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]

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.)