The Police: the real gang behind the summer riots?

Last week’s publication of the Metropolitan Police report into the summer riots identified community antipathy towards the police as a cause as well police failure to be able to confront large numbers of people who were willing to fight back rather than pushed around in the style that has been perfected at years of aggressive policing of football fans and political demonstrators.

The fact that it comes as a surprise to the police that they can’t control large numbers of people who are willing to fight them is a surprise in itself. After all, the tactic of kettling is dependent upon the passivity of the majority of the crowd while the police aggressively push against them. It uses massive force to deal with small disturbance’s and to intimidate other people so much that they are not willing to join in. it’s obvious failures have been highlighted on numerous occasions. In 2008 Glasgow Rangers fans showed Manchester police that if the majority of a crowd fights, rather than accepts being intimidated and attacked then the police are fucked and get a kicking. There is a reason why kettling is not used as a viable tactic in the occupied north of Ireland where communitys regularly fight back against the police.

Police say they are learning from experience and as an attempt to reinstall credibility boast about new more aggressive tactics in the future. The talk about water cannon and plastic bullets is on the one hand the attempt of a bully to reassert his status. On the other hand it is a necessary new tactic marking police attempting to keep up with a possible new level of confrontation that shows their weakness and what happens when the community does not consent to their style of policing.

However, one of the aspects that are finally being talked about is the role of the police and their treatment of communitys in causing disorder. It has widely been glossed over by politicians eager to scapegoat gang culture and police talking about how only criminal minority took part in the rioting. All this is partly to gloss over the class nature of the uprising and the fact that mass looting simply follows the logic of a society which defines people as individuals by consumer goods.

The Guardian and London School of Economics report ‘Reading the Riots’ is based upon interviews with 270 rioters. With this it clearly supports the political nature of the factors that caused the riots. Part of this is the attitude of the police.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/05/riots-revenge-against-police

The police are regularly described as being like a gang. The biggest gang around, attacking and preying off the community. People who have been arrested for nothing, harassed for simply walking down the street and in some cases fitted up finally had a chance to take on the police.

The style of policing has a number of names. Zero Tolerance is one of the most popular and wins favour with politicians keen to satisfy the middle class minority and community ‘leaders’ who vote and help keep them in power. The latest name is ‘Total Policing’ spewed out by would be hard man Hogan-Howe. It basically means the same and works with the same ethos as kettling. While kettling’s effects are very visible and obvious. After all if you spend four hours in a kettle instead of being able to go to a football match, you know whats happened.

But the zero tolerance policing of communitys has meant by design, not by accident that the police act as an intimidatory bunch of thugs or a gang. They give an air of violence that makes people who are not violent afraid to attack, while physically attacking anyone who is not compliant. Thugs in groups drive round in the van looking for victims to attack. The TSG are a good example. They then intimidate and assert dominance using and abusing power, such as bail conditions, home raids, court appearances etc. to effect the lives of those they are attacking. The aim is not stop crime or fight anti-social behaviour, but to assert dominance and to rule by fear.

When people fought the police and identified them as the largest gang around, this was the reason why. It was about reclaiming and making the police pay for the climate of fear they attempt to assert on communitys.  This climate of fear, this policy of control by a government who have no interest in the well-being of anyone not rich was a cause of the summer riots and the riots should be seen, despite their many flaws, as a rebellion against this control.

Fighting talk!

It’s hard not to conclude that the government is spoiling for a fight and they view everyone who actually works for a living with contempt. Otherwise why would they decide to announce, one day before the largest public sector strike since 1926, that the public sector pay freeze is going to be followed up by a pay cap of 1% for the next couple of years?

The government have already been lieing through their teeth while trying to persuade us that their attacks on public sector pensions are fair. The only justification they can really other is that a lot of people in private sector do not get as good a deal as the public sector. The logical response to this is to campaign to raise the standard of private sector pensions, not to reduce public sector pensions!

