By George Monbiot
On the day when The Metropolitan Police at last admitted that Ian Tomlinson had not died through a heart attack but from internal haemorrhaging caused by police violence, this (April 2009) article from The Guardian says just about everything that is worth saying:
"If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who has been twatted by the police. As the tabloids turn their fire on an unfamiliar target – the unprovoked aggression of Her Majesty's constabulary – the love affair between the cops and the rightwing press has never been more fragile.
The policing of the G20 protests at the beginning of this month was routine. Policemen hiding their identification numbers and beating up peaceful protesters is as much a part of British life as grey skies and red buses.
Across 20 years of protests, I have seen policemen swapping their jackets to avoid identification, hurling people against vans and into walls and whomping old ladies over the head with batons. A friend had his head repeatedly bashed against the bonnet of a police van; he was then charged with criminal damage to the van. I have seen an entire line of police turn round to face the other way when private security guards have started beating people up. I have seen them refuse to investigate my own case when I was hospitalised by these licensed thugs (the guards had impaled my foot on a metal spike, smashing the middle bone), until Amnesty International got involved.
But none of this featured in the conservative press. The story was always the same: we would stagger home after our peaceful protests were attacked by uniformed skinheads to discover that we were "Anarchist thugs on the rampage" whose attempt to destroy civilisation had been thwarted only by the calm professionalism of the police. Violent police action mutated into violent protests. The papers believed everything the police told them.
This began to change when the police foolishly attacked a Countryside Alliance march in 2004. In the spirit of impartial policing, the cops gave these reactionaries the treatment they had doled out to generations of progressives. It was grotesque, disproportionate and familiar policing, but there's a world of difference between bloodstained hemp ponchos and bloodstained tweeds. The exposure of the lies the police then told about the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes and the shooting of Mohammed Abdul Kahar made the papers – which had reproduced the official version – feel stung.
In other circumstances, Ian Tomlinson, the passerby who died after being thrown to the ground by police at the G20 protest, would have been treated by the press as a violent anarchist who had assaulted the road with his body. But video footage and disillusionment has changed that – for a few days at least. On Friday, the front page of the Daily Express carried lurid pictures of the injuries sustained by a woman at the G20 protests, under the headline "Police did this to me: it was just like being whipped by the Taliban".
Yesterday the Daily Mail posted a film made by climate camp activists. Its columnist Melanie Phillips, who is yet to be celebrated for her support of radical causes, opined that "there are always elements in the ranks [of the police] who want to give people a good kicking". An opinion column in the Telegraph explained that "there are individuals who join the police just because they like hitting people", while the Spectator lamented the "disgraceful actions of a few Met officers". Tomorrow's Guardian poll suggests the police are losing the wider battle for public opinion, too.
The papers maintain that a few rogue officers got out of control. But as testimonies collected by Climate Camp's legal team show, police violence at the G20 demos was organised and systematic. It is true that the police appear to have been carried away by testeria (a useful word which describes testosterone-fuelled male rampages). But this keeps happening, and senior officers make no attempt to prevent it.
Before the protests, the police fed the media stories about terrorist plots supposedly being hatched by G20 demonstrators. "We're up for it and we're up to it," Commander Simon O'Brien told the press. Organisers from Climate Camp asked if they could attend police briefings given to journalists in order to put their side of the story. They were rebuffed. The police initially refused to meet them even to discuss the protesters' intentions. The police plan was called Operation Glencoe: it was named after the site of a notorious massacre.
If the police at the G20 protests were pumped up, testerical, itching for a fight, it was partly because their commanders have for years blurred the distinction between peaceful campaigners and terrorists. Until recently, this strategy worked: by turning quiet protests into angry confrontations, the police could show the public that unless they had ever greater powers and resources, the country would be overrun by violent mobs. Now it has backfired.
Don't expect this momentary backlash to change anything. The police appear impervious to criticism. Just eight days before the G20 protests, the parliamentary select committee on human rights published a report on the policing of protests. It recommended that "counter-terrorism powers should never be used against peaceful protesters"; and that "the presumption should be in favour of protests taking place without state interference". The police ignored it. They used counter-terrorism powers to stop and search climate campers eating in a restaurant; they sought to halt peaceful actions. Interestingly, they also appeared to allow genuine rioters to break into a branch of RBS. This, too, is a familiar pattern: the police beat up peaceful protesters and stand by when vandals create some easy headlines for the tabloids.
The public revulsion towards the police lies about De Menezes didn't prevent them attempting a similar cover-up over the death of Ian Tomlinson. Just as the furore reached its peak, the police again curtailed the right to protest when they pre-emptively arrested 114 people close to a power station. Their purpose was to impose sweeping bail conditions on the protesters, which will come in very handy when the decision to build a new coal-burning power station at Kingsnorth in Kent is announced. Today the Guardian published evidence of collusion between the police and Kingsnorth's operator, E.ON.
The police behave like this, despite the opprobrium of left and right, because they know they will get away with it. They know the government won't rein them in; that the Independent Police Complaints Commission appears to eat out of their hands; that the sternest sanction an officer can expect for beating or killing a passerby is some extended gardening leave. They know that in a few days' time the rightwing press will revert to publishing stories about the anarchist baby-eaters seeking to turn Britain into a bloodbath.
But something else has changed in this country: the resolution of the protesters. Despite repeated assaults, they appear to have become better organised and less afraid. That, so soon after Operation Glencoe, 114 people were prepared to risk arrest and another beating testifies to the resilience of this movement. These people know that protest is not a threat to democracy but its cornerstone. They know that the issues they contest outweigh any harm they may suffer. They know that getting beaten up is a sign that the state has lost the argument."
George Monbiot guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 April 2009
Distraction
The metropolitan police have introduced a new, U.S. style euphemism into British discourse. Nick Hardwick, chairman of the IPCC, who was accused on 4th August by the Police Federation of running a "witch-hunt" against G20 officers, told the committee he had received 185 complaints from G20 protests, including more than 50 complaints from members of the public who say they were assaulted or witnessed an assault.
Mr Hardwick said the IPCC received twice as many complaints from the 2001 Countryside Alliance protests, but he said the severity of the G20 complaints and injuries alleged is greater - although the difference may be accounted for by the presence of camera-toting citizen journalists at the protest.
"One of the consequences of this exposure through citizen journalism is that we will all see much more clearly what it is - and sometimes it looks ugly - what we expect the police to do," he told MPs.
Later the IPCC said it had received 185 complaints about the G20 protests, 40-something of which were regarded as 'ineligible', more than 50 were about police tactics and over 80 of which were from people who saw or experienced excessive force by police officers.
Mr Hardwick said there was a need for police to explain better so-called "distraction" techniques they are trained to use in violent confrontations, which he said was a "euphemism" for "kicking, hitting, punching". This is a mild criticism, but as the police are accustomed to being supported by all authorities, MPs and the tabloids through 'difficult times', for a public official to stand up and actually tell it thus represents a Small Step for a Man, and could lead to calls for greater control over the Force. If only. As they are now sanctioned to use guns and tasers as well as their clubs, and the laws of assault and perjury do not apply to them, it's a distant possibility. The Police Federation should relax.
Also- The Guardian interview:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/aug/06/ian-tomlinson-family-accuse-police-of-cover-up
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