A 22-year-old woman will face charges for holding up a sign that said “fuck imperialism,” while a man was handcuffed and placed in the back of a police van for asking who elected King Charles III.
This is a decent roundup but it misses a key sinister element. This is a try out for all public order policing and protest going forward. These spectacularly illegal-otherwise arrests are made possible by the draconian new policing bill that was passed earlier this year. A law that means if the police just feel like something you're doing may cause distress or offence to a hypothetical person then you've committed a crime. There doesn't even have to be a complaint.
The Act gives the Home Secretary powers to make regulations without reference to Parliament and to decide on the type of protest deemed acceptable or unacceptable by the state. "The Act implements a recommendation by the Law Commission to introduce a statutory offence of public nuisance and abolish the existing common law offence. This will provide clarity to the police and potential offenders, giving clear notice of what conduct is forbidden. The maximum penalty for this offence is reduced from an unlimited term to 10-years imprisonment." The new law also allows senior police officers to give directions and impose conditions, including beginning and end times of protests, on those organising or taking part in either a procession or assembly that the police decide are necessary to prevent disorder, damage, disruption, noise impact or intimidation.
Holy WHAT, you can get a 10 year sentence because some random asshole cop actually pulled the "oi mate, you got a loicense for that speech?"
Yep, or even just the go-to tactic of cops here for the last 20 years. Kettle a protest and then tell them to disperse, arresting anyone who follows the order.
I've also heard of UK police kettling people for like 9 hours and then arresting people for public indecency when they had to take a piss, sounds like parody but that's Britain for you.
I've been in kettles where they've done that, several where they give a dispersal order and then nick you for trying to leave, ones after football matches where they've kettled fans for hours in the heat and then nicked people for public drinking because they only thing they had on hand was a can of lager, even charged kettled people with horses and then charged people with public endangerment for spooking the horses. Literally you name it, they do it.
And all of that is just in my adult lifetime, never mind other members of my family who lived through the miner's strikes of the 50s-80s or friends who grew up in Northern Ireland.
Yeah, pigs here love towing the line between unprompted ultra-violence and then being sticklers for red tape. Guess that's just at the heart of the British establishment lmao.
I was actually quite surprised watching footage of the George Floyd uprisings in 2020 how much less American cops kettle, although I guess the trade off is they seem to use rubber bullets and the like way, way more.
Yeah, the kettle was basically the secret weapon of the so called 'policing by consent' philosophy that's supposed to be the guiding philosophy of Britain's modern police forces.
It's technically non-violent (although the view from inside the kettle as horses and riot police tighten it on a bridge where there's no more room looks very different) but forces a situation where protestors are forced to react either to get out or just survive inside the kettle, giving the cops an excuse to drop the act. It's called a kettle because it's designed to boil over.
Now obviously I don't believe that 'policing by consent' is a real principle, because as soon as it doesn't work the state reverts to overt violence as I've seen firsthand myself. And things like the kettle are designed as a technical dodge for that idea entirely.
But as far as I know America has never even given lip service to such philosophies. The question is which is worse; having no pretence of a social contract in policing or using policing by consent as a smokescreen and propaganda tool to disguise the oppressive violence of the state?
This is the propaganda potential of the kettle, when it becomes intolerable or life threatening any action to escape it becomes the thing the police blame for injury and loss of life. Hillsborough was an early example of that, but the repetition of the tactic hasn't always gone unnoticed.
Good post, and yeah, in a lot of ways America's complete lack of lip service at least lays things out the way they actually are. I think because of supposed 'policing by consent' and the fact that UK cops don't routinely carry guns a lot of people assume that they're actually comparatively wholesome and non-violent (doesn't help that a lot of British media tries to enforce this image - every time I see a post on one of the major UK subreddits about how whacky and approachable cops are I want to scream) but those people have probably never seen British cops like the Territorial Support Group in action.
Exactly, the irony is that despite the fact the US police is supposedly far more 'militarised' it acts more like a vigilante militia. Whereas in the UK they operate with more of a military/intelligence hierarchy.
Units like the TSG and armed response operate are far less visible as specialised units that are targeted through the use of online monitoring, Forward Intelligence Teams, and possibly the most extensive undercover infiltration and surveillance program ever ran. As a result police violence happens more often on raids or behind closed doors in custody, away from phone cameras and prying eyes.
