettling are short-lived. Some demonstrators may fear to protest in the future, but others, angered by the experience of kettling, will abandon the traditional protest march in favour of more disruptive forms of protest, which do not lend themselves to kettling.

Under closer examination, therefore, ketttling can be seen as the collective punishment of political protest and is clearly intended as a deterrent against those thinking of exercising their democratic right to demonstrate. Its use does nothing to help public policing in the long run and explodes the myth that British police are operating merely to uphold the law rather than to deter and punish political protest.

Such mass and indiscriminate arrest simultaneously violates the civil right to demonstrate and the personal right against arbitrary arrest.

Kettling and police violence against demonstrators has now become common currency; and that which is a regular, normal and an every-day occurrence ceases to be newsworthy. Yet sometimes it is precisely that which is normal which requires moral and political focus. Why can police beat demonstrators, journalists and by-standers, at least without causing serious injury, with impunity? Why can these same people be detained in kettles for hours without redress?

How long will it be before police are explaining away stampedes in a kettle in which people die and are seriously injured? How long will it be before the kettle of today becomes the concentration camp of tomorrow?

Note

In January 2012, the Court of Appeal overturned an earlier surprise decision of the High Court, which had held police action during the April 2009 G20 demonstrations to be excessive and unlawful. The Appeal Court judges in overturning the ruling exonerated the police and endorsed the violent police kettling operations deployed during the largely peaceful demonstrations.

The effect of the Appeal Court decision was to legitimise the forcible detention in street holding pens of thousands of legal non-violent protesters simply because senior police officers "honestly" believed that a “breach of the peace” by some of the demonstrators was possible. Flowing from this judgement is the precedent that any protest consisting of more than a handful of people can be lawfully kettled as a means of dealing with a possible future breach of the peace by a few demonstrators.

The decision leaves the right to demonstrate unmolested in tatters, handing the police the virtually unlimited power to incarcerate and punish demonstrators. In practice, this power will be used with discrimination: not so often that it become blatant that there is no right to protest in Britain, but sufficiently often to deter political protest on the streets.

Of course, the ruling can be challenged in the Supreme Court and in the European Court of Human Rights, but in the meantime the ruling stands.

Ethnic Cleansing at Dale Farm

The liquidation of the Dale Farm gypsy settlement is a case of localised ethnic cleansing camouflaged with the language of protecting the Green Belt.

On Wednesday 19 October 2011 after several appeals and much dithering in the courts – in which Britain’s judges prioritised planning law over human rights – the forceful eviction of gypsies from the Dale Farm settlement began.

On the first day, the settlement, weakly defended by residents and non-violent direct action activists, was attacked at day break by columns of riot police. Electric stun guns (tasers) were offensively deployed on two occasions. Once the residents and their supporters had been subdued, the bailiffs moved in to do their dirty work of demolishing homes.

The gypsies were evicted from their ten-year-old settlement, consisting of land which the settlers either owned or had been leased to them. There were no issues of trespass.

The gypsies themselves were dispersed and driven from the municipality of Basildon. Their pain is every bit as strong as that of people ethnically cleansed in Palestine or elsewhere. Eighty-six families and around one hundred children were rendered destitute, left to inhabit car parks and road lay-bys.

To carry out this piece of micro-ethnic cleansing, Basildon’s Conservative-led council and the Home office spent around twenty million pounds to make hundreds of people homeless. That amounts to some 230 000 pounds per gypsy family. Obviously Cameron and the Basildon Council leader, Tony Ball, think this is money well spent to pander to racist sentiment in Britain.

Those who say this is merely about upholding the laws of urban planning are either using this pretext to cover their racism or to absolve their consciousnesses. There is simply no meaningful parallel in preventing a property developer building for profit or a homeowner building an extension with the bulldozing of a decade old settlement. Why should planning law trump all other considerations? When the London orbital M25 motorway was built thousands of square kilometres of Green Belt land were concreted. Of course, a derogation for the M25 motorway was permitted because the road was deemed important. But why was there no derogation for the largest gypsy settlement in England?

The Dale Farm settlement is to be bulldozed in an attempt to create the pretence that it never existed.

Fisher and May Bowles: different laws for different people

Injurious assaults by the police are exonerated: non-injurious ones by political protesters are punished.

