The Blind Commissioner: twenty-five years of police, press and popular protest June 18, 2009
Posted by Rhian E Jones in Politics.Tags: false consciousness, history: uk, police, protest
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The coverage of April’s G20 protests has been marked by an unprecedented level of public acknowledgement of unprovoked police violence, not only towards the uninvolved Ian Tomlinson but also towards peaceful protestors at the Bishopsgate climate camp. Press reports and online discussion forums have been awash with buzzwords like ‘kettling’, as well as displaying outrage, shock or sheer bafflement at the death at police hands of an unarmed and unthreatening individual. An exacerbating factor in this indigation has been the initial media coverage, which painted those present as violent anarchists and repeated false police claims that their efforts to help Tomlinson had been hampered by missile-throwing protestors. For many, the death of Tomlinson has involved a shattering of faith in police ability to protect citizens and maintain order, and in the media’s readiness to report their conduct objectively.
But police brutality during public disturbances is nothing new, and neither is the tendency of mainstream media outlets to repeat uncritically police claims of provocation or antagonism by demonstrators. Tales of disproportionate and unprovoked violence against participants have circulated around every major industrial, environmentalist, economic and anti-capitalist demonstration of the past thirty years. Such claims, even when backed by eyewitness accounts and amateur recorded footage, have struggled to be heard over media and government insistence on eulogising police conduct, and it is this that is perhaps the most novel aspect of coverage of the G20 protests.
This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, an event which saw an extraordinary and now largely-forgotten level of government-sanctioned violence by police against a large section of the populace. The material and emotional investment in the strike by miners and their supporters led to highly-charged confrontations with police on picket lines up and down the country. The use against strikers of riot shields, truncheons and police horses and dogs became commonplace; restrictions were placed on freedom of movement as miners travelling to solidarity pickets were stopped en route and turned back or arrested. The mass picket of Orgreave coking plant in June 1984 saw, for the first time in Britain, the use of Police Support Units carrying not the normal full length protective shield used to guard against missiles, but short shields that could be used aggressively in conjunction with batons. These units acted as ‘snatch squads’, following charges of the crowd by mounted police and beating or arresting individuals – a tactic developed for use in riots by colonial police forces in Hong Kong.
Press and television coverage of such clashes was almost uniformly hostile to the strikers. When broadcasting footage of Orgreave, the BBC, incredibly, transposed the sequence of events, making it appear that police cavalry charges had been a defensive response to antagonism by stone-throwing pickets rather than an act of aggression. Only in 1991 did the BBC issue an apology for this, claiming that its action footage had been ‘inadvertently reversed’.
The tactics used in the Miners’ Strike were also in evidence during the mass protests in 1990 at the imposition of the Poll Tax. On 31 March a march and rally involving 200,000 people degenerated into some of the worst rioting seen in central London as a result of police ineptitude and overreaction. Following the rally, riot police attempted to clear Whitehall of marchers, despite both their retreat and advance being blocked by further lines of police. As scuffles broke out and members of the public became caught up with demonstrators, mounted police charged protestors and riot vans were driven into the crowd. Nearly 5,000 people, mostly civilians, were injured. Media coverage of the protest ignored the extent of police aggression and instead followed police and government leads in blaming the violence on anarchist elements – a claim disproved the following year by a police inquiry. At the trials of arrested demonstrators, police video itself was influential in acquitting many defendants, suggesting that police had fabricated or inflated charges and confirming doubts about policing styles developed during the 1980s.
As the ideology and operation of protest adapted to a changed political arena after the end of the Cold War, policing evolved towards a policy of containment and suppression. The ‘kettling’ technique used outside the Bank of England at G20 was used against participants in London anti-capitalist demonstrations as early as 1999. At May Day protests in 2001, police corralled 3,000 people, including uninvolved bystanders, in Oxford Circus for 8 hours. Those inside the cordon were denied access to food, water, medicine and toilet facilities and had their details and images recorded before being released. This tactic has since been used at several demonstrations to control, subdue and gain personal information about protesters, despite police having the extraordinarily limited power simply to stop and search in anticipation of violence.
The significance of G20, then, lies not in the policing of the demonstration itself, but in the channels available for its reporting and consequent public awareness. G20 was notable for the amount of press and amateur reporters participating in and observing the protests, as well as interested civilians armed with cameras and mobile phones. One of the latter, a New York businessman, provided the video of the police assault of Tomlinson shown on the Guardian‘s website.
