If there is one thing that we now have to accept as certain that we would rather not do it is that we have a violent, politically motivated police force intent on suppressing the freedom of those on the left of the political spectrum to express their opinion whilst simultaneously permitting those on the right to promote their opinion unimpeded by police aggression.
In that context this tweet is worrying:
Metropolitan Police Federation calls on government and force leaders to tackle social media firms that enable footage of officers dealing with incidents to be shared.https://t.co/iWEIqOlTyA pic.twitter.com/UsRkqukaVX
— Met Police Federation (@MPFed) April 13, 2021
The world over we have seen that the ability of individuals, citizen journalists and, on occasion the mainstream media themselves, to record police violence against innocent people simply exercising their human right to express their opinion and to congregate to do so is all that we really have as a defence against police brutality.
And now the police want to deny people the right to literally record that brutality.
Why would they do that if they did not want to use their brutal approach unhindered by any constraint?
Our descent into being a police state is extraordinarily rapid.
I wonder for how long I will be able to write comment like this, which is why it is important to do so now.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
That Met Police tweet is indeed a very troubling development. It adds to the worry generated by the fearful terms of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill currently going through Parliament. There are many considered critical reviews of this proposed legislation which will further deepen our descent to the police state.
…..Liberty has a useful document and the Friends Families and Travellers group have a briefing on the way in which the Police Bill effectively criminalises the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller way of life. These are easily found through a simple google exercise but here is a direct link to the Good Law Project briefing which people might find useful.
https://goodlawproject.org/news/pcsc-bill-briefing-for-mps/
It’s not just the Police. The ONS are suppressing information too – they are now measuring excess deaths in a new way by comparing current deaths to the best 5 of the last 6 years.
Hope to see you at a public protest some time soon.
Deeply troubling video released of police harassing GRT people makes clear why the police want to shut down this avenue of protest. https://twitter.com/LydiaCaradonna/status/1382117229701910532
That’s out of order.
It makes the police accountable to politicians only. They are accountable to us too,
How long before they stop wearing PC numbers?
Worrying.
Maybe we should all pay our council tax bills but withhold the policing contribution in protest?
Err…no.
The police are employed by the crown, the state. They owe no allegiance to “the public”.
Rather like the elected govt currently owe no allegiance to “the public”, and divert enormous amounts of “public” money to their friends and donors.
Democracy is currently taking a holiday, on the Costa del Crime…
The met fed twitter is currently getting a hammering, so much so that the troll factory is taking the fed side….loads of NAME+loads_of_numbers
JohnM
My view (that I have expressed) is that WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT the Police ARE accountable to the public.
I’m looking at the local constabulary contribution on my council tax bill and as far as I am concerned, accountability starts there mate.
And if this is not the case – lets make it so.
I agree
That’s a contract
This is terrifying stuff
I have long been of the opinion that the Met is wholly unfit as a police force and should be disbanded and rebuilt by another force.
They are racist in nature and show an all to eager propensity to attack people.
The people leading it do not hold the long held British views that policing is carried out by consent.
To see this tweet at a time people are being attacked for protesting against the policing bill, demonstrates the way they want policing to progress. I have little doubt the direction would end up with them being armed.
With camera footage it would never have taken 30 years for the truth about Hillsborough to have come out. The incompetent crooks who made the mistakes, and then used colleagues to fake and rig statements would have been visible within days.
What they are trying to prevent is people seeing the way it’s actually always been. Police protect power and monied interests. That’s it.
Forty years ago, Thatcher bumped up police pay because she and her ministers knew that their plans to destroy our productive economy in the interests of high finance would lead to trouble. The pandemic, I am sure, has covered a multitude of problems still waiting to be revealed, frequently listed on this blog.
Add to that a toothless Independent Police Complaints Commission, and the fact that virtually no police officer has been made properly accountable for any death in police custody over the years, amongst other misdemeanors, and we can see where we are.
I have met and worked with a good few police officers over the years, and they were fine public servants.
It’s the system they work in that is not fit for purpose. It needs to be more transparent, and properly accountable to the public.
Finally, it is ironic that, over the years, certainly since 2010, the Tories enthusiastically anticipated recent cries to “Defund the Police!”
They use the police as a political tool and the country -and justice – suffer as a result.