Yet it is the continued economic crisis that is really driving the government’s attacks on the public sector. There is a lot of money around. But what is not talked about is the simple economic fact that for the rich to continue to be rich they have to exploit everyone else. The reduction in public sector pensions and the attacks on wages are based upon ensuring continued economic growth for the rich. To make sure they continue getting richer. It has slipped out of fashion, even within so-called radical circles, to talk about how the rich are only rich through the exploitation of everyone else. We can get by without the rich and would actually have a better standard of living with out them. The rich cannot say the same!

The whole basis of George Osbourne’s economic policy is to attack and ensure the continued exploitation of everyone who works for a living and does not live off other peoples work. He aims to keep the rich rich! To do this he wants to break any sense of power and collective interest outside of that displayed by the rich ruling class.

Behind the thin veil of ‘national interest’ and calls for unions to be reasonable there is an all out attack aimed at consolidating the interests of those at the top. The government is basing its policy on class war and attempting to portray any resistance as unreasonable while at the same time spoiling for a fight.

This is why it is important to resist now. It is important to support all actions tomorrow and use them to build on something bigger. It is important to remember that the rich are only rich because of us and it is time that they paid for their economic mess for a change!

Nigel’s petition has made it to 14,441 signatures…

The publicity for the petition to make the police a special case has caused it to rocket ahead in the past week. It has reached the heady heights of 14,441 signatures. Oddly 21,135 people support it on facebook but only 14,441 people have actually bothered signing it. Maybe they are hoping that if the police behave like complete bastards to everyone taking part in the protest’s tomorrow the government  will make them an exempt from the 1% pay cap announced today. After all that is the whole message of the petition; the police are a special case but feel free to treat everyone else like shit as long as you keep rewarding them!

9,286: The number who believe in the absolute uniqueness of the role of Police Officer

About a year ago a number of people were discussing whether the anti-cuts movement should be fighting cuts to the police, prisons, probation services etc. There was discussion about how the police were simply another public service doing their job and the poor boys in blue were in the same position as the rest of us.

Meanwhile the police got on with their jobs and attacked anyone attempting to engage in meaningful action against the cuts (i.e. anyone who wanted to do a bit more than walk through London blowing a vuvuzela before listening to Ed Miliband give a speech). In the past month a number of people have been convicted in relation to the policing of anti-cuts protests. These include 10 people arrested, charged and last week finally convicted for entering ‘Fortnum and Mason’ and sitting down. The grounds for the prosecution was that it upset some people and logically implies that any protest that is noticed by the people being protested against is potentially illegal. Of course we are not at that stage (yet). But a quick look at some of the recent prosecutions for violent disorder suggest that politically motivated policing is alive and well. How else do you explain young people with no previous convictions receiving 18 month sentences for throwing two sticks? Or for being on a train platform where a fight broke out? Why else is Alfie Meadows facing a trial for an offence that carries a five year sentence following his daring to complain about needing brain surgery after a close encounter with the TSG?

A recent story on Indymedia drew attention to the fact that some people in police have actually realised they are going to suffer as a result of government policy too. One of the Police responses seems to be to aim to spend as much money as possible and then argue they can’t cut anything, hoping the Government will bail them out. This seems to explain the Met’s public order strategy. On November 9th. 4000 officers (including undercover officers) were used to police a demonstration they claimed only had 5000 people on it.

The problem is, the army thought that because they were fighting two wars and might soon be fighting one in Iran they would be exempt from cuts. Unfortunately they learned that the only one exempt were the Generals and Admirals. Now Britain has more Admirals than ships and more Generals than regiments. The troops on the ground received redundancies and lost equipment (resulting in loss of life) while being told to get on with it. There is nothing to indicate that the boot boys in the police will be treated any differently. As they receive pay cuts and redundancies they will be expected to hit people harder and be oppress faster.

Of course some officers have realised this. A quick glance at police blogs on the internet show that a lot of them are whingeing. For doing the dirty work of the rich they expect more, not realising that they are nothing special. Any idiot can swing a truncheon and there are always more thugs lining up to do so. The birth of the PCSO has already proved that you don’t need a fully trained police officer to do the basic work of a policeman and since serving officers will always side with the rich they can’t do anything about cuts in pay and being replaced by private security guards or thugs with slightly less skills.

Yet one Sergeant has said enough is enough! Sergeant Nigel Tompsett has taken a stand! He has taken action!