It is this broadened and democratised arena of reporting that has made the greatest difference to coverage of police at protests. The initial press opprobium directed at bottle-throwing anarchists altered swiftly and dramatically under the weight of contradictory evidence, producing an extraordinary consensus of opinion on the Tomlinson case from across the political spectrum. The variety and sheer number of observers, as well as their access to media outlets such as YouTube, has enabled the public presentation of an ‘insider’ view of police actions, increasing the power of protestors to expose previously unknown or disputed police practices and to challenge subsequent press denials or misrepresentation. Despite the tragedy of Tomlinson’s death, G20 may yet provide an opportunity to unite public opinion in favour of greater police accountability and media transparency.
The police: force or service? June 18, 2009
Posted by Rhian E Jones in Politics, Scepticism.Tags: false consciousness, historical materialism, history: uk, police
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In the UK, the existence of a police force is symbiotically entwined with the growth of industrial capitalism, and one cannot be analysed without reference to the other. Put simply, the spur for the formation of the modern police force in the early nineteenth century was the desire to protect the property of corporations and private individuals. Prior to its establishment, local and national authorities had recourse to troops, local militias and government informants in their attempts to combat crime, riot and disorder. This system was unable to cope with the effects of social and economic changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, which also marked the country’s transformation into a primarily capitalist economy. Calls were made for improving law and order as traditional communities broke down and formerly feudal or migrant agricultural workers settled in large numbers around the new industrialising and urbanising centres. In these areas, growing social division between employers and employed, poor living and working conditions, and the appropriation of common land by private owners, generated widespread protest and unrest, petty crime, industrial sabotage, and nascent union activity. The mass return of soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars, who were largely homeless, unemployed and often disabled by injuries, exacerbated civil disorder. The newly-created entrepreneurial and industrial capitalist class, anxious to defend their property, lacked the traditional feudal system upon which the landed gentry relied for protection. This was the backdrop to the founding of the UK’s first uniformed and paid police forces, charged with protecting the new suburban districts, industrial sites, mines and railways, and enforcing order in increasingly anarchic and divided communities.
As Home Secretary in Wellington’s government, Robert Peel sponsored the first successful bill creating a bureaucratic police force in England. Peel’s Metropolitan Police Act was passed in 1829, at first applying only to London. The idea of an organised and uniformed police force faced significant resistance in and outside Parliament, with a majority of citizens viewing constables as an infringement on English social and political life. Steps were accordingly taken to differentiate the police from the tool of autocratic oppression employed by contemporary European states: notably, it was emphasised that their primary objective was to be the prevention and detection of crime, and that the authority of the English constable derived from three official sources: the crown, the law, and the consent and co-operation of the citizenry. The police’s increasing acceptance led to the peculiarly British prevailing view of the non-threatening ‘bobby’ perpetuated in fact and fiction.
The uneasy relationship between police and society is perhaps encapsulated by the dichotomy of force/service. Despite an emphasis on the concept of ‘service’ and the protection of the public from criminals, the police have historically constituted a force, based on both their function as an agency of social control and their nature as armed, uniformed citizens authorised to coerce. A materialist analysis of the police’s role reveals it as one not of protecting public safety but of safeguarding the workings of the capitalist system. The preventive tactics of the early Metropolitan police were accompanied by their explicit use against politically-motivated disorder, with, for example, their pitched battles with Chartist demonstrators in Birmingham and London proving their ability to deal with major disorders and street riots. The 1839 Royal Commission on Constabulary Forces, which recommended a national police force with the Metropolitan Police as the controlling power, initially saw the new police as a means of executing the widely-resisted New Poor Law. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the state has continued to authorise the use of the police to oppose industrial action and public protest.
The publicity given to and debate over the role of the police in April’s G20 protests has been useful in making more obvious the previously hidden aspects of the police’s function in protecting the interests of capital. This debate has however been carried out within a liberal framework which does not question the role of the police as an institution or the state’s self-granted ‘monopoly of violence’. Criticism of police operations, tactics, and behaviour, when adequately addressed, can only serve to reinforce the image of the police as the legitimate protectors of property and enforcers of law and order. The death of Ian Tomlinson and violence towards other protestors should instead be analysed as expected and logical extensions of the role of those forces of the state that exist to regulate and control the status quo.
