Police have defended themselves against criticism by Denis O’Connor, the chief inspector of constabulary, by saying that ignoring crime problems in the vain hope that they will go away is a long established policing tactic.
O’Connor claimed that the failure to properly respond to anti-social incidents was undermining confidence in the police force, something which forces across the country have strongly refuted.
A spokesperson for Greater Manchester police explained, “Confidence comes from predictability, knowing exactly what will happen, and I assure you the people of Manchester are completely confident in predicting our response to a call about what is essentially just some noisy children.”
“Ignoring something until it goes away is a long established technique for dealing with problems – my father, an alcoholic who died at 39, swore by it.”
“There are lots of things that go away if you ignore them for long enough – things like Big Issue vendors, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and member of the public reporting anti-social behaviour.”
Defended
Chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Sir Hugh Orde explained, “The placebo effect is well recognised in science, and all the police forces across the UK are doing is imitating its effects.”
“You could call it a policing placebo – we say all the right things on the phone so they feel like they’re getting actual police action, but they’re not. Not really.”
“They think someone’s coming, but they’re not, and they think someone is investigating the incident, when they aren’t.”
“In most cases people feel better for it – but I admit, that every now and again someone gets bothered by some pesky kids.”
“At the end of the day we must remember that it was Jesus who said to ‘turn the other cheek’ – and that’s what we’re doing. We’re turning it in the direction the TV in the station canteen and away from that gang burning a car at the end of your street.”
Watch these two videos of campaigner Charlie Veitch being stopped by the Metropolitan Police under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, despite having demonstrably not broken a single law. A comedian speaking loudly through a megaphone is now longer a lawful reason under the European Court of Human Rights’ ruling to stop and search people on anti-terrorism grounds, but watch the exchange. It’s quite revealing:
Charlie Veitch of The Love Police shows up a Police Community Support Officer (PCSO) for trying to illegally detain him merely for speaking loudly on a megaphone. The irony couldn’t have been lost on many on Camden High Street that they should have decided to exercise their power (of which arrest isn’t strictly one, and certainly not in this instance) on Veitch, when drugs pushers are walking past them and actively doing business by the dozen. Welcome to Britain 2010.
It’s cast iron proof that we need to be extremely careful about what powers we give the police. They keep insisting they need to lock people up without charge for 42 days, that the DNA profiles of people unconvicted of or innocent of a crime should be retained for years, despite it already having been proven that there’s no advantage in doing so, even that photographing police officers should be a crime. And all the while they keep protesting that you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, that these powers won’t be misused or abused, yet Bob Patefield’s video shows the exact opposite – multiple police officers flagrantly abusing their authority because of legislation which allows them to. It couldn’t be simpler.
Of course these police officers could have spent time looking for pickpockets, for muggers, for violent drunks or wife beaters, but why should they when they have the Terrorism Act 2000 and the Police Reform Act covering their backs? Are they reacting to a moral panic which only the police seem bothered about? Did all police at some point decide that photographers were either terrorists or paedophiles, and needed to be stopped? This wasn’t after all one of the high profile stops in London a couple of months ago – it was in the north of England. Perhaps it was just a case of how the police operate when they have laws which allow them to abuse the innocent.
It was heartening to attend the Mass Photo Gathering in January, organised by I’m a Photographer Not a Terrorist, which demonstrated just how angry and fed up people are by this abuse, but it’s certainly not ended. The police’s insistence on extra or additional powers can’t ever be taken at face value; there has to be a proportionate need for them. After all how often do terrorists use DSLRs to scout targets which can be seen clearly on Google Street View? And how many amateur photographers really go around being ‘anti-social’? Good grief.