Nicola Fisher

The first case is that of Nicola Fisher. On 2 April 2009 Nicola Fischer attended a vigil for the newspaper vendor and bystander, Ian Tomlinson, killed the day before by police during the G20 demonstrations. Apparently, Fisher was standing in a place where the police did not want her to be.

Fisher’s account, which is backed up by film of the incident, runs as follows:

"Suddenly quite a few police officers came and made a line in front of us and almost straight away the officer in front of me shouted 'get back' and pushed me before I even had a chance to move. When he did that I, as an instant reaction, pushed back, then straight away he gave me a back-hander across my left cheek."

Not content with that, police officer Delroy Smellie then calmly took out his baton and beat Fisher on the legs causing her to dance in pain and leaving her with extensive bruising.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) decided to prosecute Smellie for assault.

Nicola Fisher did not appear at the trial, and despite the evidence against Smellie, District Judge District Judge Daphne Wickham acquitted him of assault. She said there was no evidence that his use of the baton was not approved, correct or measured.

Jonathan May-Bowles

On 19 July 2011 Rupert Murdoch was giving evidence to the House of Commons Media Select committee. Murdoch’s company, News International, has been engaged in illegal phone tapping, paying money to police officers and has for a long time extended its influence over elected government. Its aim is to support business interests, the establishment and right wing ideas in addition to making money.

May-Bowles, sitting in the audience, threw a paper plate covered in shaving foam into Murdoch’s face.

Rupert Murdoch did not appear at the trial. The same district judge, Daphne Wickham, sentenced Jonathan May-Bowles to six weeks imprisonment (reduced on appeal to four) for assault.

Conclusion

Fisher suffered injury: her attacker was acquitted because he was a police officer. Murdoch suffered no injury: his attacker was jailed to deter protest.

Officer acquitted of assault on Nicola Fischer

The Nicola Fisher case established the precedent that police can beat protesters with impunity.

Nicola Fisher, aged 38, was a participant in a small vigil held on 2 April 2009 to commemorate the police killing of the newspaper vendor, Ian Tomlinson, the previous day. Tomlinson had been attempting to make his way home during the G20 demonstrations when he was bitten by police dogs, truncheoned and hurled to the ground. He died from his injuries minutes later.

From a policing point of view Nicola Fisher was at most irritating and perhaps in the way. Officer Smellie saw fit to give her a back-hand across the face; he then calmly removed his baton to administer two hard strokes on her thighs before turning his attention to other things. His misfortune was that everything he did was filmed.

To dispel the view that gratuitous police violence was tolerated, and to assuage the concerns of Daily Mail readers, the authorities needed to throw a police officer to the wolves. Of the recorded police violence against demonstrators in April 2009, the Fisher incident was not the most serious, but it was the most suitable for prosecution. Officer Smellie made the ideal fall guy; he looked like a thug, and he had hit a woman.

Yet Fisher didn’t play ball and failed to turn up to the trial. But, surprisingly, despite the evidence against him Smellie was acquitted.

Thus a precedent was set: arbitrary violence against demonstrators was to be tolerated and unpunished police behaviour; this is not what the authorities had wanted. While, of course, police had often beaten left-wing and ‘alternative’ protesters, it was another matter to be seen to be giving it official sanction.

Ian Tomlinson - The Meaning of His Death

The death of a street newspaper vendor following a vicious assault by police shows how Britain's repressive state operates.

On 1 April 2009 a diverse crowd of people gathered in the centre of London to protest at the G20 summit meeting of world leaders. Most were peaceful if noisy; a tiny minority were there to commit acts of vandalism. But overall, the commercial district of London came to resemble a street carnival of clowns, jugglers, hippies and ordinary people taking to the street to make a point.

Sometime after seven in the evening news filtered through of a death. The police soon made it clear what had happened: a newspaper vendor in his late forties, Ian Tomlinson, uninvolved in the demonstration but surrounded by black-clad anarchists, had collapsed: a heart attack was suspected. Police medics rushed to his aid but were met with a barrage of bottles hindering their efforts. News outlets aired the story.

In the following days several witnesses challenged the police account, but the police complaints authority (IPCC) felt safe in dismissing them and endorsed the police version of events. A post mortem revealed that Tomlinson had indeed died of a heart attack.

