Brutality exposed

Slim Jim

This has got nothing to do with Gordon Brown. He did not issue any orders to the Met Commish to make sure absolutely no-one pooped his wee party.

Prodicus

OT

Guido's blog is down. Overload? Balls-up? Carter-Ruckup?

Nicholas

Appalling. Shouting at protestors is no way to control the situation. In fact the video is clear evidence that they had lost control and were behaving in a manner that was making the situation worse. Whoever was in tactical command of those police needs some training in proper public order policing.

The tactic of "kettling" clearly increases tension, resentment and violence.

Austin Barry

The police seem to have three protest strategies:

(a) run away or look away if any Islamists are involved:

(b) bash small women and middle-aged men;

(c) arrest protesters before they protest.

All of which recalls Joe Orton's lines from Loot:

Hal: "The police force used to be run by men of integrity"

Inspector Truscott: "That mistake has been rectified!"

Lance Grundy

"This is where the mobile phone footage shot by bystanders can prove so valuable."

Yes it can, and that's why [under the guise of ‘fighting terrorism’] it has been made illegal to film or photograph police officers on duty. Expect police to start using these powers soon.

The first people charged, pour encourager les autres, will no doubt be some drunken youths filming a group of police officers bundling their paralytic friend into the back of a police van on a Saturday night in deepest suburbia . Either that or someone filming a police officer tasering a member of the public.

Either way, the police will use these powers to stamp out what they perceive as a challenge to their authority – Joe Public filming them on mobile phones and holding them accountable for their actions.

logdon

Compare and contrast these quite brutal images with the ones the other week of our finest running like scared rabbits from a allahu akhbar screaming muslim mob. These are recorded facts which our populace cannot fail to notice and ultimately cannot be ignored. Their impression of a set of paralel laws for muslims is bolstered by this, on the face of it, blatant anti white racism. No kettling of cartoon demonstrators or at any of the myriad of anti war/Israel demos. I wonder why?

Verity

It's part of the SS 'We Are The Masters' mentality that permeates the British police. I have never encountered this air of bossy superiority in any other police force in any country I've visited. The British police are institutionally Fascist.

Steve.W

I support the aims of Liberty and Sharmi Chakrabati, Director of Liberty, is always saying that our freedoms are being removed faster than ever under Nulabour.

Peter you say - “But it's clear that the service requires deep reform, and that certain unsavoury aspects need rooting out”.

I think it's also clear that Nulabour, 13 years in power, have had plenty of time to do just that. Progress so far?

Andy

The police have become politicised. They need to go back to Peel's basics. The G20 tactics were no surprise to me - I saw what they did to those protesting against the flawed Hunting Act. Strangely, such behaviour attracted little or no opprobrium at the time - I wonder why.

hayley

"big supporter of the police" are you? is that all of them or some?
The old saying "the partner is always last to know" holds true..no-one wants to believe the unpaletable truth, but its out there! look at the facts/videos/history/evidence and still support `the police`

hayley

"big supporter of the police" are you? is that all of them or some?
The old saying "the partner is always last to know" holds true..no-one wants to believe the unpaletable truth, but its out there! look at the facts/videos/history/evidence and still support `the police`

Death or Tory

Er, O/T - but am I the only one to notice that Guido Fawkes' Blog has disappeared from the Blogosphere?...

Roger Thornhill

I cannot see why we should allow the bill to outlaw photography of the police to stand. We need as much information as possible so we can all see the full picture.

One must also remember, though, the woman, amongst others, appeared to be standing there yelling obscenities at the police. Before I judge both, I would want to see what happened before and if or how the Police provoked such verbal abuse or not.

That said, the baton to the legs was far from reasonable IMHO, regardless of verbal abuse.

Jonathan explains it all

Woman begins screaming at a policeman. He tells her to get back. She continues to scream in his ear. He pushes her back. She returns and continues to scream at him. Next stage: use the baton. What is unreasonable about this? Should people be just allowed to shout at poilcemen?

Jonathan explains it all

Woman begins screaming at a policeman. He tells her to get back. She continues to scream in his ear. He pushes her back. She returns and continues to scream at him. Next stage: use the baton. What is unreasonable about this? Should people just be allowed to shout at policemen?

Pete Hoskin

Death or Tory: the volume of traffic that Guido has been getting caused his server to crash. I imagine order-order will be up-and-running again in good time.