- Fifty police officers in riot gear crack down on peaceful protest by migrants demanding respect for basic rights
- Officers declare orders to destroy all migrant shelters in the area
- Escalation in repressive tactics leave migrants with nowhere to go
In a rare show of defiance, around 100 migrants camped around a gym which had been used by local charities to provide urgently needed night shelter over the harshest weeks of winter, before its closure on Tuesday. The migrants, primarily from war-torn Afghanistan, also burned some blankets and banners in opposition to the closure, which comes on theback of the repeated eviction of migrants from their camps. Within half an hour, scores of police officers descended on the site threatening to destroy the makeshift camp on failure to disperse. Following a stand off, the migrants were permitted to leave the area, but were closely pursued as they searched for alternative sites to shelter.
Having actually been advised by some police officers to do so, some men set up shelters on the site of one of the former camps, or ‘jungles’, and were given assurances that the police would not attack. But within hours, the officers had entered the camp several times, arresting six people, in what has now become a daily routine of arresting those without identity documents in Calais in an attempt to flush them out of the area. By midday on Wednesday, 20 CRS (riot police) vehicles had surrounded the new camp, and anything resembling a shelter was destroyed.
Following a relentless routine of police pursuit, arrest and assault this winter, the migrants returned in desperation to the closed night shelter and installed some of the tents that had been discarded by the authorities following the eviction that morning. The police promptly arrived at the scene, announced that they had orders to disperse assemblies and destroy shelters, before seizing the remaining tents.
Throughout the night, the hunt continued as migrants were followed by groups of police, who pre-emptively destroyed any half-erected structures they found.
“The police were quite literally swarming everywhere last night. They were pursuing migrants in case they dare set up shelter, or following any activists who might assist them,” said Joanne, a British activist from the No Borders network who is present at the scene.
“This is all part of a carefully planned strategy by the French and British governments to drive the migrants away from the area. But when you think that many of these people are coming from conflict zones like Helmand province, where else are they expected to go?” Joanne continued.
Alex has been involved in documenting – and directly intervening in – the police harassment in Calais for some time. “As shocking as it is, we find that the presence of European citizens during police raids can make a real difference, because the arrests are so arbitrary. It shows that ordinary people do have the power to help migrants defeat this enormous show of force by our governments. I really think that resistance from the migrants themselves and support from ordinary people is the only hope we have of stopping this horrendous repression.”
No, I’m not joking. Someone actually made a flippant comment on twitter and got arrested for it:
When heavy snowfall threatened to scupper Paul Chambers’s travel plans, he decided to vent his frustrations on Twitter by tapping out a comment to amuse his friends. “Robin Hood airport is closed,” he wrote. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”
Unfortunately for Mr Chambers, the police didn’t see the funny side. A week after posting the message on the social networking site, he was arrested under the Terrorism Act and questioned for almost seven hours by detectives who interpreted his post as a security threat. After he was released on bail, he was suspended from work pending an internal investigation, and has, he says, been banned from the Doncaster airport for life.
Sorry but WTF? When did we lose the group ability to distinguish between a credible threat and someone mouthing off – ill-advisedly sure – but obviously just mouthing off? Why waste police time investigating what I could have told them was rubbish (and I don’t even know him)? Hannah Dunleavy suggests:
While I agree it was a savage over-reaction and has undertones of something quite troubling, I wonder if they’d all be so outraged if Chambers had been a Muslim teenager from Bradford, rather than a white man. I’m sure they wouldn’t. Freedom of speech has to apply to everyone: jokes about blowing up planes cannot be the preserve of Caucasians and Christians.
I agree there’s a point there about freedom of speech needing to apply to all, but to be perfectly honest if a Muslim teenager from Bradford had said the same thing in the same context I would be equally as outraged. If a Muslim teenager from Bradford starts mouthing off Jihadist nonsense on a website known for its extremist content then by all means devote police resources to investigate what’s going on there, but to react in the same way to a stupid comment in a flustered mood by anyone mouthing off to their mates and admirers on twitter? Perspective really is needed.
“I’m afraid I’m rather sceptical about the excuse that a public service, in this case the police, is overworked and therefore can’t change.
“With a given level of resources, some police forces, or some parts of police forces do very much better than others.
“And it is the ones who are the less efficient and who have the wrong approach to the public who fall back on this ‘Oh, I’m overworked’ [argument].”