A week later conclusive evidence of what had really happened emerged from an unlikely source: the mobile phone footage of a New York hedge fund manager. The film showed Tomlinson walking along, hands in his pockets away from a line of police. Suddenly one of them, Officer Simon Harwood, dressed in a black balaclava partially obscuring his face and with his police identification number removed from his clothing, stepped forward. He truncheoned Tomlinson on the legs and then pushed him to the ground. Stunned, Tomlinson struggled into a sitting position and was assisted to his feet by a demonstrator. Far from helping, the line of police looked on or through Tomlinson as if he were not a person in distress at all. A dazed Tomlinson stumbled out of sight of the camera and minutes later he collapsed and died.

Two further post mortems by independent doctors established that Tomlinson had died from internal bleeding consistent with being thrown to the ground. The first was made public immediately; the second only months later.

The police behaviour on the 1 April 2009 against largely peaceful civilian demonstrators was almost certainly the most gratuitously violent in modern times. Little, if any, attempt was made to distinguish between people committing crimes and those simply attending and protesting, or in Tomlinson’s case by-standers caught up in the event. Forced into street holding pens (popularly called ‘kettles’) with no means of escape, men and women were punched, kicked, hit with batons and shields and bitten by police dogs. In attacking Tomlinson Officer Harwood’s behaviour was probably no worse than that of many of his colleagues. Harwood was unlucky for two reasons: Tomlinson died and the assault was filmed.

Some argue that the police went berserk in London on 1 April 2009. That is not the case: had they done so many tens of people would have died; in fact neither Harwood nor the police in general wanted to kill anyone. The police operation, led by a Commander Broadbent, certainly allowed officers to humiliate lawful protesters and beat them in a non life-threatening way. And to ensure that individual officers were not accountable for their actions, they were permitted to wear balaclavas and a blind eye was turned to their removal of identification badges on their uniforms. Broadbent felt, not without good reason, that the government, courts and media would side with him and his officers even when their actions constituted illegal assaults on innocent people.

The Tomlinson death presented a problem. State disregard for police violence at public order events normally depends on two conditions: first, that the police don’t kill or seriously injure people and second that the details of who was at fault in any particular confrontation remained murky. Tomlinson’s death broke both these conditions. Justice in a state supposedly governed by the rule of law now demanded that charges of assault and (given that Tomlinson had died as a consequence of a serious assault) manslaughter should be pressed against Harwood.

The Crown Prosecution Service took fifteen months to come a decision; it decided in the end not to prosecute Officer Harwood. It’s reasons were transparently dishonest. Manslaughter charges could not be brought, it said, because of the conflicting post mortem results. Yet the results of the first police-instigated post mortem had been rejected by two independent doctors; and even if Tomlinson had died from a heart attack, it was impossible to argue that his experience at the hands of Officer Harwood had not contributed to his death. In addition it was by now apparent that the police had summoned the first pathologist, Dr Freddy Patel, because he could be relied on to give the police the results they wanted at the time (i.e. that Tomlinson had died of a heart attack brought on by being surrounded by black clad anarchists). And to finally demolish the credibility of the police-instigated post mortem it was revealed that Dr Patel was later stuck off the list of approved Home Office pathologists on account of other incidents of misconduct undertaken in support of the police.

And what of the assault charge? Well, it was time-barred because it had to brought within six months and the prosecution service had taken fifteen to reach its decision.

Some have argued that the institutions of the state (prosecution service, courts, etc.) will always support the police when they are in conflict with ordinary people, so the decision not to prosecute Harwood is no surprise. There is much precedent to support this argument, but it should be pointed out that by not prosecuting Harwood, the police and prosecution services suffered a loss of legitimacy in the eyes of all those who cared to look - not just people on the left. It would have been far more beneficial to the police in the long run to have claimed Harwood was a ‘bad apple in the barrel’ and to have sent him to court.

The refusal of the prosecution service to charge Harwood seems to have its cause elsewhere. The evidence against Harwood was rock solid and a majority of people wanted and expected him to be charged with at least assault. What the Crown Prosecution Service was saying in its decision is that WE the state decide prosecutions, irrespective of the evidence and the demands of justice. You, the people, can collect all the evidence you like and argue as logically as you want, but is WE who retain the power.

The Meaning of the Tomlinson Case

The meaning of all this is not, as some have suggested, that the police have been given a carte blanche to assault and kill at random. Officer Harwood, even if he never faces a criminal trial, has not been given a pat on the back but faced interrogation and a possible charges for manslaughter for over a year. No police officer could be sure that if these events were repeated in the future he would be treated so leniently. The meaning of the Tomlinson case is more subtle.