Ken

O/T
Guido's site has been down more than an hour now, probably just server overload, but .... might be a story?

Thrasymachus

One wonders how quickly the woman would have claimed compensation had she been discriminated against at work because of her gender. What did her being a woman have anything to do with her being struck? Nothing. This is a predictable consequence of our confused multiculture, and as irrelevant as the fact that the officer would not have cuffed her had she been wearing a niqab.

The police “have an extremely difficult job” - this is equally fatuous. Others put it more blatantly: officers were being provoked. But if I lose my job and my partner leaves me all on a single day and a toe-rag gets mouthy to me on the train home, I cannot justify my punching him squarely on the nose. Provocation is no defence.

What is at work here is that the Police have a great deal more power than the citize; now more than ever. Historically they have exercised this power through a contract of trust with the people. This trust demands that their ever-increasing powers be exercised without impunity. Yet societal changes and the police’s reaction to these have successively eroded this trust, and it is now at breaking point.

The officer should be summarily dismissed for his heinous violation of what remains of this trust. Not because he struck a demonstrator, but because he was knowingly wearing a uniform with no numbers on it when he did so. The IPCC must condemn such behaviour and make an example of him immediately.

Yet this was no nervous rookie police constable, but a sergeant – a post which these days sadly necessitates political shrewdness not just a knowledge of the law – who is no doubt conscious of which way the wind’s blowing.

Soon Scotland Yard will issue a statement saying that number removal (making officers instantly unaccountable) is now an operational necessity to ensure the safety of the police given the increased terror threat. As they did when it became illegal to photgraph them. Conveniently forgetting yet again that the primary duty of the police is the protection of the public’s safety, not their own.

Maurice Mcleod

Sickening.
As long as police continue to have a 'them and us' attitude, they will never be respected in certain communities.

Verity

Pete writes: "Don't get me wrong' I'm a big supporter of the police."

I would contend that a large proportion of people who claim to be big supporters of the police are eliding over what the British police have become, and what they really mean is, they're big supporters of law and order.

In today's Britain, the two or not synonymous.

The Masked Marvel

The increasingly insolent, indignant, and violent public are at least as much of the problem here as any unsavoury elements in the police force.

It seems these days that practically every public gathering escalates into violence, regardless of how the police behave. While you're frowning at individual policemen trapped in a war not of their own choosing, you ought to look into the unsavoury elements creating these public gatherings and inciting the violence in the first place.

Who knows if poor Ian Tomlinson would have had a heart attack later that evening? If there weren't so many violent thugs leading and joining "protests" those protests in London, Mr. Tomlinson would have had an easier route home from work, and that policeman wouldn't have felt the need to shove what he must have thought was yet another potentially violent "protester". In short, if not for the culture of violent protests you seem to get these days, Mr. Tomlinson would still be alive. How many other deaths are a direct or indirect result of this culture of violent demonstration?

The police did not create today's environment of violent demonstrations: the demonstrators themselves have done that. Criticize individual policemen, and certain police policies all you want, but you must also examine those who have created the current culture of violence.

magneto

More and more the police in the UK resemble some Latin American dictators enforcers. This is beyond the pale. But does anyone here seriously believe that the Tories will roll back police power? No chance at all. Remember Kent miners being stopped from boarding buses IN KENT under the Resolute One. Or the standard practice of removal of their numbers by police as they acted against protesters in the 70s, and miners in the 80s. Orwell must be spinning in his grave.

Bob Frost

FWIW here's the Daily Mash take on it :-)

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/police-to-target-hippies-with-video-cameras-200904151702/

David P

The problem is, in every UK Police force, there are, a large number of corrupt individuals.

The corrupt ones are more than happy to act with criminal intent, to lie and cheat, and to show no respect to the public they are paid to protect.

They can do this because they nearly always get away with wrongdoing.

Some years ago I had serious problems with the Police in Scotland, and eventually two officers were charged with fraud offences and a high court trial was arranged. The Crown Office then "lost" the files and the police walked. Some time after this I was threatened, and attacked in my own home, after police broke in without a warrant. This I was told, was a punishment for my first complaint. I can never forget the screams of my 5 year old daughter. Another complaint made, and this time one of the officers has to retire early due to stress, (on a full pension). Because of this the prosecution "had" to drop my complaint. I had to move hundreds of miles away to get peace. Nothing has changed; complaints are made, and cops still go off sick and cases against them come to nothing. They will still lie for one another, from senior officer down. This HAS to stop. The police must be accountable to their public. And why are they all in the freemasons?

