Protest demonstrations and the police

By Brian Barder

[Note: The following comments on police behaviour at protest demonstrations were originally sent in an e-mail by “a young man who blogs under the handle Jamblichus” (his own description) and arose out of some comments on a rather different but related subject in my blog.

Jamblichus wrote as follows:]

The notion that the police “predictably” but not “justifiably” respond disproportionately to protestors who are being provocative implies that in such cases, justifiably or no, protestors “bring it (a fierce police response) upon their own heads”. This is the trope that pretty much gets wheeled out by most who watch often deeply biased coverage of protests on TV and can’t quite get their head around quite how nasty the police can be with protestors who are not, by any means, violent or provocative.

“NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear wrote to Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in May, complaining of “intimidatory policing”. He cited examples of police officers who know journalists by name, follow them and film them all the time they are working.

Regular, low-level intimidation of photographers often goes unreported. David Hoffman, a freelance with more than 30 years experience, told the Journalist: “If you’re just walking down the street and taking a picture of police on the beat, when you’re well away from any problem and not causing an obstruction, they come over and interfere. “It happens constantly. In May I was taking pictures of the party on the London tube – the last day people could drink alcohol – from a good distance when two police officers started pushing me around and put a hand over my lens. There was no reason at all. I was simply recording the event and they stopped me because they thought they could. That’s a very typical incident. That will happen to me once a week if I’m out working.”

That, in short, and speaking from some degree of personal experience, is the “context” of which I spoke. Hence my, and no doubt a few others’ somewhat knee-jerk reaction to the raid. I know from reading your blog that you are committed to civil liberties and don’t mean to sound shrill. Just to emphasise some personal experience and context for my comment.

– Jamblichus
____________________________

[In reply, I wrote:]

I’m grateful to you for going to so much trouble over this – and for your thoughtfulness in not, as you put it, wanting to “clog up your [i.e. my] blog with tangentials”. I wouldn’t for a moment dispute either your general case against the police over their behaviour at demonstrations, or your specific examples of police misbehaviour. I entirely agree that the hundreds of new and mostly badly drafted offences created by New Labour in the torrent of rushed legislation under the pretext of the so-called war on terrorism are a threat to our basic liberties, and that they have (utterly predictably) been grossly abused on a heroic scale by the police as justification for harassment – and worse – of often entirely innocent people in contexts that have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism. Much of the blame for this disastrous state of affairs rests squarely on MPs of both the major parties for their pathetic failure to strangle these disgraceful laws at birth: Labour MPs, with a few creditable exceptions, out of slavish obedience to the whips and in many cases personal political ambition and hopes of patronage; Tories out of indolence, an instinct for anything authoritarian, and the fear of being labelled by an unscrupulous Labour government and the equally unscrupulous tabloids as being “soft on terrorism” for daring to oppose whatever measures ministers cared to place in the capacious anti-terrorism folder.

My suspicion is that Blair, Brown and successive Labour home secretaries have not consciously or deliberately phased in, year after year, this menacing apparatus of the police state: they have simply been terrified of laying themselves open to the charge of negligent inactivity in the event of another terrorist outrage. They are obsessively risk-averse, incapable of making a sensible assessment balancing the extent of a risk against the cost of measures to prevent it materialising, and desperate to build up a record of having “done something about it” to protect themselves, at whatever the cost. As a result we are all losers – and the risk of another successful terrorist attack has anyway hardly been measurably diminished, other than by patient, thorough, painstaking detective work by the intelligence and security services, including many police.

The next time a minister or a policeman tries to justify some law that abridges our human rights and civil liberties by promising that it will be applied and enforced only very sparingly and only in the context of the war on terrorism, he
or she should be howled down with shouts of “Liar!”, before being hauled off to the Tower as a traitor and a danger to a free society. Yet they keep on doing it.

As for the question of provocative behaviour by some – probably a smallish minority – of protestors and demonstrators, including sometimes acts of violence (such as breaking windows, throwing missiles at the police and assaulting individual policemen), I take it that you wouldn’t deny that such things happen. You don’t have to be physically present at many demos to know that it’s so: you have only to turn on your television. I have emphasised that misbehaviour by protestors and demonstrators can’t justify corresponding (or even worse) misbehaviour by the police. But it’s a statement of the obvious that it helps to explain it. You and I both know that there are people out there, in numbers that no-one can quantify, for whom participation in a demonstration, especially one that’s likely to involve a punch-up with the police, is a blood sport to be enjoyed, rather than a gesture of support for whatever cause the demonstration is all about. Certainly the police bear some of the responsibility for the growth of these attitudes and this behaviour, but the people concerned have to accept the greater part of the responsibility for their own actions, as in any other sphere of human behaviour. The death of deference and the rise of contempt for authority are facts of life, in some ways healthy, in others profoundly damaging. Among other consequences, the kinds of people who are nowadays attracted by the idea of a career as a policeman (or prison officer) tend to include a higher proportion of people who are temperamentally unsuited to such a career, and a lower proportion of people motivated by idealism and social responsibility – the old-fashioned Dixons of Dock Green. OK, PC Dixon was absurdly idealised, no doubt: but he represented an idea of policing which has now largely vanished.

You’re quite right to guess that I haven’t taken part in any big political demonstrations lately. For much of my life I’ve been disqualified from doing so by the constraints on the freedom of political activity rightly laid on all public servants. Before I joined the public service I marched (or at any rate shuffled along) with thousands of others against the criminal folly of Suez, and after I retired from it I shuffled along again with thousands of others against the criminal folly of Iraq. On both occasions such police activity as I witnessed was impeccable: so was the behaviour of my fellow-protestors, at any rate those whom I could see. I think standards of behaviour on both sides have deteriorated since then and I now prefer to try to make my dissenting and protesting views known and felt by other means (and means more appropriate to my age, by the way!). But I don’t accept that this disqualifies me from holding an opinion about who (including the cops) does what and to whom, at marches and demonstrations as reported in the media and recorded for television. Nor do I accept that the innocence of a single victim of police violence such as the luckless Mr Tomlinson proves anything about the guilt or innocence of others who have been involved in violent struggles with the police. Some have undoubtedly been engaging in lawless and provocative behaviour; others have clearly been completely innocent passers-by or peaceful demonstrators who have been doing nothing whatever to warrant violent attacks by policemen, nor even non-violent harassment by filming and photographing and kettling and the rest of it.

It’s a dreadful mess, and I don’t see much likelihood of any future government either cleaning out the legislative Augean stables or reining in the police. Nevertheless it’s absolutely vital that voices of outrage at what is happening, such as yours and that of organisations such as Liberty, should continue to be raised time and again until our elected leaders begin to take some notice. After all, it is they who got us into the mess, and it’s mainly their responsibility to get us out of it, which they won’t bother to do unless fiercely and continually prodded.

Brian

[‘Jamblichus’ has agreed to the transfer of his and my e-mails to LabourList.]