He hasn’t involved himself in the anti-cuts movement or attempted to build links and solidarity with the rest of the working class. That would involve changing sides. It would involve admitting that the cuts are not benefiting the whole of society. No, he has decided that the police, because they are so loyal to the rich and government, should be a special case. While everyone else deserves to suffer as a result of the public sector cuts, the police should be exempt. So he has started his own protest (just like the police occasionally do their own marches where only police can take part). He started this action by doing an e-petition requesting that police (and only the police) should have their pensions exempt from government reform because of “the absolute uniqueness of the role of Police Officer.”

So in Nigel’s opinion the police pensions should be protected, but all other public sector pensions can be cut. Look after the police and everyone else can go to hell!

If he wasn’t already a police officer I would call him a self-centred scab, chasing his own interests at the expense of everyone else. Imagine if teachers marched under a banner saying ‘We support (and will help to introduce) all the cuts, except the ones that effect us!’ However he is a police officer, so all I can say is that this is what you can expect from the men and women of this organisation.

Yet the police regularly tell us about how they have the support of the majority of the public. You would think that people would be flocking to sign Nigel’s petition. Surely Nigel’s fellow officers would show solidarity for their own profession, even if they can not find it for the rest of their class.

Police blogger ‘Inspector Gadget’ even paused from his usual blog, drawing attention to the petition. Instead of his usual themes of arguing that police should be free to kill, demonstrators should be put in concentration camps and courts and prisons are too easy, the Inspector wrote in support of Nigel. Surely with the backing of a blog that claims to have 6 million hits and is the regular internet forum for police officers who want to make rape jokes about people sent to prison, Nigel would easily get the 100,000 hits needed for the petition to succeed.

Sadly not. The petition has so far managed a miserable 9,286 signatures. Just 9,286 people think the police should be a special case. Just 9,286 people could be bothered to sign a cyber petition on behalf of the police. In the UK there are more that 9,286 police officers. Some of them even have family members who are not policemen. Yet Nigel  has not got enough of them to believe that MPs should debate whether the police should be a special case when it comes to the cuts.

Many people will probably point out that the petition has a long time to run yet. However this issue (if you believe the police) should not be a slow burner. It is somehting that everyone supports. After all, everyone loves the police and they do a job a normal person couldn’t do. (Actually I agree with this last point). I have no doubt that people like ‘Inspector Gadget’ will eventually drum up anough support for Nigel’s petition. But considering that the police are a special case and they are currently treated badly is repeated over and over again by the whingers in blue 9,286 is an extremely small amount of support. Considering the number of people who will have seen or been informed of the petition (after all I found out about it) 9,286 is a laughably small amount of support.

9,286 people surely shows the level of popularity the police enjoys. It shows the number of people who think they do an exceptional job that no one else can do. It shows the Britain may still support the police, but only 9,286 people actively support the myth the police spread about themselves!

IPCC decide police don’t have to answer questions over Smiley Culture’s death!

On March 15th. of this year police raided the home of David Emmanuel. David Emmanuel was a former reggae star (known as Smiley Culture) who, at the time of the raid, was charged with drug offences. He was maintaining his innocence.

 

During the police raid, according to police, he decided to stab himself to death.. He did this in his kitchen with no police present, despite his flat being raided at the time. After he stabbed himself police decided to apply handcuffs. The stab wound caused rapid blood loss and death within a few minutes. No explanation for his death, other than the police, version has ever been given.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that we are not getting the full story. If the police are really to be believed, a man was having his flat raided for drugs was left free to wander around it, decided he’d had enough and so chose that moment to kill himself by stabbing himself to death. The knife used did not have any finger prints on it. As he rapidly bleed to death on the floor police decided that was the moment to apply handcuffs. Maybe this is true, but at least give more details.
The IPCC decided that none of the police present are to be treated as suspects, none of them need to be interviewed (and all have declined to be voluntarily interviewed). The police raid might not have been “satisfactory” but you can’t have everything. That is the case closed and the only investigation that the IPCC and police will do into this mans death.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/sep/02/smiley-culture-david-emmanual-reggae

Basically we are expected to sit back and believe this. Every suspicious death should be investigated fully. Just because the police are involved doesn’t mean they should get the benefit of the doubt and be allowed to walk away. The recent riots were caused by the police believing they were above the law and that a death involving them did not really matter. This case once again proves that there is not so much one law for them and another for us but thew fact that the police are completely above the law, allowed to do as they please without even being investigated, let alone facing consequences!