Tomlinson demonstrates that the institutions of force and law (police, police complaints authority, prosecution service) cannot be held to popular legal account. They are corrupt, not in the sense that the people working in those institutions take money to mis-perform their duties, but that they brazenly disregard the purpose for which they exist and citizens have little or no form of address against their maladministration. The police lie and organise ‘bent’ autopsies; the police complaints authority act as puppets of the police. The prosecution service obstructs and drags its feet and gives wholly dishonest reasons for failing to prosecute. Such is the nature of the institutions of the British state today.

Also noticeable is the near total silence of British politicians; they seem quite relaxed with a society in which a police officer truncheons a passer-by, hurls him to the ground and to his death, but then goes unpunished. The maladministration of the police, the police complaints authority and the prosecution service leave them equally untroubled.

Tomlinson has divided effects on state power. On the one hand the case has undoubtedly undermined trust in the police; the misconduct is too clear-cut for anyone who cares to notice. On the other, the state has reinforced its unaccountable power over the people in that even when there is rock-solid evidence of state misconduct, citizens have no right to remedy. People are subject to the state; the state is not accountable to the people who live within it.

Postscript: Following the urban riots of 2011 when public sympathy with the police had at least been partially restored, P.C. Harwood was tried for manslaughter. The severity of the charge and the then prevailing public attitude, if nothing else, meant that a divided jury failed to convict him. He was later dismissed from the police.

Never ignore police violence

Anyone who is assaulted by the police should take the following steps:

Report the incident to the police complaints authority (however ineffective)

Visit the doctor (however minor the injury)

Write-up the incident in full and publicise it (however time-consuming and boring)

The campaign against police violence should have number one priority on the left. If the freedom to organise and protest is undermined, no political movement for change is possible.

There are some on the left who box themselves in like this. “Ah,” they say, “we have already analysed the role of the police as elements in the state’s repressive apparatus, so what you are telling us about police violence is nothing new. Next question please” But that's just paralytic intellectualism.

Every case of police assault needs recording.

Police violence is now police policy

In Britain the policing of demonstrations is increasingly about the punishment of protest. The latest step: CS gas spray.

In medieval times the penalty for anyone who protested against the existing way of things was death.

In Britain in 2011 the police don’t kill peaceful protesters – or at least they don’t do so on purpose. But an old understanding has now gone. It was once thought that if protesters weren’t violent, the police would not cause personal injury to protesters. Now punishing protest has become the purpose of much public order policing. The latest tool is the misuse of CS gas sprays.

In public utterances British police pride themselves in not following the practice of their continental cousins and firing canisters of CS gas into groups of demonstrators. Yet in January 2011, a police officer saw fit to spray CS gas into the eyes of several people passively blocking the entrance to a store in Oxford Street belonging to the tax-avoiding Boots Pharmacy chain. Anyone waiting for this officer to be charged with a serious assault should not hold his or her breath.

The CS gas incident comes against a background of a recent upswing in punishing policing. Most notable has been the use of so-called hyper-kettling involving mass street arrest. Demonstrators are incarcerated in street holding pens for hours in often in sardine-can like conditions without food, water, shelter or medical attention. Those trapped at the edge of the kettle often suffer random beatings from batons and police shields as well as kicks and punches.

The purpose of this policing is the punishment of protesters.

Police everywhere and always identify with the established order and attempt to increase their powers and remit unless checked by political and judicial authorities. The default position of both New Labour and now the Coalition has been near unconditional support for punishment policing. That British politicians and much of the public have failed to oppose this police attack on personal and civil liberties is an outrage that needs addressing.


Note

The Guardian film of the incident brings more details to light. The demonstrators were noisy, but entirely peaceful. A woman pushed a leaflet between the locked doors of Boots and was arrested for criminal damage. Amid the booing and pushing arising from this illegitimate arrest, a male police officer sprayed CS gas at a group of demonstrators. Why he did so is not clear. I tend to suspect he felt threatened, not by the demonstrators, but his own embarrassment at the illegitimate arrest of the woman. A bull whose pride is hurt is a dangerous animal.

The political point remains. Will the police draw back from this escalation of police violence against peaceful protesters? Or will they de facto allow CS gas to become an available tool of punishment, which is what will happen if they fail to prosecute the officer.


Note

1. In matters of police violence, it is important to distinguish between the behaviour of individual police officers and police policy. The police contain a higher proportion of sadists than the general population, and these men and women will take every opportunity to hurt and humiliate. Though the degree of control by superiors may vary from event to event and from time to time, violence of this kind remains fairly constant.

