But will do the Met police do something?
Friday last week the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) convened a new panel to talk about policing in the aftermath of the G20 protests fiasco.
We received three accounts of the meeting and are publishing excerpts from each.
Helen Lambert — Police State UK
“Today is all about listening to you – we’re not here to speak for the Met, nor to defend them,” said Victoria Borwick, chair of the MPA’s newly convened Civil Liberties Panel, opening this morning’s open meeting.
The scope of the meeting – an evidence gathering session on public order policing, and more specifically the G20 demonstrations in April – had been unclear to some. Many people had brought questions demanding immediate answers, but instead their concerns have been ‘noted’, with no clear idea if answers will be forthcoming.
It may seem late in the day for a data-gathering session on the policing of G20. Photos, video footage, eyewitness accounts and the Climate Camp Legal report have been publically available for months.
But did this morning achieve anything more than a collective airing of grievances? The reach of the Civil Liberties Panel remains unclear. All this evidence will inform a report on public order policing to be released at the end of this year. The Panel seems largely sympathetic to the experiences of protestors, but the whole MPA has to approve its recommendations. Even the MPA are not involved with day-to-day or disciplinary policing issues, and can only advise on the overall framework of policy. Implementing change is a slow and frustrating process, each stage of representation more distanced than the last.
– full version here.
* * * * * * *
Andrew May — Defend Peaceful Protest
Accountability aside, the future at least looks a bit brighter. If HMIC’s final report on ‘Adapting to Protest’ develops as we hope, a sea change in policing of protest could be on the way. There was something of a consensus at this meeting that the police must change their ways. The following points were particularly prominent in submissions to the panel from members of the public and protest groups present.
Officers not displaying ID – There was strong agreement on this point. Police excuses that they are down to flimsy numerals are simply not acceptable. The ease with which Police ID can be removed is not only long overdue for altering but is an excuse for rogue officers to cover their tracks when overstepping their authority. As was seen clearly in the treatment of Emily Apple at Kingsnorth and with the officer who clubbed Ian Tomlinson it’s invariably those to have something to hide who are caught not wearing ID.
Kettling of Protestors – unsurprisingly this came in for another hammering from members of the audience as a utterly appalling tactic. In my view the members of the panel didn’t go far enough on this issue. At the meeting I asked them to specifically state that kettling should only be used as a last resort in situations of violent disorder and is never appropriate. It was not clear from this session whether they will make that recommendation.
Training of officers in public order – We saw from the Channel 4 dispatches documentary that police still train with petrol bombs, despite the fact that none have been used in a protest in 29 years since the Broadwater farm riots. The lack of conflict management skills evident in many front line officers at the G20 and other protests is something that members of the panel voiced considerable concern at.
The key question from all of this is whether the civil liberties panel will get its recommendations implemented. In meetings in April and May, Met. commissioners Bob Broadhurst and Chris Allison failed to give adequate answers to questions on everything from intrusive surveillance to the uniform review to containment. I remain to be convinced of senior officer’s commitment to change.
Anna Bragga
After yesterday’s inaugural public meeting of the panel, I am left with an all pervading sense of gloom that no matter how well presented our arguments, no matter how much documented evidence we produce (from citizen journalists to accredited professionals), and no matter how many lawyers and experts we bring in, little will change.
“If we can’t trust the police to report an honest and truthful account of events, how can we trust the police in intelligence gathering?” I challenged the panel. The Met had filmed and documented the details of goodness knows how many of the thousands of innocent members of the public at the demo – including myself and my colleague.
The persecution of people of conscience has to stop now. There must be an end to the use of catch-all anti-terror powers, such as stop and search, to harass and intimidate protesters, and a repeal of all laws which interfere with our democratic rights to protest and assembly.
Most importantly of all, there needs to be a big clean up of the Metropolitan Police Service, so that it can begin to serve the public again rather than fight it. We need clear lines of accountability and responsibility, and a new culture of openness based on trust. It can be done. This is a wake up call!
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- Liberal Conspiracy
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- Helen L
3 accounts of the Civil Liberties Panel meeting: RT @libcon But will do the Met police do something? http://bit.ly/LxG2b
- Police State UK
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- Hash Police
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- Andrew May
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- Liberal Conspiracy
:: But will do the Met police do something? http://bit.ly/LxG2b
- Helen L
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- Police State UK
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Reader comments
Thanks for the heads up on these accounts.
In addition to ID, kettling and training, I’d add a repeal of any laws banning photography of police officers or allowing the confiscation of photo or video evidence. The police can’t be trusted to police themselves so public recording of events is vital.
Also, while kettling and lack of conflict management are down to training, removing ID has no excuse. Those who have removed their ID should be disciplined.