He said while some officers would claim it took four hours to fill in forms, “good police officers will take an hour to fill in the same forms because they want to get out and catch criminals”.
He added: “Some police officers, whatever they say, actually quite enjoy being in the police station in the warm. We are dealing with human beings, but we are also dealing with the kind of discipline and culture in the police service.”
And it’s ironic of course because the reason why police forces are so overworked is because of Straw and his minions – the architects of the surveillance society, who’ve passed numerous laws in the last 12 years to criminalise and stigmatise more of us than ever before. Yet of course Straw too is right, the agents of his database state are indeed hampered by poor leadership, organisation and organisational culture, but those aren’t problem which lead to police whingeing. Henry Porter ends the year saying:
But if I have one overriding concern in 2009 it is about the British police, which every day seem more like a force than a service, whether it is displaying violence at legitimate demonstrations, making secret databases of political and environmental activists, swooping with unnecessary might on innocent people such as the rock band the Thirst, making arrests to add to the DNA database, Tasering members of the public as punishment or treating football supporters with a shocking disregard for their rights. It has been a bad year for the police, and a worrying one for the general public who see an essential trust and respect being lost. The next government must find a way of bringing the police under control and making them realise that they are the servants, not the masters, of the public.
And he’s right. The problem is to do with police unaccountability, and a belief throughout their ranks that we are now subservient to them. Has their arrogant organisational culture been egged on by the Home Office (and now the Justice Department too), or has it happened because of their neglect? The answer is probably a bit of both, so Jack Straw is right in his prescription of what the problem is, but has deflected responsibility for its cause. It’s our responsibility to hold him, Alan Johnson and their successors accountable in 2010, because the mass media for the most part won’t, and only the smaller opposition parties are trying – and their voices are nowhere near loud enough. With the ISA this year we’ve gone well past the old refrain of ‘if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear’ – if we want the state to remain subservient to us we have to make it.
“They want to be seen as the best and they want to be the best – and of course when anybody challenges them about it, they feel it very personally,” he [Head of the Metropolitan Police Territorial Support Group, Commissioner Chris Allison] said.
They want to be seen as what they are… the overwhelming majority are highly professional cops who go out on the streets to protect communities.”
Pardon me for finding it absurd then that if they want to be seen to be ‘the best’ then they shouldn’t go around either wantonly beating unarmed, non-violent protesters or killing innocent passers-by. If the overwhelming majority of the TSG really are highly professional it seems rather odd that the reports of extreme violence from within their ranks should be coming out with such regularity, with so little then done to change the behaviour of the unit.
Half of all suspects aren’t using the free legal representation they’re entitled to because of police pressure:
Solicitors questioned by the National Audit Office (NAO) say they believe that the reason half of all suspects do not use their free services is a direct result of the action – or inaction – of the police. This is partly confirmed by further research in the NAO report which finds that solicitors “can experience barriers to accessing their clients” at the police station. Between April and October last year 29 per cent of calls from legal advisers working for the Legal Services Commission went unanswered. Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 the police must inform anyone detained at a police station of their right to a solicitor.
Last night the Law Society warned that police failings jeopardise defendants’ right to a fair trial. A spokesman said: “It is very disturbing that half of suspects in police stations don’t make use of solicitors providing advice for them. It is even more disturbing that 31 per cent do not recall being advised that they have the right to free advice, and that many solicitors consider that it is because of pressure by the police.”
I wish I could say I was surprised. It’s not remotely unusual for the police to convince suspects that they don’t need representation at the outset, stacking the books unjustly in their own favour, and thus denying the suspect fair treatment throughout their experience in the criminal justice system. And it’s amusing watching the argument in the comments section of the article – of course denial of legal representation doesn’t happen at the duty sergeant’s desk – it happens off the record, in the car, a pressurising ’suggestion’ here, a word on the way into the station there – they don’t like the time it takes for solicitors to arrive, they want an advantage they’re not entitled to and they know how to get it. I’m shocked at the scale of it though, but don’t think for a minute that anything’s going to change; this is the police after all.
