Police reform bill - reducing our rights.

I just sent an email to my MP calling on them to sign the amendment to remove clause 151 (or should this be 152) from the Police Reform bill. If passed, it would  mean instead of prosecutors applying immediately to the courts for the arrest of a war crimes suspect, they will first have to get the prior agreement of the Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) for the case to be heard. 

This will cause unnecessary delay in time sensitive operations and could result in political intereference. 

It only took a minute or two using a model letter - please take the time to do the same.
All you have to do is visit http://psc.iparl.com/lobby/64 and put in your postcode - easy as that.

Police officers being dragged off police horses and beaten?

Cameron said on Thursday that he had heard about “police officers being dragged off police horses and beaten”. The PM then suggests that protestors that damage property should face "full force of the law".

The reality is very different. The footage of how the un-mounted police officer sustained his injuries is being circulated and as you will see the officer was not beaten by protestors but steppen on by his horse. Meanwhile the police can be seen hitting a protestor in the background.



Perhaps the police horse should face the full force of law? Alfie Meadows did. Having been beaten by police he sustained a brain injury requiring surgery, yet on arrival at hospital the police apparently tried to prevent him receiving treatment. Those officers should be proscuted.

When the police are facing cuts will they be this violent towards their own colleagues?

Screw Human Rights say police...

More evidence of the police state in the Guardian - as if we needed more evidence - as the Association of Chief Police Officers tell their forces to resist calls to remove innocent people's DNA from their database. Clearly the police want as much evidence as they can lay their hands on, whether a crime has been committed or not.

Holding 5.8 million DNA samples and 1 in three profiles of young black men is simply wrong by any standard. Defying a EU Human Rights ruling is not only bizarre, but illegal - but then no one polices the police in this country.

Welcome to the database state and yes, you are being watched.

Government in bed with EON

More revelations about the policing of Kingsnorth in today's Grauniad. Apparently the police handed documents to EON:

• BERR officials passed a strategy document belonging to the "environmental protest community" to E.ON, saying: "If you haven't seen this then you will be interested in its contents."

• Government officials forwarded a Metropolitan police intelligence document to E.ON, detailing the movements and whereabouts of climate protesters in the run-up to demonstration.

The collusion between DBERR, the police and the private energy company is appalling - but almost unsurprising. That DBERR could colude so blatantly with EON demonstrates the government's aim to send society and the planet to hell in a handcart.

Government and the police need to serve the people in this country and uphold the law, not continue to break it at the behest of big business and the gods of economic growth.

Tomlinson's coroner - how did he get it so wrong?

The news that Ian Tomlinson died of an abdominal haemorrhage and that a police office attacked him a few minutes before has been making the blogosphere rattle for the last 24 hours. The incident that led to Mr Tomlinson's death is shocking and horrific but probably expected given the tactics and attitude of the police, but what is not being explored is how the first coroner could have got it so wrong.

I'm not a coroner and have never seen an autopsy, but as someone with a clinical qualification (I'm a registered nurse) I have to ask how he could find a substantial amount of blood in the abdominal cavity and then conclude that the death was due to coronary artery disease, i.e. a heart attack.

I suspect that we will never know whether there was any pressure put on him by the police but there can only be three possibilities for him to come to that conclusion:

1. It is a perfectly reasonable conclusion to come to
2. He was pressured by the police or some other person or organisation
   
3. He is incompetant

Had the video footage of him being attacked not been made public a second post-mortem would have not been ordered and Tomlinson's death would have remained due to a heart attack. If this post-mortem had been a cover up then it may have been sucessful without the video evidence.

G20 Death -- Fix British Protest Policing

This is the latest call for action by Avaaz: G20 Death -- Fix British Protest Policing

"Peaceful protest is an essential part of our democracy. But at the G20 demonstrations last week it was threatened by flawed policing -- targeting the peaceful majority instead of isolating the handful of troublemakers. Watch one of the many videos which have shocked the nation, and let's stop this from ever happening again. "

The death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protest is appalling. The video evidence shows that the police are no longer facilitating peaceful protest but are actively trying to stop it. Please sign the petition and let us hope that the masked policeman that attacked an innocent bystander is brought to justice also also that his bosses are held to account too. They are clearly sanctioning illegal attempts to intimidate protestors and trying to stop legitimate protests.

Demonstrator's database

Who needs ID cards or the national database scheme when the police have already made one. This report from the Grauniad says what we have know for some time, that the police are keeping records of people who are not breaking the law but simply exercising their right to demonstrate peacefully.

They are clearly breaking a number of laws by doing this and all hats off to Liberty who seem to be leading the charge against the police in the courts.