There is little surprising about this development. Some years ago one chap was so outraged by his treatment by the police that he started a web site aimed at helping people with compalints against the police.
https://crimebodge.com/
I came across the site by chance on youtube – some of the videos etc were jaw dropping.
The police are and have been for more than 50 years, a force unto themselves with no accountability to others (or if there is accountability it is mostly fake). For those that feel this is overstating things, it is worth noting that there are endless cases of the police knowlingly lying in court, even when this becomes known ……nothing happens. The Guildford 4 – and the officers concerned are a good, high profile example, where people died in jail; & nothing absolutely nothing happened to the police concerned. This was the 1970s – 1990s. Things have got much worse since then. In the case of the Met, the infiltration of groups that do not meet police-defined societal norms – has led to a system that can only be described as “instituionally approved rape” (uncover police having sex with unsuspecting members of various groups, mostly, women). That these events occur shows that in its upper echelons, British society/the state is, and has been for decades, fundamentally evil – in the biblical sense, with the police acting as the coercive arm of the state – behave, or else.
I was watching a news clip of re-opening pubs and saw the ever present police. The British attitude that everything is being seen through the lens of public order rather than public health or community management (consensus) should terrify all of us.
In a few weeks we vote for the Police and Crime Commissioner. I used to think this was a David Cameron gimmick following the American play book. But could it be a useful way to hold them accountable or would the previous method of seconded councillors be better?
You get to vote for political stooges…..one running in my town has opened/closed so many companies that printing them would take 10 minutes.
And he runs a less-than-savoury private security company….and he’s a tory…
The so called Countryside Alliance, alongside the Hunting Office (which regulates all hunting with hounds) already have their own people in place for the upcoming PCC elections in order to push the pro hunting agenda in policing of hunts (see Jonathan Seed as an example). A committed PCC can bring pressure to bear on police forces, but there are already ‘interest groups’ manouvering their own people in place and the general public have little knowledge – or interest – in who the candidates are or what views they represent.
If we want a police force that is made up of decent individual officers, we need to have compete transparency on their actions. That transparency enables officers to work with integrity and get more things right.
Air accident investigations work on the basis of not blaming pilots and aircrew so that more openness and understanding of what went wrong helps inform safety issues.
Locally West Suffolk Hospital had some unpleasant cover up where the hospital leadership wasted a lot of resource and staff goodwill in trying to identify a whistle-blower (finger printing staff!!), rather than trying to understand the problems that had been raised. The NHS desperately needs a system that encourages openness and a desire to understand things that go wrong.
Likewise, we get better policing when officers know the standards to which they should operate.
Possibly the term ‘public servants’ has a wrong connotation these days – but ‘public service’ – operating without fear or favour to do things well is certainly what we want.
I share the general “unease” at this development, and indeed at the whole government approach to civil liberties. Maybe I could just support the blog’s asssertion of worldwide suppression of opportunites for citizen’s assertion of their rights and demands. One need not look as far as Hungary or Poland even, but at that country which first set itself the goal of human liberty (admittedly at the time mainly for men, but I suppose one has to start somewhere): after declaring that all men are born free and remain free and equal in rights, the second article of the 1789 Declaration instances Liberté, Propriété, Sûreté (safety) & Résistance à l’oppression.
The Micron government, after several years of encroachment on these liberties, and repeated violations of human rights in practice, condemned even by the UN, is now putting its Loi de Sécurité Globale through Parliament. The latest addition is to article 1, and inceases the penalties to 3 years imprisonment and up to 45,00€ in fines the following:
– entering a professional, commercial, agricultural or industrial property with the help of ruses, threats, violence or insults or constraint.
This is aimed at preventing homeless squatting – at a time when there are some 300,000 homeless and 3 million empty dwellings while the government ignores its legal responsibility to house them’ and at preventing any occupation of business, universities or schools by protesters, even students or parents.
The article 24, aimed at preventing the filming of police has been somewheat diluted but ther are two further sessions to go.
Reading all the replies to this post makes me suspect that all of your respondents, so far, are too prejudiced against the police to read a contrary view. But go ahead, prove me wrong, make my day. https://tristramhicks.com/2019/12/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-policing-in-england/
I scanned the article
I am sorry to say that it showed a very narrow perspective on the issue
I am not even sure you get your head around what crime might be, let alone imagine why it might happen
I repeat – I scanned – but the perspective was so narrow I was turned off from the analysis which seemed to me to offer a very narrow argument