Red Pepper » Val Swain

Unfair cops: it’s not about ‘bad apples’

admin — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:54:07 +0000

In recent months the Metropolitan Police has been rocked by allegations of collusion in the phone hacking conspiracy and revelations of the extraordinary level of hospitality enjoyed by the former Met commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson. Even as it cleared Stephenson and three other senior police officers of misconduct, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) was moved to comment that ‘the public will make its own judgements about whether any senior public official should accept hospitality to this extent from anyone.’
Other senior officers, including the then acting Met commissioner, Tim Godwin, and the chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, Peter Fahy, leapt to Stephenson’s defence. He was guilty only of ‘misjudgements’, Fahy insists. They have also repeated the assertion that police corruption is ‘not endemic’ – a view that is not easy to share.
Police forces have never managed to stem the steady stream of corrupt and dishonest cops going through the courts, although it is hard to know just how extensive the problem is. There are certainly major issues relating to the misuse of police information systems. The Met alone has disciplined 84 officers over the past three years for illegally accessing computer systems. Demand for police information extends far beyond News International’s hacking exploits, and this is likely to be the tip of a large iceberg.
The most serious issue, however, is not one of ‘bad apples’ but the extent to which the police misuse and abuse the significant political and institutional power that they exert over our society.
Political police
The fact that the modern British police constitutes a political force is becoming increasingly self-evident. Through a variety of channels, including direct lobbying of politicians and the involvement of the Association of Chief Police Officers in key policy committees, the police have long been in the business of influencing government policy. They also do a great deal of networking with local government, private industry and, of course, the media.
They wield a remarkable degree of power at every level of society. As a result of their procurement requirements, a large number of private interests have significant contracts with the 56 police forces in the UK. These include arms, security and information technology companies, many of which employ ex-police officers in senior or lucrative positions. An even larger section of society depends on various licences to carry out trades that are granted or influenced by the police. And, of course, the police have the ability to use violence to control, contain and arrest, as well as significant discretion to push people into, or keep people out of, the criminal justice system.
None of this in itself is evidence of corruption – but it is certainly evidence of an environment in which corruption can flourish. Cosy cliques building up among powerful individuals and institutions are a recipe for corrupt practices, as the phone hacking scandal has shown. Yet there is no watchdog that can effectively oversee the mechanics of what is going on in our police forces.
Hospitality, it seems, will be the subject of some public scrutiny. The Met stated at the end of July that it would publish figures for gifts and hospitality ‘within weeks’. This will no doubt provide entertaining reading, but it is disappointing not to see similar pledges from other forces. Chief constables are supposed to police the public without distinction and any ‘incentive’ to do otherwise should at the very least be available for public examination.
The relationship of police and media also bears inspection. Police forces are usually keen to form good relationships with the press. They happily provide tip-offs and titbits of stories, but in return often expect the media to reflect a police perspective of events. Coverage of political events, such as demonstrations and rallies, frequently reflect a police viewpoint. Depending on circumstances, there is a thin line between an effective working relationship and an unhealthy ability to influence the media’s portrayal of events.
Issuing false information in an attempt to manipulate public opinion is clearly something that crosses that line. Yet there is a pattern of this occurring in the Met’s public statements, particularly where there are suspicions of wrongful police actions.
Wilful misinformation
The most startling instances of apparently wilful misinformation have occurred in relation to victims of police violence. Ian Tomlinson was killed at a G20 demonstration in 2009. Shortly afterwards, the police issued a statement, reported widely in the press, that police had been ‘pelted with missiles believed to include bottles as they tried to save his life’. In fact, riot police at the scene had not been hit with missiles – but had obstructed protesters who were trying to administer first aid and call for an ambulance. This only became known as a result of efforts by witnesses and G20 campaigners, an investigation by the Guardian newspaper and footage taken by witnesses.
This blatant attempt to mislead the public, and to shift blame from themselves to a group of supposedly violent protesters, has never been properly investigated. Neither have other attempts by the police to manipulate the media to their own advantage.
Mohammed Abdul Kahar, shot by police in his home in Forest Gate during a terror raid in 2006, was finally released without charge after a week in custody. But the destruction of his reputation in the press, including unfounded allegations of child pornography, caused him and his family ‘irreparable damage’, in the words of his sister.
