More G20 stuff

[juliet]

Climate Camp legal team report on the policing of the 24 hr G20 camp. There's a decent summary in the first couple of pages if you don't want to read all of it.

Warning: the witness accounts in Appendix 3 are distressing in places: police violently attacking and threatening peaceful protesters.

(The legal-notebook-based timeline that they have in there is interesting.)

ETA: Government department passed on information about activity and whereabouts of protestors to E.On before last summer's climate camp. Because sharing information about your citizens with a private company is *entirely* acceptable behaviour, oh yes.

Comments

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Many thanks for doing, and blogging, this work.

Is there anything that the rest of us can constructively do at this point?

[juliet]

Hm. http://climatecamp.org.uk/g20/legal suggests writing to your MP - obviously if you weren't involved then it's more about 'here is this report / information on Ian Tomlinson, I am horrified & what are you going to do about it' than it is 'I was batoned by a police officer, what are you going to do about it'. But I think it's still useful - even *more* so when non-directly-involved people complain, because it shows that it's not just Those Activists who are aware & upset.

More generally: there's lots of suggestions for getting involved at that website!

NB: I wasn't personally at G20, due to WrongContinentError, although I was at Climate Camp last summer, which also featured exciting riot police action. (and the government passing police info onto E.On! How nice of them. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/20/police-intelligence-e-on-berr )

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Letter sent - and my MP is very responsive.

[juliet]

Awesome, go you!

[zebrallama.livejournal.com]

This is all very depressing. I'm English but living in Australia, and I'll tell you I'm NOT going back, and this is one of the main reasons why. (Not that that helps the people who have to live there.)

WrongContinentError

Made me laugh.

[ladyjulian.livejournal.com]

I nearly thumped the radio this morning - ACPO chap was on the Today programme saying that it was all proportionate because the protesters came into town with the intention of "damaging property, injuring and killing police officers." WTF?!

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

What evidence did they cite to support this claim?

[ladyjulian.livejournal.com]

None at all - it was Derek Barnett, and he's the Chief Superintendent and therefore presumably psychic, because although no damaging, injuring and killing was done (at least, not by the protesters), he knew in advance that was what they intended. It's on Listen Again.

Response from ACPO

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Many thanks for your email.

Please find link to statement issued by ACPO yesterday that put ACPO President Sir Ken Jones comments into context.

http://www.acpo.police.uk/pressrelease.asp?PR_GUID={6435E06C-AAAA-49F4-BBA0-A0C7DC4C837A}

The point that was being made on the programme this morning merely draws a comparison between other countries, showing that British policing takes a proportionate approach to policing of protests. Sir Ken Jones was not in any way trying to justify or excuse the actions of those officers during the G20 demonstrations.

There has been a degree of misreporting which we have sought to clarify and I would direct you to the link below which followed the interview and includes some of his comments.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6130949.ece

Re: Response from ACPO

[juliet]

Thanks for posting this.

(I am wildly unconvinced by it, obviously - assuming that they are prepared to stand by the comments as in that Times article, I'm still horrified by those. "Other people use rubber bullets!" - that does not excuse the police violence we saw here!

And again, there's a direct quote there with his (unsubstantiated) claim that people came here to attack the police.

(There's a note in the legal report about which describes someone at the Bank of England kettle who *did* come forward, hit a police officer, and then duck back again. The police hit out at everyone else around. Now, that's a difficult situation from the police POV, fair enough. But even there I would say that reacting with violence was inappropriate, certainly with indiscriminate violence; and that x many more so in the situations where there is *no* evidence, nor even police claim, of any attack from protesters.)

[juliet]

grrrRRRR. I don't know if you saw the bit in the legal report there commenting on the police briefings ahead of time - basically setting the protesters up as violent etc etc.

It's very much the same stuff as was said at Climate Camp. On that occasion there was a police claim that they were concerned about protesters intending to injure police dogs and horses. The media (who by that stage were unimpressed with the police presence themselves) gave lots of space to the CC people saying "yeah, cos a vegan[0] camp is likely to be planning that sort of thing". I think that was when they were showing off their hoard of DANGEROUS CONFISCATED GOODS including kitchen knives in a proper knife-block (obviously not remotely necessary when cooking for 1000 people for a week), some bits of chain, and the War On Terror board game.

[0] Not all climate activists are vegan, obv, but CC is in terms of communal cooking etc.