John Wilkes

I imagine you have a mixture of people commenting on this item with a range of attitudes and prejudices.
For sometime (a lot longer than this government have been in power) I have thought that there was a threat to law and order caused by public distrust of the police. This was largely got up by middle class liberals in the 1970's a lot of whom have gone on to be significant political players. The lawyers at the vangaurd of this are of the same vintage as and include the likes of Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, both former leading lights in the National Council for Civil Liberties ("Liberty" as was) who went on to be ministers in the current government. In fact that animosity ought to have become a side issue as a result of many reforms over the past 25 years. Most notable of these was in fact the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984, which time has shown to be the single most effective piece of legislation within the criminal justice system. It achieved, in legislation passed by a Conservative government, a historic compromise between extending Police powers and ensuring accountability in the form of proper record keeping in respect of the use of the extra powers as well as in relation to the interrogation of suspects.
It is therefore an extraordinary turn of events that the Police are in the process not of regaining the trust of the public under the administration of those who undermined them so vigorously in the past, but actually throwing it all away. The reason? No government in living memory has done more to politicise the police as their servants and not the servants of the people. They have become the enforcement arm not of the state but of the government. The examples of their partisanship are too legion to list but are well known. This is not nostalgia for "bobbies on the beat" but the realisation that what we have seen is exactly what happens when the police seem themselves not as accountable to the state (ordinarily in the form of the justice system) but tools of the government. The ordinary citizen becomes their enemy and they no longer care how it appears to others. There are very many examples of potentially totalitarian legislation passed under this government, some big some small. The easiest one to understand is that small one prohibiting the taking of photographs of the Police - in fact this has been an offence since 2001 and the most recent Counter Terrorism Act has only extended it. It is all done under the guise of preventing terrorism but protects them from having evidence gathered against them whilst the states powers against the citizen are extended and extended (viz. the interception of communications).
Just what sort of society does the recent images of the police conjure up for your readers? Certainly not one that I like.

Hawkeye

Jonathan explains it all said: "He pushes her back. She returns and continues to scream at him"

Err - no! He actually slapped her across the face. You can hear it on the soundtrack.

Craig

In many ways the police set the tone for a demo. They can calm things down or crank them up depending on tactics and attitude. Clearly, the Met "were up for it" during the G20 protests as many of the photos are videos coming out now show.

Mic

Police officers? Constables and sergeants surely, not officers. It has become fashionable to over rate the lower ranks.

Big Alec

I agree with Jonathan.

First of all, on a legal point, that policeman had a legitimate right to hit that woman, as her action was provocative and threatening. Ask any lawyer and he will tell you the same thing. Secondly, I think police should use their full authority when dealing with trouble-makers, even if it means giving them a knock with their batons or spraying them in the face. Those louts who trash windows and riot and shout their heads off deserve everything they get. That daft woman will think twice before she does that again.

Steve Harris

I am a retired policeman and I'm ashamed of the conduct of these policemen; the damage caused to relationships with the police as a result of their actions is immeasurable.

I can only urge people to remember that police officers are not all the same and that many work extremely hard and do their level best every day in sometimes difficult circumstances. It's too easy to talk about 'the police' as if they are all the same.

I hope those responsible are properly punished - I'm sure most of their colleagues realise there should be no place in the police service for bullies.

Stronghold Varricades

Why did the supervisors of these front line officers allow them to cover up their identification numbers?

If they say they were unaware does that mean these supervisors no longer fulfil a front line role and therefore can not adapt their techniques to the situation that evolves in front of them?

Ask any general about how long a plan lasts once contact is made

George Laird

Dear Jonathan explains it all

"He pushes her back".

Try putting it correctly; he slaps her across the face with the back of his hand.

She wasn't pushed.

If you are going to continue with this moniker can I suggest that you change it to Jonathan explains it all badly and wrong.

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

David Burns

According to the Evening Standard PR is being handled by Max Clifford. Goad a Police Officer (which she was doing) get hit and then take the tax payers for every penny you can get plus a wedding in Hellow etc.

George Laird

Dear All

Today, I got an email back from the IPCC regarding my observation that two City of London dog handlers needed to be questioned in the events that lead to the death of Ian Tomlinson.

Here is the reply;

"Thank you for your email which was passed to the IPCC investigation team.