Cases such as these have highlighted the woeful inadequacy of regulatory and investigatory bodies to oversee police behaviour. The IPCC oversees complaints, as well as automatically investigating all deaths involving the police, but there is little public confidence in a body that appears anything other than independent. Figures reveal a mere 10 per cent of complaints to the police are upheld, and a significant proportion of those are complaints from other police officers. Eight out of ten of the IPCC’s senior investigators and more than a third of all investigators are former police officers or police staff.
The family of Sean Rigg, who died in police custody after an arrest in 2008, have been campaigning for three years to get answers to crucial questions, and are particularly scathing about the failures of the IPCC. In an interview with the Guardian a year after his death, they spoke of the failure of the IPCC to investigate the case properly, and particularly to recover crucial evidence. Instead of investigating robustly, they said, it failed to go ‘beneath the surface’ and simply took whatever evidence was provided by the Met.
Deaths in custody
According to figures published by the respected pressure group Inquest, there have been 409 deaths in custody since 2000. Inquest has identified numerous deaths that raise issues about standards of care, such as deaths due to self-injury, alleged drunkenness or drug intoxication, or poor medical care, as well as deaths that raise issues of excessive use of force by police officers.
These figures do not include the three deaths that occurred after police restraint at the end of August. Philip Hulmes, aged 53, and Dale Burns, 27, both died after police discharged taser guns. Dale Burns was reportedly shocked three times by a taser. Jacob Michael, aged 25, died after police restrained him using pepper spray. Witnesses to his arrest have described how the police punched and kicked him while he was on the floor, restrained and in handcuffs. Eleven police officers were involved in the arrest. Inquest reacted to these latest deaths by stating that ‘it is imperative that the police are reminded that they cannot act with impunity’.
There have also been 32 fatal shootings by police in the past ten years. The latest was Mark Duggan, whose death at the hands of the police sparked the riots in August. The failure of the police to provide prompt and accurate information to the Duggan family has exacerbated problems. In addition, the IPCC has had to apologise for ‘inadvertently misleading the press’, by implying in a telephone conversation to a media contact shortly after the incident that it was Mark Duggan who had opened fire first. As it turned out, the only bullets fired had been fired by the police.
For all the deaths, including the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes as he got on a tube train at Stockwell, there has not been one single successful prosecution of any police officer. The IPCC has claimed that this has been in part due to a reluctance of juries to convict police officers, but campaigners point to an evident lack of will on the part of the police, the IPCC and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to conduct robust investigations and prosecutions.
Riot factor
Anger at the treatment of Mark Duggan was one factor in the recent riots, but there are others. Persistent stop and search is frequently cited by young people as a cause of discontent. Campaigners have also highlighted that police often break stop and search laws that are meant to provide protection to the individual.
The police frequently, and unlawfully, demand personal information as they carry out stop and searches, and there is a general perception, not without foundation, that the police will use force or will carry out punitive arrests or strip searches against those who are not sufficiently compliant.
There is clearly a close relationship between the police and the CPS, despite its insistence that it works independently. Again this does not necessarily demonstrate corruption, only the potential for it. An inquiry is currently taking place as to why the CPS withheld key evidence in a trial of activists for an environmental protest in 2009. The evidence, which included crucial recordings of an alleged conspiracy, came to light during the exposure of undercover police officer Mark Kennedy.
When the police published a strategy aimed at remanding in custody all those arrested during the summer riots, they clearly felt able to rely on CPS support. Despite the fact that all cases should be treated on their merits, the CPS worked on a conveyor belt of cases to ensure 66 per cent were remanded into custody, included those arrested for less serious matters. This interference by police in the criminal justice system is currently the subject of judicial review. In what is also seen as a political policing initiative, the CPS issued guidance to prosecutors to request the usual anonymity for young people in the courts to be lifted, so that teenagers could be ‘named and shamed’.
The disparity between the treatment of young, working class men and women in the riots and privileged, well-connected individuals in the phone hacking affair is blatant and inescapable. Justice in the riots was dispensed instantly, at the full height of public anger, through courts sitting through the night. Sentences have been unduly harsh and even the Law Society has warned of ‘rushed justice’. In contrast, the investigation into serious offences in connection with phone hacking has been slow, cautious and hesitant, and the police have appeared to take every possible opportunity to stall investigations.
Ultimately, this is the real evidence of corruption within the police and criminal justice system. That there is one law for one set of the population – the rich, the powerful and the police – and one for the rest of us, will come as a surprise to nobody at all.

