Police provocateurs are par for the course

Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Police has cancelled publication of a report into undercover operations initiated when spies in environmental campaigns, including Mark Kennedy, were exposed. No doubt they were planning the usual 'one rogue operation gone wrong' cover up.

But another operations has just come to light. Officer Jim Boyling, working undercover in Reclaim the Streets as Jim Sutton, was allowed to use his cover name in court. Police, prosecutors and others must have known. Lying about your name under oath? That's definitely against the law.

The convictions of twenty environmental campaigners were recently overturned in light of the Mark Kennedy revelations; lots of Reclaim the Streeters will be on the phone to their lawyers today.

The reality is that state does not hesitate to use violence, undercover agents, bugging, provocations, and other ruthless and illegal methods to enforce the rule of the few over the many and to selectively defend the laws of private property and state power as and when it chooses.

And the ongoing police-bailiff operation to evict travellers at the Dale Farm site in Essex also reveals the twisting of the law, the use of informers combined with brute force against anyone who resists the inhuman activities of bailiffs who are “only doing their job”.

Police say they came armed with tasers because intelligence from within the camp told them there were weapons hidden there. Of course there were no weapons, but who on the inside supplied police that provocative piece of disinformation?

No one could fail to feel a chill at the statement by Essex County leader Tony Ball. Ball, who could easily serve as Minister of Truth in the coalition, when he stated: "I hope that there are no repeats of yesterday's scenes of premeditated violence and disorder from the protestors on the site, and that we can get on with the job of upholding the law, and clearing the site in a safe, professional and dignified way." Yes, professional beatings, “dignified” taserings, and illegal upholdings of some laws.

Police came armed with tasers, which they used, it isn't clear yet how often but more than once. They beat people. There have been at least two serious head injuries. They smashed in the sides of people's vans, making them unusable, and the electricity has been cut off on a freezing cold night. Generator fuel ran out in the early hours of this morning. Helicopters circle continuously. Now the Bailiffs have moved in behind police.

As traveller Mary Sheridan said: "The only premeditated violence has come from the police - they knew exactly what they were doing when they started beating and tazering people. This is not how a community should be treated by its own Council. It’s illegal for us to travel, but illegal for us to settle down here. We’re getting hit by the police but we’ve got nowhere else to go.”

Another Dale Farm resident Kathleen McCarthy said: "The way in which the police are acting has shocked and outraged everyone here. We hope the world is watching.” We are, Kathleen: from Cairo, to New York, to London, to Madrid to Athens, we are watching and learning.

As the occupation outside St Paul’s, Dale Farm, the death of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson and the anti-cuts protests have all shown – a key role of police operations has been to instigate violence, not prevent it and, secretly, to set others up for arrest.

Mass action is needed to abolish the laws that enforce the rights of private property and profit over all other human and social rights, including the right to travel and to have a place to stay. Organised in a network of People's Assemblies across the globe, we will develop a democratic framework of rights and rule of law. This will involve a Charter of Rights under a new constitution.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

A law unto themselves

The decision not to bring charges in relation to the death of Ian Tomlinson following his beating by the police at the G20 demonstration on April 1, 2009 is truly shocking. But it should not be surprising.

There will be many who agree with the family's suspicion that there was a co-ordinated effort to conceal events surrounding Tomlinson's death. Others are asking whether there’s been a state conspiracy to protect the Met’s notorious Territorial Support Group (TSG).

According to The Guardian, the Independent Police Complaints Commission concluded there was sufficient evidence to charge the officer involved with manslaughter, and told Tomlinson's family so.

PC Simon Harwood, who is shown on video footage assaulting Tomlinson, is a member of the TSG. He was investigated twice over his alleged aggressive behaviour before joining the TSG, which is the Met’s mobile riot squad. Just after the G20, it was revealed that a third of the unit’s officers had been investigated for misconduct in the previous 12 months.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announcement of the main reason given for the long-delayed decision not to prosecute was the “irreconcilable conflict between Dr Patel on the one hand and the other experts on the other as to the cause of death”.