Regards"

I have not put up the name of the person from the press unit as it is not relevant.

It will be interesting to see if the IPCC officers investigating question the dog handlers and make it publicly known they have done so.

At present, it appears that everyone wants to look solely at the one officer in the riot gear.

The ends of justice are not served by trying to 'manage' this situation but by finding out the truth.

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow Univrsity

Hysteria

further to Mr Marvel's comment.

When faced with a hostile crowd, what tools of persuasion are available to the police to prevent a crowd intent on causing physical damage? Ask them nicely to cease and desist perhaps? Sure this might be your first weapon of choice, but when that fails?

Crowd control, especially a crowd in which there are elements intent on doing harm, is not an easy task.

Frankly, people get hurt. That's the reality, however much at an individual level this may be deplorable.

Fed Up

And what does the RT Hon Jacqui Smith our alledged Home Secretary have to say about all this? The woman has not got a grip on the Home Office, why does Brown not sack her immediately? Forgot he's too busy indulging his own Mcavity tendencies at the moment.

Richard of Cirencester

I'm the sort of person who should, and used to, instinctively support the Police. I'm the sort of person who wears an overcoat with a black velvet collar!

But my sympathy for the Police began to wane twenty years ago when I was badly parked at my local shops. It was a Saturday afternoon and there was nowhere to park. So with a car full of children I stopped for a couple of minutes in the hatched area in the middle of the road whilst my wife popped out to get something.

A motor cycle policeman saw me and came over. I was expecting to be told (entirely reasonably) that "It's not very sensible to park there, is it sir, move". But no, he started wittering on about how parking in this (admittedly stupid but quite safe) place was an 'indictable offence' which was potentially punishable with a prison sentence. With prison! For bad parking! Excuse me?

I should have taken his number and reported him but I was so shocked I just moved on. But later I thought, what type of corporate culture is it that policemen think it is proper to talk to a patently decent member of the public?

Since then there have been too many instances reported in the media of the Police appearing to be the enemies of the public rather than their protectors.

Yes I know they have a difficult job. But the tactics used for the G20 demos were unacceptable. And if I was the Commissioner, I would instantly dismiss the Inspector(s) who permitted the men under his command to cover up their numbers.

It's not the fault of the lower ranks. It's the fault of pusillanimous Chief Constables who are have allowed themselves to become agents on an increasingly illiberal Government.

Bring back the practice, I say, of using retired senior officers from the armed forces (who really know how to manage people) as Chief Constables.

Tankus

The missing officers identification shoulder numbers are key ......

The officer with the missing Id's and his immediate chain of command (up to 2 levels above) should be automatically disciplined involving at least a 3 months wages fine ....

Think it might resolve a fair portion of the problems cause by a very very small minority within the police who watch too many Sweeney reruns on dave .

Jack Reagan RIP

IanB

This is very different from the Ian Tomlinson incident. Clearly the use of the baton looks excessive. But, equally clearly, there was strong provocation.

The woman was screaming four-letter words, she ignored several instructions to move back - indeed she still came forward after the officer struck her with his glove.

In a pressure situation, faced with an out of control individual carrying a carton of liquid - that could have been harmful for all he knew - the officer was forced to respond.

Rodders

Children, its not very difficult. If you don't want to be struck by a police truncheon, don't repeatedly scream obscenities into the face of a police officer.

Verity

I think comments are getting "disappeared" on this blog. I'm going to start saving my comments and reposting them, presumably when a different moderator, with a different set of prejudices, is on.

My Cat

Rodders - I like your name, but you're ghastly.

We will see whether this comment gets through the thought Fascist Iron Curtain obtaining in these parts.

Verity

Child Rodders who styles people he has to laboriously explain things to "Children", policemen are there to police our streets, no take infantile personal offence at what protesters shout at them. The notion that a police officer can thwak someone with a police truncheon for screaming insults is grotesque. This officer's personal sense of insult is not the issue. Two thousand years of free speech is.

Ruairidh

This is hardly police brutality. The news that the woman in this video has now hired Max Clifford and is claiming to be 'traumatised' is ridiculous.

The 'slap' was after the woman tried to grab the officers arm. The baton to the legs after she continued to move towards the officer shouting at him despite being told to move back. I have no sympathy for this woman, indeed the way she is going after the officer concerned and appears to want this to cost him his job makes me despise her. I think this is a fuss about nothing.