Yet anyone who even hints at this is roundly attacked by the police and politicians. You are accused of being PC, tieing their hands, making them afraid of being accused of murder every time they kill a newspaper vender and other such bollocks!

 

The riots: a crisis for the progressive politics?

Tomorrow will see the start of the Notting Hill Carnival. Because there is a possibility that this could result in more rioting it seems a good opportunity to have a look at what actually happened a few weeks ago when the myth of peaceful happy Britain was undermined by the worst rioting for at least 25 years.

The narrative for the Notting Hill carnival has already been written and slowly drip fed to the media. If there is rioting, disorder as the police and courts perversely seem to describe it, then this is because the police have not been harsh enough. They will need more powers and crowds fo working class people need more control. For years there has been talk of moving the Notting Hill carnival off the streets and into a ‘safe’ environment, such as a park, allowing control of who goes and what happens, rather than it being a gathering of the community on their streets. Any ‘disorder’ will see these call returning and plans for laws to monitor and attack working class people who dare to no longer blind the dominant narrative that this society provides all we need and all you have to do is work hard and spend harder.

If the carnival passes peacefully, I predict that there will be lots of politicians and social commentators talking about London having returned to normal having managed to defy the criminal minority who attacked the social peace a few weeks ago.  Once again people will have stood up and given a vote of confidence in the society we live in.

Yet, in my opinion, the riots showed a deeply problematic society. Every man and his dog has a view on what happened. However the majority of these views either focused on how there is a criminal underclass (shopping with menaces) who need to be crushed and controlled to restore the peace that everyone else loves. Or they adopt the view that these riots are the beginning of the end and some how they will result in a new society with workers councils magically springing up like mushrooms after the rain. (There is, of course, a variation of this analysis, where the EDL/ reactionary groups in general have been proved right and community’s will now rally behind them). The truth is more complex and the riots are the symptoms of problems that have been brewing for years.

But briefly, the political elites have spent years ignoring working class community’s and basically, in the name of serving the interests of the vocal middle classes, abandoned them to poverty and allowed an underclass to fester. The myth that any of the three main party’s  care about the working class has long since evaporated for many people. The message for years has been that they count for nothing. Elections are now fought on the middle ground and on marginal seats. Any real threat is countered by the flooding of these marginal seats with party resources and propaganda ensuring opposition is overwhelmed, unable to compete financially and in man hours. ‘Safe seats’ are simply ignored and abandoned. Labour presumes that it will always get a sizeable proportion of working class votes and no other party interested in the working class is big enough to challenge them. There for it does not bother to fight for the interests of working class community’s any more.

Poverty and anti social crime are issues that don’t need to be tackled, just controlled. poverty is something that doesn’t need to be tackled, but something that needs to be kept within acceptable levels. Unemployment and the need for at least a million unemployed, is something that is a key factor in the economic strategy based on Anthony Giddens third way.

Against this background, police are given general freedom to act as they like to maintain control (not to fight anti-social crime). For years deaths involving the police have been ignored as has the notion that the mentality that an individual  is defined by their property is one of the central factors in anti-social crime.

Community’s have been getting increasingly angry with being treated this way. Each time the police have killed someone anger has increased. The police whinge that their hands are tied, yet the very fact that keep coming up with phrases like this shows that they view some sections of the public as an enemy they are at war with who need to be stopped and have no part in society. If you keep treating people in this way they will eventually strike back.

Mark Duggans death at the hands of armed police was simply the latest in a long line of deaths at the hands of police. The treatment of the death was to tell lies in order to look good to the middle classes (the important ones). Stories were put out that he fired at police, fired first and injured a police man who was saved by his radio. All these things have been shown to be false. There is doubt that he even had a gun in his hand.