Commander Bob Broadhurst, who had overall command of the G20 policing operation, told the home affairs select committee in May that “no plain clothes officers [were] deployed at all” during the demonstrations in the City of London.
It has emerged that 25 undercover City of London police were stationed around the Bank of England to gather “intelligence” on protesters on 1 and 2 April. Broadhurst stands by the evidence he gave to MPs, claiming the deployment of undercover officers was unknown to him.
The proof is on a video on that page. Broadhurst can split hairs all he likes, saying that he was only talking about the Met, when the plainclothes police in question belonged to the CityPolice, but he still told parliament as the man in charge of the entire operation, that no plainclothes police were deployed when there were. And the City Police admitted it:
The assistant commissioner at the City of London police, Frank Armstrong, then told the MP that about 25 undercover officers were deployed during the protests.
Keith Vaz, chairman of the select committee, has written to Broadhurst suggesting the disclosure about plain clothes officers “contradicts” his evidence to MPs. Broadhurst claimed the officers filmed marching among Met and City of London riot police were “evidence gatherers” seeking to identify a certain protester.
It’s a terrible demonstration of just how inept he and the entire operation were that day, particularly when Armstrong continued to undermine Broadhurst:
[Lib Dem MP Tom] Brake said Broadhurst had “inadvertently misled” parliament, thus revealing a “startling lack of co-ordination” in the top ranks. “If plain clothes officers were only deployed to gather intelligence why is one clearly seen brandishing a baton?”
Was the cop in question in the video instructed to brandish that baton or was that rogue behaviour? The fact is the cops were out of control that day, pumped up largely by Broadhurst into an expectation of the need for violence which never resulted from protesters. Today’s report is sorely needed.
The TSG has been the subject of 5,241 allegations since August 2005. They include 376 allegations of discrimination and 977 complaints of “incivility”. More than 1,100 of the allegations concerned what members of the public said were “failures in duty”. However by far the largest number of complaints – 2,280 – were categorised as “oppressive behaviour”.
Just over 2,000 (38%) were “unsubstantiated” by the Met’s department for professional standards, while the rest were resolved at the police station, dismissed, discontinued or dealt with in other ways.
It left just nine complaints ’substantiated’ by the Met. The Met responded to the figures:
Senior Met officers say the TSG’s work, involving drug raids and demonstrations, means they are more likely to face complaints than other officers.
The reasons are clear: the commission continues to rely upon poor-quality local police investigations and adopts a decidedly “arm’s length” approach to its supervisory and management responsibilities. In consequence, it has failed to identify the inadequacies in those investigations at a sufficiently early stage to have any prospect of remedying the evidential deficiencies. This formal system is permeated by a lack of will, and the outcomes stand in marked contrast to the redress achieved by individual victims on their own account in the civil courts.
Compensation claims are a flawed and inadequate response and have proven wholly ineffective in the face of oppressive and discriminatory abuse of powers by the TSG. Officers continue to enjoy an effective immunity from criminal and disciplinary sanction.
Babar Ahmad’s attacker continues to get away with it, and Ian Tomlinson’s attacker has still not faced justice for his actions. For all the Met’s mealy mouthed words about changes in policing after the G20 fiasco, they’re still quite literally getting away with murder.
2pm, Wednesday 30th August 2009. Parc Saint Pierre, Calais
Benjamin: This is Benjamin, I am from Iran. I just came in Calais, like,three weeks ago. From three weeks ago the police authority and Frenchgovernment I think they decide to destroy the jungle. First they destroy thePashtun jungle, after that they destroy the Kurdish jungle. All people, theymoved to the town from jungle. Now we are in town. And Iranian jungle theydestroy as well. Now we are in town and the police disturb us every morningevery night.
Ali: Four O’Clock in the morning. And at night, 2 pm.
Interviewer: Where are you sleeping?
Benjamin: In the parks, under the bridge. Ali: They are all the time taking us in detention for a few hours. They wantto make us crazy. What are they doing? We don’t know. Nothing.
