Police violence understated
The more I try to change my career path, the more I realise that editorial work is probably the best work in the world – despite the lack of reward or general appreciation. This week I did a project management course. The trainer talked about ‘forming, storming, norming and performing‘. This is a technique for managing your team, but somehow it made me think of the police and how they manage demonstrations.
That could be because the MPs report into Policing at the G20 demonstrations was published on Monday. The press focused on MPs’ criticisms of the police tactics and use of inexperienced officers. But actually, if you look at the way the criticisms are worded, you can see it lets the police get off very lightly.
In the introduction it talks about the policing “largely being very successful” and compares it with the poll tax riots of the 1980s and May Day 2001. The report says that:
“…non-protesters were able to go about their lives with little or no major disruption…”
Ian Tomlinson, who died after being assaulted by an unidentifiable, masked policeman, was a non-protester.
The way this report uses language is very clever. It manages to criticise the police enough to satisfy the media and the public’s thirst for justice to be done, without really confronting the level of police violence that took place in London during the G20 Summit.
So, it refers to “isolated incidents” for example. This expression both understates the seriousness of the ‘incidents’ by not being specific – riot shields in protesters’ faces, unprovoked attacks, that sort of thing – and by not attributing any action to the perpetrators of the violence, that is, the police.
Similarly, by talking about:
…the wider concerns which have been raised over the policing of large-scale public protests…”
the report is completely dismissing the degree of anger that is felt in this country by people who have witnessed or been victims of shocking police violence at demonstrations for decades. I could try to catalogue them all – Miners’ Strike, Poll Tax riots, riots in Brixton, Toxteth and all that, deaths in police custody throughout the 1990s, assaults on environmental protesters – oh but already it’s taking up too much space on my blog.
In its conclusions and recommendations (paragraph 10) the report criticises poor communications and the language that the police use. Having never once referred to the propensity for violence within the Metropolitan Police, the report says:
“We cannot understand why… the police would use language which would only serve to create a “them and us” attitude and antagonise the most violent elements within the protesters.”
The implication here is that any violence at the demonstrations was bound to come from the protesters.
In fairness, the report is very critical of containment and ‘kettling’ tactics, but how is this for an understatement?
“We are firmly of the view that the problems that were reported by those “contained” at Bishopsgate could have been easily prevented through greater communication throughout the day.”
If you want to see what actually happened at Bishopsgate, watch this film on indymedia:
‘This is not a riot’ at Bishopsgate in April 2009