Some of his family (including his mother) only learnt of his death from TV news. The police, being concerned to look good, decided that the their shooting someone in Tottenham did not warrant giving any information to the people of Tottenham or any details to his family. Journalists were the only people who they wanted to brief.

A small protest by member of the local community which included some of Duggan’s family was not only ignored, it was treated with hostility. The police had done this kind of thing many times before and so they saw no reason to act differently towards their ‘enemy’, the poor, this time. Some stories say that a group of policemen even assaulted a 15 year old girl.

It was this lack of representation, coupled with a police force who thinks working class people and the poor are scum which gave the original conditions for the riot. Duggans killing was the spark that ignited the riot. The original riot on the 6th. August was an anti-police riot with people acting against the enforcers of  law that is simply aimed at controlling them and does not represent their interests.

The police got a well deserved kicking. Public order strategys that were aimed at containing and intimidating peaceful protesters or groups of people going to football matches proved absolutely useless. it is only possible to control people when they believe that you can control them. The police lost control and this inspired others who had been abused by them for years.

Sporadic riots continued on the sunday and on monday the 8th. August the police decided to reassert control. They did this by flooding working class areas with police and trying large-scale stop and search operations against the people who lived there. People reacted and once again the police lost control.

The police continuously losing control when they try to assert dominance over people should be any libertarians dream. The first step towards changing any society is stopping the belief in the dominant order. However, the belief that the law represents the poor and the MP’s in westminster are actually working in people’s interests might of broken down, the dominant belief in consumerism and every individual for himself did not stop. There was nothing to replace the dominant order, no sense of defending community’s or getting a new politics that did represent people.

The anger against the police was replaced with the idea that people could grab what they wanted. In reality people were playing out the grab what you can mentality that is witnessed by bankers and pervades every corner of our society. A mentality that allowed people to think it was OK to set homes on fire and mug injured people while grabbing what they could took over. This is simply a reflection of the dominant ideology of capitalism: everyone is an individual and they should act in their own interests at all times. Property is what you express yourself through and the more property you have, the more important you are. Consume and be happy. The looters were simply following this ideology, the unwritten ideology of Britain. The politician’s mean nothing and the police are the enemy but this is still the dominant view that can be found in every aspect of society.

There was no socialist ideals waiting to step in, to encourage people to create after destroying because all flavours of the left have failed to get ideas across to the poorest community’s. In classical marxist terms if the riots were simply the logical outcome of the material circumstances of capitalist society then the left have failed to keep up with these material circumstances and organise the beginnings of something new to develop out of the conflict. The institutions of capitalism are being rejected by parts of society yet the ideology that supports capitalism is still dominant. The left (whichever form it takes) can only succeed if the rejection of the ideology of capitalism precedes the physical rejection of capitalist institutions, yet the left has been unable to make an impact amongst the working class who are rapidly losing faith in (and at times attacking) the institutions that are supporting capitalist ideology. The looting and arson that followed the attacks on the police were simply the logic of capitalist ideology played out without a belief in the institution of law and order.

Self Loading Rifles in Libya

It appears the civil war in Libya is coming to an end. The ‘rebel’ government, backed by the west, will soon control the country. You don’t need to be too much of a cynic to imagine that this will result in the country being rebuild according to the plans of the countrys who have happily bombed Libya in the past months, finally ending any hopes of a peoples revolution.

In the past I have commented on what appears to be US army surplus uniforms on the Libyan rebels. It is also worth noting, in light of the continued ban on selling arms to anyone in Libya, that they now also appear to be using weapons supplied by the west.

Large numbers of Libyans appear to be fighting with AK47′s, yet even more of the ‘rebel’ army appear to be using the Self Loading Rifle (SLR). This was a weapon originally manufactured in Belgium and sold to a number of countrys. None of them were near Libya and it has never been bought on mass by Libya. However it was used by a number of commonwealth country’s, including Britain which presumably had large stocks of the weapon after it was replaced by the SA80 in the late ’80′s (and early ’90′s for some units).
You can guess what I’m trying to say and I could be wrong. However, if the west did not supply the SLR’s, who did? It does suggest that any future Libyan government is already tied to the west and dependent on its ground weapons as well as its air power.