I would add a requirement that #2 applies to events INSIDE police stations, where police can be trusted even less than they can in public. Everything should be recorded, and the record be made readily accessible to all subjects of those recordings.
CCTV and audio recordings which should in prinicple safeguard the public are routinely lost, destroyed or withheld, or found to be mysteriously malfunctioning when there is a death in custody, or indeed any complaint of police misconduct.
In simple terms, the Police are out of control.
Let’s put it this way – Damian Green was very fortunate when he was arrested for being in possession of leaked, deeply secret Home Office information about immigration.
He could have been carrying a table leg or been in bed when the Police arrived to arrest him:
“Officer cleared after killing a man carrying a table leg”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/may/13/ukguns.hughmuir
“Three Sussex officers avoid prosecution over fatal operation and subsequent cover-up which was damned by two separate inquiries
“In a small Sussex seaside town, at 20 past four in the morning, James Ashley was sleeping naked in his bed. Seconds later, he was on the floor, shot dead at a range of 18ins, by a police officer using a powerful Heckler & Koch carbine.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/secrets-lies-and-.htmlit-after-police-shoot-naked-man-in-bed-685719.html
“No police marksmen will be prosecuted over the fatal shooting of barrister Mark Saunders in a south London siege, the Crown Prosecution Service said.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8262629.stm
“Jean Charles de Menezes (7 January 1978 – 22 July 2005) was a Brazilian national shot dead by police at Stockwell tube station in London, England. He was shot in the head seven times at close range by Metropolitan Police officers who misidentified him as a suicide bomber about to explode a device on the London Underground. Within hours police discovered that he was not involved in any terrorist act, but was actually an innocent victim.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charles_de_Menezes
…and 5000 complaints against ‘riot police’, only tiny proportion upheld.
Infallible methods for enhancing Police productivity:
” A third of the violent offences which were not recorded as crimes should have been. An inspection of how police forces record violence showed that officers are deciding that thousands of violent incidents are not crimes.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6885415.ece
“Almost 40,000 cases of assault were dealt with by cautions in England and Wales last year, the BBC has learned.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8346321.stm
Curiously, or not:
“An investigation shows that conviction rates for many of the most violent crimes have been in freefall since Labour came to power in 1997 and are now well below 10 per cent. The chronically low figures for convictions come at the same time as reports that violent crime is increasing.
“An analysis of Home Office figures reveals that only 9.7 per cent of all ’serious woundings’, including stabbings, that are reported to the police result in a conviction. For robberies the figure falls to 8.9 per cent and for rape, it is 5.5 per cent.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/may/28/ukcrime.immigrationpolicy
BobB: ““Almost 40,000 cases of assault were dealt with by cautions in England and Wales last year, the BBC has learned.”
Do you happen to know how many of these cautions have since been overturned, having been found to be neither in the public interest nor warranted by the evidence? According to the Exceptional Cases Unit at New Scotland Yard, they are overwhelmed by the number of wrongful cautions they are having to delete.
It seems to me that the serious cases of violence are being overlooked by MPS in favour of the wrongful pursuit of easy targets to bump up their numbers. And the FMEs, CPS and duty solicitors all appear to be in cahoots with this tactic.
“Do you happen to know how many of these cautions have since been overturned, having been found to be neither in the public interest nor warranted by the evidence?”
The short answer in: No.
What I starting to wonder is how long will it be before asking questions like this are construed as “obstruction”?
Bob @ 6, I suspect the reason for this is related to Offences Brought to Justice (“when the offender has been cautioned, convicted, or had the offence taken into consideration by the court”). It appears I first wrote about this problem in 2007:
In fact the number of successful convictions has declined, as has the successful convictions as a proportion of the total number of offences brought to justice (the 53% referred to earlier).It is the contributions made by ‘non-convictions’ – cautions, formal warnings, Penalty Notices for Disorder, and offences “taken into consideration” by the courts – that have allowed the Government to meet its targets.
I’ve yet to receive the figures, but I’ve reason to suspect it’s a lot more than it should be, if the police were operating above board.
Of those 40,000 cautions, a proportion should perhaps have been fully prosecuted (though I think they have to offer a caution if it’s a first offence), but a reasonable proportion are for cases where either public interest or evidential tests or both were not met. It’s a scam.
Not to worry, the government is conducting another review:
“A review of the police use of cautions to deal with violent offenders was ordered today by the justice secretary, Jack Straw, after concerns voiced by magistrates, the director of public prosecutions and senior police officers.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/nov/09/jack-straw-police-cautions-review
I trust someone – or a computer – in the Cabinet Office is keeping track of all these reviews because I lost count years ago.
The usual form should be fairly familiar to most by now: some glaring screw up in policy is exposed in the media so a minister promptly announces “a review” and the whole shenanigans disappears into the long grass for the foreseeable. Everything then goes quiet meanwhile.
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