For the record: what the police will know about you

admin — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 18:10:24 +0000

For the past six years a secretive, unaccountable, publicly-funded yet privately-run organisation has collected, collated and analysed vast amounts of personal data relating to political activists, organisers and protesters. By next summer, the £8 million-a-year operation run by the National Coordinator for Domestic Extremism (NCDE) will pass into the control of the Metropolitan Police. This is intended to increase democratic accountability and reassure concerned politicians. Perhaps it will – but on the ground little is likely to change.
Until now, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), a private company engaged in lobbying government and steering police policy, has operated three ‘domestic extremism’ units under the management of the NCDE. These units have access to the data collected by all of Britain’s 43 police forces on individuals and groups engaged in protest or other political activity. They oversee and co-ordinate intelligence gathering on a national scale. This is a powerful organisation, capable of labelling a protester as a ‘domestic extremist’, a tag that is sometimes interpreted as being only one step below ‘terrorist’. Many have argued that the NCDE units should not be operated outside the accountability structures of normal policing. The real question is whether they should be operated at all.
From a civil liberties perspective, there has been consistent criticism of the NCDE units. While the NCDE repeats the mantra that it is only concerned with a small minority of protesters that commit criminal activities, that claim has worn very thin. The largest of the extremism units, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), was forced last year to admit to the Guardian that it kept the details of an 85-year-old pacifist who had never been in trouble with the police, and that it logged his presence at 80 demonstrations that he attended to lawfully protest against the arms trade. While the NCDE website hints at serious crime and terrorism, in reality just being on a protest is enough to justify intelligence gathering.
Also raising concerns is a second NCDE unit, the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (NETCU). Its role is to liaise with, advise and support corporations and private companies that have become ‘victims’ of protest campaigns. The NCDE’s involvement came after EDO, an arms company alleged to have supplied weapons components to the Israeli army, was subjected to weekly lawful but noisy protests outside its Brighton factory, and Eon, the energy firm criticised by environmentalists for generating dirty power, was the target of a proposed peaceful mass trespass by Climate Campers. Protesters have voiced concerns that NETCU has shared police intelligence with these companies and stepped well beyond the supposed neutrality of the police.
Theoretical accountability
While the move into the Met will in theory provide accountability and oversight through the Metropolitan Police Association and other police regulators, in reality little will change. The Met is already closely involved with the work of the NCDE. The NPOIU operates from premises provided by the Metropolitan Police at New Scotland Yard, and has seconded police officers and staff from the Met. The Met has also been a key player in developing intelligence-gathering tactics through the use of Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) – officers who monitor, photograph, identify and document political protesters.
The NCDE is engaged, fundamentally, in data analysis. Much of the dirty work is being done by the Met and other regional forces in collecting and storing data for the NCDE to use. Just how much data is kept, on whom, and in what format, has been difficult to determine. But work by campaign group Fitwatch and others has revealed that the Met, at least, holds a remarkable level of information. Its Public Order Unit, known as CO11, operates its own image and criminal database containing the personal details of thousands – possibly hundreds of thousands – of protesters, data that it shares with NCDE and the Counter Terrorism Unit. As the Financial Times and Sunday Times reported earlier this year, even MP Jeremy Corbyn and Nick Clegg’s interfaith advisor Fiyaz Mughal were the subjects of entries into the Met’s criminal intelligence database after speaking at a Stop the War rally.
For less well known targets, the police have an array of tricks and tactics at their disposal to obtain personal details and photographs. Police routinely video demonstrations, but also frequently seek to systematically photograph individuals in a crowd or group. It is undeniably intimidating – a small group of women holding a peaceful protest camp at Aldermaston found themselves visited by police and cameras earlier this year, and told that the photographs were being used for facial recognition purposes.
Kettles, or ‘containment’ as the police prefer, are used at least as much for intelligence-gathering as for public order purposes. At a trade union march in Birmingham a group was kettled and held after a lawful and peaceful protest moved away from the agreed march route. They were released only when they complied with being searched, filmed and identified. Those who refused were forcibly held in front of police cameras while their belongings were searched for identification. No arrests were made, and no illegal items seized.
Students at the recent protests in London have had a crash course in data-gathering. Protesters held for a long time in kettles provided police with ample opportunity for photographs, which will undoubtedly be retained for reasons other than criminal investigation.
Police used powers given them by the Police Reform Act to demand names and addresses, and they even made ‘preventative arrests’ under breach of the peace powers to make identifications. The vast majority of those people had committed no offence.