2. The “understanding” of non-violent protest requiring police not to injure protesters has indeed often been honoured in the breach, particularly in the 1970s and early 1980s. Yet, I believe that Kingsnorth, and more so the G20 demonstrations, revealed a police policy to use violence against public protest as a means of punishing and deterring it. That in my view is a qualitative change.

Edward Woollard: the meaning of his harsh sentence

Britain treats illegal violence against the state very differently from illegal violence committed by state officials.

In January 2011 Edward Woollard (18), who threw a fire extinguisher from the roof of Tory HQ at lines of police, was sentenced to two years and eight months in jail for violent disorder. Apparently, the harsh sentence handed out to the youngster was intended to send a message to the British people. But what is the message?

Woollard is undoubtedly a stupid youth who almost certainly didn't intend to hurt anyone in his irresponsible act, and he didn't. Yet, every institution of the state has been quickly lined up to punish him and make an example of him.

It is interesting, then, to compare Woollard’s case with that of PC Simon Harwood, the police officer who fatally assaulted the newspaper vendor, Ian Tomlinson, during the G20 demonstrations in April 2009. Harwood, a trained police office, certainly did intend to hurt and injure Ian Tomlinson by tuncheoning him and hurling him to the ground; but in his case every institution of the state was lined up to prevent him from being held to account for his actions.

These two examples taken together show the real message sent by the British state to the people. Violence by people against the state is given exemplary punishment; illegal violence by police against the people is brushed under the carpet.

Kettling: what it means

What we are a seeing is the normalisation of police brutality; and police brutality being used as an instrument of public policy.

Kettling is the process of mass arbitrary arrest by means of detention in street holding pens; incarceration lasts for several hours without food, water, shelter, toilet facilities or medical attention. Often those subject to detention suffer baton beatings and other assaults.

Precisely because this assault on personal and civic liberty has become normal, it is no longer newsworthy.

Kettling is a form of collective punishment in order to intimidate demonstrators and anybody else thinking of protesting in the future. Police now prefer collective punishment through kettling to attempting to apprehend wrong-doers.

Tomlinson case shows up British state

A passer-by, with his hands in his pockets and walking away from a line of police officers, is suddenly struck on the back of the legs with a baton and then hurled to the ground. He suffers severe internal bleeding as a consequence of the fall and dies some minutes later.

The facts are not in doubt because the whole incident was filmed, but it takes the Crown Prosecution Service fifteen months to come to decision not to charge the offending police officer with any criminal offence.

Perhaps one is not surprised that this psychopathic police officers exists, but that the police and the Crown Prosecution Service do everything they can to prevent his prosecution is more surprising. Also of note is the silence from government and politicians; the message they send out is that the unprovoked police assault on Ian Tomlinson on 1 April 2009 is of little importance.

The meaning of all this is not, as some have suggested, that the police have been given a carte blanche to assault and kill at random, but that when they do, even when there is rock-solid evidence of state misconduct, citizens have no right to remedy. People are subject to the state; the state is not accountable to the people who live within it.

The police should be accountable

We need a police force which serves the public and is properly bound by the rule of law. Police forces, if not subject to proper political and judicial control, attract authoritarian personality types and expand their remit, threatening civil liberties and personal freedom. That something like this has been allowed to happen is mainly the fault of the New Labour government.

Sir Hugh Orde on the British policing of protest

The UK police service has a long and proud history of upholding the right to lawful protest

This is far from true.

On 1st April 2009 the police in London mounted a full-scale attack on the freedom to demonstrate. Peaceful and defenceless protesters were herded into street concentration pens, held for hours against their will, beaten with riot equipment and had dogs set upon them.

The police acted with impunity, removing en masse their service numbers in order to beat, punch and otherwise assault the general public.

None of this happened because of bad apples in the barrel, but as a result of a police management that couldn’t give a damn about civil liberties, human or political rights.

G20: Police commander blames own officers for misdeeds

The attempt by the police commander Bob Broadhurst to explain away the extensive police violence against demonstrators on 1 April as merely the deeds of inexperienced young officers is disingenuous.

It was Broadhurst who earlier inflamed the situation with his predication of a summer of rage, who gave orders to imprison (i.e. kettle) thousands of peaceful protesters without food, water or toilet facilities, then to baton-charge them and beat them. It was officers under his command who with impunity took off their service numbers so they could assault at will.