The police can take our photographs without our permission and store them on a searchable database to be used in the future. But if we take a photo of them we can be locked up for 10 years... No wonder the builders are getting into the action now.

FCUK or Recycle Now?

I'm off to do some shopping and I'll be wearing a T shirt which says 'Recycle Now'. I am very worried about being arrested as a dangerous extremist pushing my offensive views on an unsuspecting public. Even though I will be leaving my camera at home, I still deserve a night in jail for even thinking about making a public statement.

With hindsight it might be better to buy a FCUK T shirt - at least that can't be construed as offensive???

Worse still, I could write something in the snow which people might be able to read... this is from the Daily Record:

A GRANDAD was arrested by police - for drawing a protest message in the snow.

Geoff Lamb, 65, yesterday told how he was handcuffed, spent a night in the cells and had his car impounded.

It happened after police found him drawing a four-foothigh slogan on a hill.

The 100-foot-long message was on the flight path into Aberdeen airport so that it could be read by passengers.

The message read: "You fly, they die."

It was written by Geoff using a garden pressure hose and was meant to be a protest against climate change.

NETCU - a waste of time and money

Monbiot's article has prompted me to have a look at the NETCU website. "The National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (NETCU) promotes a coordinated response to domestic extremism" proudly states the opening paragraph. Monbiot details the case of a university lecturer trying to get his name removed from a publication by NETCU after he protested against the destruction of Radley Lakes, but perhaps an equally bizarre story exists by looking at their newsfeed.

Four arrested for leafleting: Ok, it was despicable stuff they were distributing - but surely this is not a headline event from the NETCU?

Street Collector Jailed for Fraud: He nicked four grand. The NETCU are proud to have played their part in his capture. Is this the best they can do?

Two convicted of tresspass: Now it's getting serious.

Of course they also have the padlock and knives found 'in woodland outside the climate camp' and still claim that they were to be used against Kingsnorth, despite no evidence to substantiate this.

We have thousands being killed on the roads each day, thousands of children going missing, obscene profits made by the few at the expense of the many, real fraud (not £4k), abuse, hate crimes and so on. Disband NETCU now and put the resources where they will make a difference.

Police hold Green for 5 hours, a personal account

On the back of some obnoxious comments in the press today about the climate camp protesters, I thought I would share an email from Matt Wootton, a Green Party member in Lancaster, about his treatment by Kent Police:

From Matt:

I just wanted to share some of the political perspectives I gained through being arrested, handcuffed and put in a police cell for just a few hours at the climate camp at the weekend http://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/3504 "Police hold Green activist for five hours for possession of Vitamin C."

Obviously my arrest was not a usual occurrence, for me or for the police. As Derek Wall said at the weekend: "This is another example of how over-the-top the policing of this event has been. This shows that the priority of the police is not to protect the public but to suppress legitimate protest."

But I pity anybody that's in that sort of cell for more than a few hours. It was a windowless, concrete, plain white cell. It had a bed - well - a platform with a sort of plastic-covered thin hard foam mattress, a metal toilet, and a sink inset into the wall. The only good thing about it was the acoustic, but after a couple of hours I had run out of slightly melancholy a cappella folk songs to sing (a sign of the times is that I stopped myself from singing in any foreign language in case I was overhead and it started a line of enquiry about my right to remain in the UK or something ridiculous).

There was a "sink" of sorts (like you get on a Virgin train), inset into the wall, that you could just about get our hands into, not anything else. It spurted out hot water that was - I suppose - drinkable, but not exactly what you'd call drinking water. There was a metal toilet without a seat, but no toilet roll. There was a "bed" (and an equally hard pillow); I loved it because I have a bad back, but not to everybody's tastes... There was no blanket of course. Everybody is tacitly treated as a suicide risk, hence no blanket, no toilet roll, no towel, plastic fork at meal times.....

After I was released I heard of a tale at the camp of a 14 year old boy who had been arrested and kept in his cell with no clothes at all, apparently because he was deemed a "suicide risk" (maybe he answered affirmatively to the question I was (I'm sure routinely) asked by the custody officer: "Have you ever self-harmed?"). Taking his clothes away is, I'm fairly sure, a contravention of the code of practice that detentions operate under. The most ridiculous aspect of this is that I can't think of anything more likely to make a 14-year old WANT to commit suicide than being arrested (probably for the first time in his young life) on possibly a spurious charge, stripped naked, and put in a cell without any proper drinking water, anything
to drink out of, and a metal toilet bowl where you're obliged to wipe your ass with your hand. (Thankfully I didn't need to go...). This kind of treatment makes it pretty clear to me why people in this country - rightly or wrongly - consider the police to be "bastards".