Benjamin: They just trying to disturb us to leave Calais. And now we startto have a hunger strike to get help from other countries. We ask for otherWestern countries to come and help us. And we start hunger strike from today12, at noon. We need help. We need help actually. And we don’t want to stayany more in France because of police and because of government. They don’trespect anybody. They don’t respect anyone in Calais and in Paris it is thesame. Our situation is very bad. We have no good food. All the time we aregetting is the same food, same as yesterday, usually only bread and bananas.We have nowhere to sleep. We are looking for somewhere safe at least tosleep, to get some respect from people, from government, frompoliceauthorities. Actually I can tell you about one day, the police come,just like five days ago, they come, they talk with us; they hit a friend ofmine next to me, they hit him with a stick into his head, and we havewitnesses and evidence of this too. We said stop this, they say they dontcare, they will do anything we we want. And they searched our bags andbaggage and
(interview pauses, as two police vans and more police on footappear from around the corner, gesturing; Video ends here, as interviewer,friends and migrants are asked for ID and dispersed for being a larger crowdthan three people)
On the 16th of February, the Government passed a law (in the Counter Terrorism Act) making it illegal to take a photograph of a police office, military personnel or member of the intelligence services – or a photograph which “may be of use for terrorism”. This definition is vague at best, and open to interpretation by the police – who under Home Secretary guidelines can “restrict photography in public places”. We call for these vague restrictions to be lifted, as they can easily be mis-used by the police.
Photography and Section 58A of the Terrorism Act 2000
The offence concerns information about persons who are or have been at the front line of counter-terrorism operations, namely the police, the armed forces and members of the security and intelligence agencies.
An officer making an arrest under section 58A must reasonably suspect that the information is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism. An example might be gathering information about the person’s house, car, routes to work and other movements.
Reasonable excuse under section 58A
It is a statutory defence for a person to prove that they had a reasonable excuse for eliciting, publishing or communicating the relevant information. Legitimate journalistic activity (such as covering a demonstration for a newspaper) is likely to constitute such an excuse. Similarly, an innocent tourist or other sight-seer taking a photograph of a police officer is likely to have a reasonable excuse.
The key element of the petition for me is ‘can easily be mis-used by the police’; the key element absent in the response is any acknowledgment of that issue. Narrowly defining ‘legitimate journalism’ as the domestic activity exempt from the legislation leaves out situations like Gemma Atkinson’s attempt to hold the Metropolitan Police to account for a wrongful search on her boyfriend, and fails to address the reality that the police are frequently misusing this legislation to get away with unlawful behaviour. Why should you have to be employed as a photographer in order to be allowed to take photographs of the police? The Met’s current guidance says:
Members of the public and the media do not need a permit to film or photograph in public places and police have no power to stop them filming or photographing incidents or police personnel.
But it’s notable that they and the Home Office differ in their offical interpretation of this stupid legislation.
A police officer who allegedly struck a woman during the G20 protests in London a woman is to be charged with assault, the Crown Prosecution Service said today.
A CPS spokeswoman said Sergeant Delroy Smellie would be charged with assault of Nicola Fisher and he will appear at Westminster magistrates court on 16 November. He faces up to six months in prison if found guilty.
Smellie, a member of the Metropolitan police’s territorial support group, was suspended from duty two months ago after footage emerged of him near the Bank of England, apparently hitting Fisher, 35, with the back of his arm.
He was also shown appearing to strike her on her legs with a baton as she attended a vigil for the newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson, who had died the previous day. She said the incident left her with severe bruising.
Of course he’ll get off, or he’ll become the scapegoat that his renowned colleague has long been expected to become. What must be remembered is that both officers, although behaving in an unacceptably (and unnecessarily) violent manner, were operating under the presumption that this was acceptable behaviour. Don’t forget how the force trailed its intention to be violent that day. The CPS can’t be allowed to get away with making this their only notable prosecution against the Metropolitan Police after their calamatous handling of the G20 protest.
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