More unwarranted arrests post-G20 protests

[juliet]

What happened when the police broke (illegally) into the RamPART Centre in E London (features tasers & the police stealing people's phones, among other things).

The phone thing goes: "Is this your phone?" "Yes." "Prove it or we'll nick you for stealing it." It's a tactic to get people's names & addresses, basically (because you are not obliged to provide a name & address when stopped-and-searched). I've witnessed (at Climate Camp last summer) other similar tactics to get names, including taking cards out of a wallet and reading them (also illegal under stop-&-search legislation), reading notebooks (ditto), and some truly outrageous racial discrimination while I was doing my legal-observer thing, where an Italian guy was threatened with arrest under the Immigration Act unless he provided name, address, and *his landlord's phone number*, whereupon they *phoned the landlord*. So, yeah, I'm furious and saddened, but not surprised.

(RampART link)

Comments

[zebrallama.livejournal.com]

I'm furious and saddened, but not surprised.

+1

Thanks for reporting.

[(Anonymous)]

why are protesters so bourgeois these days? we should be out on the streets protesting about mobiles imo.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

"Well, it's national security, innit. Any means necessary, and all that."

Or, as I'm currently watching Babylon 5 again, Nightwatch ...

[sigh]

Generally, the police do a difficult job with limited public support, but behaviour like this makes a mockery of it all.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

And it further limits their public support as well.

So they are in fact shooting themselves in the foot...

[juliet]

Having the various sorts of race/class/background privilege that I do, my image of the police has always been broadly positive. (And yeah, a lot of what they do *is* a difficult job which needs to be done.) I was really, genuinely shocked by what I saw at Climate Camp - and whilst some of it is clearly driven by orders from above, or by the attitude of the inspector on duty at any particular moment, some of it is down to attitudes of individual cops.

On a slight tangent: I'd always been v suspicious about protestors who use scarves to cover their faces, before - I can absolutely understand it now, after the harrassment I've seen and heard about. At present, it's still not something I'd choose to do (because I think the public-image advantages of perceived openness outweigh the personal implications, for me), but I can really see why one might. The day I did legal observing was a very sunny one, and I was wearing a hat and sunglasses much of the time. I left the next morning without either, and was followed down the road by an car with an inspector and a camera-wielding intelligence person, who overtook and stopped in the middle of the road to get some nice clear shots of my face, while the inspector gave me the 'where are you off to then?' stuff. Bit alarming, really, and that's the very mild end of things I've heard.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Aye. With both barrels and unusual accuracy.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Fuckers. Have propagated.

[juliet]

thanks!

There's a report on the policing of the G20 stuff here: http://climatecamp.org.uk/node/563 if you're interested, btw. (Put together by the Climate Camp legal team, so obviously they're not a wholly unbiased source (as if anyone ever is...), but they are, in my experience of working with them, reliable and competent people.)