There is of course the usual racist thuggery and things like gun and drug running ops amongst rank and file too (one 20+ year op only came to light after the racist murder of another cop somewhere I used to live) but the deliberate police and state violence is better organised and concealed.
To some degree this has always been true given the closeness between the police, Met, and MI5, but it's also because many of the tactics and organisation used during the occupation of Northern Ireland during the troubles was then directly applied to policing at home.
as far as I know America has never even given lip service to such philosophies.
Yeah American cops have always ruled through violence and violence alone. the rest of society manufactures legitimacy for them, but they don't give a shit about legitimacy. They've got guns.
American cops do kettle quite a bit, but it mostly only works on libs who don't know better these days. Mostly the cops are happy torturing people with pepperballs, chemical weapons, flash bang grenades, and various other toys. I imagine to some extent they'd rather just torture everyone than actually process them for arrest.
A law that means if the police just feel like something you’re doing may cause distress or offence to a hypothetical person then you’ve committed a crime. There doesn’t even have to be a complaint.
yeah this is literal police state shit. it is completely ignoring even the flimsiest pretense of rule of law, delegating the power to infringe one of the most basic civil rights to the truncheon-wielding legbreaker pigdogs of capital. now don't get me wrong, i don't believe in all of that liberal hogwash anyway, but it used to be that western states at least tried to keep up a facade of being "the free world." These were ofc purely bourgeois freedoms that were only upheld as long as you didn't threaten the societal distribution of wealth and the dictatorship of capital. But even that is too much of a hassle for the ruling class now. one guy holding up a sign or yelling slogans doesn't threaten anything. it is fucking nothing. the royals do not have to give a flying fuck about one rando in a crowd of tens of thousands of avid cowtowing monarchoids, but no. not the tiniest bit of dissent is tolerated. questioning the west's genocidal imperialism was never something the ruling class was happy about, but it is being turned more and more into a completely taboo subject. If things go on like this, literal holocaust denial will soon be more acceptable than mentioning the crimes the british crown committed in Africa.
The oppression and lack of bourgeois freedoms that targeted minorities and actual threats to the establishment already felt is getting rolled out wholesale. And the comfortable middle class whites are still treating each example of it happening to someone like them at a Royal event or a climate demo as an isolated incident of overreach because they're too comfortable to notice that their relationship with the state is changing.
Britain has never been the liberal, diverse opinionated, marketplace of ideas that it has pretended to be. But in the last 20 years or so we've gone from protest and non-state sanctioned opinion being tolerated but ridiculed, to actively suppressed and punished, and now the establishment treats anything less than fawning praise and respect as a criminal and traitorous act.
This is a decent roundup but it misses a key sinister element. This is a try out for all public order policing and protest going forward. These spectacularly illegal-otherwise arrests are made possible by the draconian new policing bill that was passed earlier this year. A law that means if the police just feel like something you're doing may cause distress or offence to a hypothetical person then you've committed a crime. There doesn't even have to be a complaint.
Holy WHAT, you can get a 10 year sentence because some random asshole cop actually pulled the "oi mate, you got a loicense for that speech?"
Yep, or even just the go-to tactic of cops here for the last 20 years. Kettle a protest and then tell them to disperse, arresting anyone who follows the order.
I've also heard of UK police kettling people for like 9 hours and then arresting people for public indecency when they had to take a piss, sounds like parody but that's Britain for you.
I've been in kettles where they've done that, several where they give a dispersal order and then nick you for trying to leave, ones after football matches where they've kettled fans for hours in the heat and then nicked people for public drinking because they only thing they had on hand was a can of lager, even charged kettled people with horses and then charged people with public endangerment for spooking the horses. Literally you name it, they do it.
And all of that is just in my adult lifetime, never mind other members of my family who lived through the miner's strikes of the 50s-80s or friends who grew up in Northern Ireland.
Yeah, pigs here love towing the line between unprompted ultra-violence and then being sticklers for red tape. Guess that's just at the heart of the British establishment lmao.
I was actually quite surprised watching footage of the George Floyd uprisings in 2020 how much less American cops kettle, although I guess the trade off is they seem to use rubber bullets and the like way, way more.
Yeah, the kettle was basically the secret weapon of the so called 'policing by consent' philosophy that's supposed to be the guiding philosophy of Britain's modern police forces.