Individual officers certainly sometimes went on a frolic of their own, but they did not decide to compulsorily photograph individual demonstrators as the left the street concentration centres, or issue that wholly false press release about the death of Ian Tomlinson.

Quite clearly Broadhurst miscalculated. He though the police violence which he unleashed would be applauded by New Labour and the Daily Mail. Thanks to people-photography he got it wrong – and now the coward wants to blame his own officers.

Man tasered three times in Nottingham

It is increasingly clear that, whatever the legitimate uses of tasers as alternatives to live bullets, the weapon is mostly used an instrument of on-the-spot torture.

The truth is that any police service will descend into a band of thugs, unless it is held to account by political and legal authorities. Unfortunately, New Labour, in a bankrupt attempt to outflank the Tories in appearing tough on crime, has been happy to let this descent in thuggery gather pace.

The situation is truly appalling.

British police killing people

Good practice would require that police may only shoot to kill if the victim poses an immediate threat to the life of police officers or someone else and there is no other means to disable the victim.

In the case of Jean Charles de Menezes (July 2005), armed police assassinated a terrorist suspect who at the point when he was shot presented no immediate threat. Menezes could have been arrested without serious injury to anyone. The police were allowed to get away with the killing which maintained and reinforced a terrible precedent.

It would seem, then, that armed police units have de facto impunity to execute anybody who is or might be armed or whenever the police are told in advance that the victim may be armed. No doubt many police officers will not kill a victim unnecessarily, but if they do they will not be called to book after the event. It is also unfortunately true that too many armed police enjoy killing.

G20 See the whole picture of police violence

Two cases have been highlighted of people being assaulted by police: Ian Tomlinson because he died and Nicola Fisher because she is a woman – and in both cases video evidence shows very clearly what happened.

Police authorities will try to pass off Tomlinson and Fisher as isolated cases using the ‘rotten apples in the barrel’ argument. However this approach deliberately deflects attention from the wide scale use of police violence.

The truth is that tens (if not hundreds) of demonstrators, who were neither violent nor vandalising property, were beaten with truncheons, riot shield, or were kicked or punched by police officers. Officers removed their identification number en masse precisely so they could assault with impunity.

Many of the victims were people who were corralled for hours into street concentration pens (the so-called kettling) who could not even leave the demonstration if they wished.

After several hours without food, water or toilet facilities demonstrators were allowed out the kettles, only if they agreed to identify themselves and be photographed. No legal authority for this exists; yet neither police management nor the government cares.

It is impossible not to draw the conclusion that police tactics were to punish demonstrators, not to police the demonstration. And the government is quite content, it would seem, to let that stand.

For the government Lord West has already congratulated the police on their operation. The Independent Police Complaints Commission, which is anything but independent, has thus got the political support to procrastinate and to exonerate the police whenever it can. We need not hold our breath for them to finish their deliberations.

Indeed Tomlinson and Fischer need justice in their individual cases. But what really needs to happen is that large numbers of these police thugs need prosecuting and should be dismissed from the police force – and those senior officers in charge of these police on April 1st should be put on trial for conspiracy to assault.

The police killing of Jean Charles Menezies

Here is a case where armed police assassinated a totally innocent terrorist suspect in circumstances where he could have been arrested without injury. (Arguably once he was grabbed and thrown into the seat he was already de facto under arrest anyway)

Every step was taken by the police and the establishment to exonerate these anonymous police officers who are now back on duty. The precedent set was a terrible one, namely that even the most worst police excesses could be swept under the carpet.

Police violence against peacful protesters

It is revolting to see batons, dogs and fists used against protesters who are protesting wholly peacefully. The police deal with the protesters as if their protest were a crime per se, instead of a democratic right which the police should protect. How else can you understand the gratuitous police violence and the incarceration of hundreds of innocent people in street concentration pens for hours?

If someone breaks the law during a demonstration (e.g. committing vandalism, assaults or trespassing) they should be arrested not subject to on an on an on-the-spot beating. If they are not breaking the law they should be left in peace.

These police and policing tactics are incompatible with the norms of a democratic society.


(I find utterly vacuous the argument of the people who argue that because police in similar situations in some other countries might beat more people and more brutally that therefore people in London have nothing to complain about. By this criterion nothing can ever be wrong because there is always worse. It is hopeless and depressing argument.)