When people are on remand (i.e. charged but not yet brought to trial) I take it they are kept in better conditions than a police holding cell...? I'm not an expert on this so I would be grateful for anybody's input if you know.

It certainly puts the 42 days detention debate in a different light: if it possible to spend up to 42 days WITHOUT charge and it is just an "ordinary" police cell that one is being kept in, then I have every sympathy for whatever "barmy" LibDem it was (was it Norman Baker?) who called for televisions to be provided for those in detention. Of course television should be provided. Why? Because if we are to take the maxim "innocent until proven guilty" at face value, then police holding cells need to actually be more like secure
waiting rooms than punishment rooms. This sounds terribly wet, but it isn't, because until you are charged you are waiting for the police to make a case just that you MIGHT be guilty. At the moment it seems that the police's maxim might as well be "punishment begins at the front door to the police station", when in fact "punishment" (if such a thing is warranted at all, which is a different debate) should and must in my opinion only be meted out AFTER sentencing has occurred, not long before.

Apart from anything else, the kind of psychological effect on one's mental wellbeing that sensory deprivation starts to have on a detainee is obvious and completely unwarranted. The police should not be damaging (even temporarily) the psychological health of (potentially) innocent people, or preferably anyone for that matter.

I spent two periods of an hour at a stretch in the cell and each time - in the absence of natural light, human company, my phone, entertainment or a clock, that hour felt like 30 minutes (time flies when you're having fun). If a few hours in and out of a cell has that much of a disorientating effect on me, I hate to think what it would do to someone after a day, three days, a fortnight. Nobody deserves to be disorientated to that degree; it's bordering on cruel and usual punishment, although it does have one effect that the police probably like: it makes you feel powerless. This, I would suggest, is not a healthy thing in itself, and has implications for the exercise of an individual's rights in the face of a will more powerful than their own.

Enough of the cell: my very brief experience of a British police station generally has shown me that the police are all too eager (perhaps unintentionally yet casually) to abuse their discretion: in my case for example by not allowing me a phone call to tell my girlfriend when I was likely to get out (and indeed, more than once claiming they were "too busy" (they didn't look that busy to me)). This privilege was denied despite being clearly granted in paragraph 5.6 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) Code of Practice C, which of course has been scrutinised by Parliament. After telling me that him granting me a phone call was "at his discretion" the custody officer's mouth nearly dropped into his plastic cup of coffee when I answered him by saying that surely Annex B paragraphs 1 and 2 did not apply in this instance... The police are so used to having power that the operate on this discretion, rather than on the rules, in my limited experience.

On the whole, I have to say the police were fairly reasonable. The custody officer in particular was an intelligent and witty man, who even expressed privately that he thought campaigning against the government's Climate Change policy was a "good cause" that he supported.

But the level of "customer service" stills leaves a lot to be desired. Even when I was released without charge and allowed to return straight away to the camp, there was not an apology as such. And my innocent wallet was retained, and I was obliged to pay a taxi cab £17 to take me back to the camp (where I was promptly searched again..!!). Many people would scoff at the idea that the police should be providing customer service. But if innocent people are actually to be treated as if they are indeed innocent, we still have a long way to go.

Another issue of course is the fingerprinting and the DNA swabs that we taken from me and put on the national police database. If we are to complain about abuse of personal data, surely this is the sort of thing we need to take up our time with: this is taken completely by force, and unlike the protection afforded me by the Data Protection Act I have no right to ask the police to delete my details. I am not alone in being added to the database: only last week an unrelated headline in the local Cumbrian newspaper The Westmorland Gazette ran: "HUNDREDS of children and dozens of pensioners have had their DNA recorded in South Lakeland and stored in a national database. Cumbria Police, operating in South Lakeland, have taken DNA samples from 872 children aged 15-years-old and younger, including 18 aged ten years or younger – a revelation described by one Kendal councillor as “truly horrific”. " http://www.thewestmorlandgazette.co.uk/news/3581858.DNA_stored_on_police_data_base/

People don't trust the police in this country, and the lack of civility in police custody reinforces an idea that the police are indeed a "paramilitary" sort of operation, and that while in their care you should expect different standards of service than you should expect of the rest of the British state. Surely that link of public trust needs to be restored - all but the most idealised Green society will make use of a police force. And surely we need a police force that DOES provide 21st century levels of customer service, one that can truly demonstrate that it takes the maxim "innocent until proven guilty" seriously, and can inspire respect instead of resentment...?

Matt Wootton - Green Party