It's technically non-violent (although the view from inside the kettle as horses and riot police tighten it on a bridge where there's no more room looks very different) but forces a situation where protestors are forced to react either to get out or just survive inside the kettle, giving the cops an excuse to drop the act. It's called a kettle because it's designed to boil over.
Now obviously I don't believe that 'policing by consent' is a real principle, because as soon as it doesn't work the state reverts to overt violence as I've seen firsthand myself. And things like the kettle are designed as a technical dodge for that idea entirely.
But as far as I know America has never even given lip service to such philosophies. The question is which is worse; having no pretence of a social contract in policing or using policing by consent as a smokescreen and propaganda tool to disguise the oppressive violence of the state?
Well except for the Hillsborough massacre by police kettling people so they were crushed to death
This is the propaganda potential of the kettle, when it becomes intolerable or life threatening any action to escape it becomes the thing the police blame for injury and loss of life. Hillsborough was an early example of that, but the repetition of the tactic hasn't always gone unnoticed.
Good post, and yeah, in a lot of ways America's complete lack of lip service at least lays things out the way they actually are. I think because of supposed 'policing by consent' and the fact that UK cops don't routinely carry guns a lot of people assume that they're actually comparatively wholesome and non-violent (doesn't help that a lot of British media tries to enforce this image - every time I see a post on one of the major UK subreddits about how whacky and approachable cops are I want to scream) but those people have probably never seen British cops like the Territorial Support Group in action.
Exactly, the irony is that despite the fact the US police is supposedly far more 'militarised' it acts more like a vigilante militia. Whereas in the UK they operate with more of a military/intelligence hierarchy.
Units like the TSG and armed response operate are far less visible as specialised units that are targeted through the use of online monitoring, Forward Intelligence Teams, and possibly the most extensive undercover infiltration and surveillance program ever ran. As a result police violence happens more often on raids or behind closed doors in custody, away from phone cameras and prying eyes.
There is of course the usual racist thuggery and things like gun and drug running ops amongst rank and file too (one 20+ year op only came to light after the racist murder of another cop somewhere I used to live) but the deliberate police and state violence is better organised and concealed.
To some degree this has always been true given the closeness between the police, Met, and MI5, but it's also because many of the tactics and organisation used during the occupation of Northern Ireland during the troubles was then directly applied to policing at home.
Imperialism abroad etc etc.
Yeah American cops have always ruled through violence and violence alone. the rest of society manufactures legitimacy for them, but they don't give a shit about legitimacy. They've got guns.
American cops do kettle quite a bit, but it mostly only works on libs who don't know better these days. Mostly the cops are happy torturing people with pepperballs, chemical weapons, flash bang grenades, and various other toys. I imagine to some extent they'd rather just torture everyone than actually process them for arrest.
:ukkk: :england-cool:
for context, that's twice as much as i got for a GBH charge lmao
yeah this is literal police state shit. it is completely ignoring even the flimsiest pretense of rule of law, delegating the power to infringe one of the most basic civil rights to the truncheon-wielding legbreaker pigdogs of capital. now don't get me wrong, i don't believe in all of that liberal hogwash anyway, but it used to be that western states at least tried to keep up a facade of being "the free world." These were ofc purely bourgeois freedoms that were only upheld as long as you didn't threaten the societal distribution of wealth and the dictatorship of capital. But even that is too much of a hassle for the ruling class now. one guy holding up a sign or yelling slogans doesn't threaten anything. it is fucking nothing. the royals do not have to give a flying fuck about one rando in a crowd of tens of thousands of avid cowtowing monarchoids, but no. not the tiniest bit of dissent is tolerated. questioning the west's genocidal imperialism was never something the ruling class was happy about, but it is being turned more and more into a completely taboo subject. If things go on like this, literal holocaust denial will soon be more acceptable than mentioning the crimes the british crown committed in Africa.
Couldn't agree with this more.
The oppression and lack of bourgeois freedoms that targeted minorities and actual threats to the establishment already felt is getting rolled out wholesale. And the comfortable middle class whites are still treating each example of it happening to someone like them at a Royal event or a climate demo as an isolated incident of overreach because they're too comfortable to notice that their relationship with the state is changing.
Britain has never been the liberal, diverse opinionated, marketplace of ideas that it has pretended to be. But in the last 20 years or so we've gone from protest and non-state sanctioned opinion being tolerated but ridiculed, to actively suppressed and punished, and now the establishment treats anything less than fawning praise and respect as a criminal and traitorous act.
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