Patel is under investigation by the General Medical Council (GMC). As a Home Office registered forensic pathologist he performed autopsies in a number of contentious cases including some involving deaths in police custody, before he was suspended.

Dr Freddy Patel was the first of three pathologists who carried out post mortems, and he concluded that Tomlinson died of a heart attack. But he failed to keep even a sample of the key evidence – 3 litres of fluid found in Tomlinson’s abdomen.

Can it be a coincidence that the CPS decision was made public on the very day that the second pathologist, Dr Nat Cary, was giving evidence to the GMC, before any conclusion could be drawn about Patel’s competence? Or are their other forces at work in the background?

Cary said his report contained clear evidence that Tomlinson suffered injuries sufficient to support an actual bodily harm charge. The CPS dismissed the injuries as "relatively minor" and thus not enough to support a charge.

Speaking for the first time about the case, Cary said yesterday: "I'm quite happy to challenge that. The injuries were not relatively minor. He sustained quite a large area of bruising. Such injuries are consistent with a baton strike, which could amount to ABH. It's extraordinary. If that's not ABH I would like to know what is."

That the announcement coincided with the anniversary of the police killing – rather execution – of Jean Paul de Menezes in 2005 could be considered cruelly provocative. Apparently the CPS lawyer who made the decision was the same one who decided no officer should face charges over Menezes.

Deborah Coles of the Inquest charity said: "The eyes of the world will be looking on with incredulity as yet again a police officer is not facing any criminal charges after what is one of the most clear-cut and graphic examples of police violence that has led to death. This decision is a shameful indictment of the way police criminality is investigated."

Following Tomlinson’s death at the G20 summit it emerged that the police were under orders to deal harshly with the protestors, and there was a flurry of concern and promises to soften their tactics. Don’t count on it. The state is gearing up to deal with the mounting opposition to the gung-ho slash and burn tactics being pursued by the Cameron-Clegg regime.

The Coalition can’t tolerate anything that might stand in its way as it attempts to rebuild the profit system through the destruction of jobs, pensions, services and living standards. “Tough decisions” will require brutal action, and neither they nor the police will be held accountable. Both are a law unto themselves.

Gerry Gold

The spirit of the Stasi lives on in Britain

Last night Gordon Brown joined other world leaders in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. But while he and others waxed lyrical about the joys of freedom, his government was forcing a sinister Bill through parliament which reinforces state secrecy in Britain.

Throughout its 12 year-rule, New Labour – with Jack Straw leading the charge – has tirelessly provided the police and the secret state with more and more powers. New Labour’s latest effort in this direction will reduce still further the power of the public and the media to find out why someone has died violently or from unknown causes.

The legislation was forced through the Commons with a majority of eight. This now means that those who have lost loved ones as well as the public, can be barred from attending hearings into controversial deaths. As Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews noted, “the government is handing a massive new power to the executive”.

The ancient right to a public inquest can now be overruled by government ministers and replaced with a secret inquiry simply by order under the new law, which was smuggled in via the Coroners and Justice Bill. Earlier this year, justice secretary Straw tried unsuccessfully to introduce secret inquests. Yesterday he claimed the secret inquiry measure was necessary to keep secret the snooping activities – also known as “intercepts” – by the police and intelligence agencies.

The measure went through only days after it emerged that Scotland Yard’s Territorial Support Group (TSG) – responsible for the death of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 City of London protests – has received 5,241 complaint allegations in the last four years. The figures also show that only nine – yes, you read that correctly, that’s nine, or 0.18 per cent – were “substantiated” after being investigated by the police’s own complaints department.

The results are so suspicious that even the normally pro-police Daily Mail has published allegations by a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority that the TSG “enjoys some form of immunity as far as the actions of its members are concerned”.

Scotland Yard has, naturally enough, denied this, saying complaints about the conduct of its officers are taken “extremely seriously”. Does this include the case of TSG officer, former Royal Marine PC Mark Jones, who has just returned to duty? Jones was one of the police officers present when a Muslim computer expert Babar Ahmad was arrested in his South London home. His accusations of police brutality were rejected by the Police Complaints Commission, but he was nonetheless awarded £60,000 after police admitted he had been subject to “gratuitous violence”. No less than 31 complaints have been made against Jones since 1993, 26 of them being allegations of assault, including one of racially aggravated assault. Many of those complaining have been black or Asian men.