Paparazzi police
Possibly of most concern is the police practice of placing FITs outside lawful public meetings of political and campaign groups, so that those attending have had to deal with uniformed police with large cameras taking their photograph before they even got through the door. In Brighton, MP David Lepper last year accused Sussex police with ‘paparazzi-style’ lenses of deliberately intimidating those attending an environmental campaign meeting.
Intimidation is undoubtedly as much of a tactic as data gathering. Police claim they are deterring people from involvement in groups connected with unlawful activity or disorderly behaviour, and demonstrating that by getting involved in group ‘x’ or protest ‘y’, you are becoming associated with criminal activity, and will be treated as a criminal.
Judging by police behaviour, though, almost every political protest group in the country must be a criminal one, so widely is this tactic used. Many people have been frightened away from engaging in protest about a cause they believe in.
Some groups, such as Unite against Fascism (UAF), which hold peaceful counter-demonstrations against anti-Muslim group the English Defence League, have found themselves the targets of even stronger police interventions. Police forces have worked ‘in partnership’ with local authorities, universities and community organisations to actively dissuade people from attending UAF events. Young people, especially Muslim young people, who ignored this advice and turned up anyway have been targeted by stop and search operations, which frequently result in them having to give their names and addresses to police cameras. Some under 18-year-olds have even been warned that their presence could result in them being referred to social services.
All of this – the data-gathering, the deterrence and prevention – are the core components of the approach known as ‘intelligence-led policing’, described last month by Theresa May as remaining ‘at the centre’ of policing operations. It is a fundamental aspect of the British policing model that has been so heralded by politicians and police alike, and is now being exported around the world to deal with protest and disorder.
‘Intelligence-led policing’ de-emphasises crimes or offences that have been committed, in favour of targeting and deterring those judged to be the most likely perpetrators of future crimes. Kent police are often credited with inventing the term when they put their resources into targeting known car thieves rather than responding to reported thefts. Translated into the political scenario, intelligence-led policing targets whoever the police decide may be potential ‘domestic extremists’.
Numbers up
A classic example has been the implementation of ANPR, Automatic Number Plate Recognition, deployed to ‘deny criminals the use of the road’. It works by stopping, tracking or intercepting cars with vehicle number plates contained in a police database. As well as databases showing up criminal activity, there are databases showing up political activity. FIT officers working at protests frequently note the vehicle numbers of protesters’ cars. Even an elected politician was stopped last year at a police checkpoint some weeks after attending a protest at Faslane nuclear missile base.
Intelligence-led policing is also becoming a multi-million pound industry, with personal fortunes on the table for those who can aid its expansion. Technology is a driving force, with information analytics, facial recognition and database development constantly pushing the boundaries of what is achievable. It is also a lucrative career option for police officers and staff increasingly lured to technology companies working in the law enforcement intelligence field. At the same time, there are few, if any, practical constraints on what the police can do with our data. The police can claim exemption from nearly all of the main provisions of the Data Protection Act, and are permitted to share data with non-police recipients when it is in the interests of ‘preventing crime or disorder’.
Giving the Metropolitan Police control over a nationwide network of information and intelligence on political dissent does not make the policing of protests more accountable. It merely continues a process of centralising power that is far from the interests of a free society. The Met not only has a significant quasi-military capability, it is also acquiring powerful measures of social control. The level of control exercised over the police by any accountability structures is at best questionable, and at worst non-existent.
The British model of policing is one of policing by consent, and the British public, we are told, has consented to this form of policing. That is largely true – far too many of us are consenting and compliant to police data-gathering. The campaigns of protest groups for non-compliance with intelligence-led policing tactics need to be heard and heeded by all.
Val Swain is from Fitwatch.