The so-called independence of those who are supposed to monitor and investigate the activities of Scotland Yard’s finest is clear in the appointment last month of Commander Moir Stewart to the leadership of the Independent Police Complaints Commission and to its management board. Stewart, a top Scotland Yard officer, was personally criticised for failings in the bungled police anti-terror operation that lead to execution of the innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes in July 2005 in Stockwell.

Back to Brown and the fall of Berlin Wall. The power of the hated East German Stasi secret police collapsed at the same time. But while Brown was in Berlin, his Home Office was announcing that it would push ahead with plans to compel communications firms to monitor all internet use in a measure that the Stalinists would have been proud of.

The Home Office says it wants to change the law to require communication service providers to collect and retain records of communications from a wider range of internet sources, from social networks through to chat rooms and unorthodox methods, such as within online games.

Christopher Graham, the Information Commissioner, commented tersely: “The proposal represents a step change in the relationship between the citizen and the state." Need we say more?

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

A law unto themselves

Once again the police have blood on their hands and a cover-up is already well under way. That’s the only conclusion you can draw from the video of the gratuitous police attack on bystander Ian Tomlinson during last week’s G20 protests in the City of London, soon after which he collapsed and died. 

The police had the area covered from every angle by CCTV and by their own photographers and must have known what happened. Yet the first official statement said that Tomlinson just happened to be found in a side street and that the Met’s brave police were attacked when they went to his assistance! 

Sounds familiar? Jean Charles de Menezes, you will recall, was alleged to have leapt over a Tube ticket barrier and was wearing a bulky jacket, clearly trying to evade the police. None of this, naturally enough, turned out to be true. Yet no one was prosecuted for the execution of the Brazilian electrician while he sat reading his newspaper. And you can bet that the same will apply in the case of Tomlinson. 

Why? Because the police are always only “doing their duty” in “difficult circumstances”. And what is this higher “duty” that allows them to behave with impunity and do things that ordinary citizens would end up in jail for? The duty in question conferred on the police by the state is to protect the status quo of capitalist society by whatever means are necessary, lawful and otherwise. 

The first professional police force in the world was set up first in London in the 1830s and then throughout the rest of the country at a time of major social and political unrest. Workers had demanded and been refused the vote, trade unionists were deported from Dorset for illegally combining and riots were breaking out against the introduction of the workhouse for the unemployed. 

The Royal Commission on the Police 1839 reported that the creation of a force  throughout the country was a way in which “the constitutional authority of the supreme executive is thus emphatically asserted”. What the commission was talking about was the authority of the state as a whole in relation to maintaining and developing capitalism in terms of  private property, as our book Unmasking the State – a rough guide to real democracy elaborates in more detail.  

And that’s how the boys in blue have behaved ever since, with the notable exception of the London police strike after World War One when demands for an independent union were ruthlessly crushed. The high command of the state in the shape of senior officers sets the tone with wild statements about a “summer of rage” on the streets and then the unthinking plods are sent into action to do their worst, which they gleefully do. That’s what happened at the Climate Camp in Kent last year and is routine for just about any protest or action that is not some orderly march from point A to point B. 

As the economic slump develops, more and more people will act to defend their jobs and their livelihoods. The police are being prepared for this by the sinister and secret Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO). This is the organisation that did the Thatcher’s government’s bidding during the miners’ strike, which began 25 years ago. In the course of that dispute, a total of 11,000 miners were arrested, 7,000 injured, eleven people died, and 1,000 men were sacked. More than 100 were jailed.

The present capitalist state is clearly an alienating power that is undemocratic and more or less the plaything of the corporations and banks. The police, together with the army and the spy agencies, are this state’s enforcers and nothing will change their historic role. This should add to the urgency of developing a strategy for creating a new kind of  political democracy. This would be founded on co-ownership and control of resources and require the replacement of institutions like the police with new forms of community control.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor