The contrasting faces of British policing were on display this week as the capital’s Metropolitan force (the Met) called in support from 30 other police forces across the country to create a 5 000-strong team of officers for at least six diverse demonstrations in the City of London and Trafalgar Square.
Outside the Bank of England police horses and riot officers were pushed back by the sheer force of demonstrators — helmets were torn from officers’ heads and cans, fruit and flour rained down. In retaliation the police surged forward, cracking heads with batons, using pepper spray and CS gas as sirens wailed all around.
Three minutes’ walk away, in Bishopsgate, smiling officers shared a joke with men and women pitching tents along the road, a family offered them brownies from an organic food stall and a few lads politely queued up outside the compost-toilet tent.
The Met’s commanders had insisted that they would not let the capital be brought to a standstill by demonstrations around the G20 summit.
They used tried and tested tactics to trap about 4 000 people into streets outside the Bank of England for more than five hours in a practice known as ”kettling”, tightening the cordon when violence flared in one part of Threadneedle Street and a group of protesters broke into the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Commander Bob Broadhurst, in charge of the operation, said his aim was always to facilitate peaceful protest. But those demonstrators caught inside the cordon with no toilet facilities and often no water questioned the idea that they were allowed to exercise their democratic right to march.
”The police should let us all dribble out when we need to,” said June Rogers from south London. ”We’ve come on a peaceful protest. We’ve got fire in our belly and we want to say something and be heard. We’re just ordinary people but they have hemmed us in and made the situation worse.”
Scotland Yard defended the way the demonstrations had been policed outside the Bank of England, saying a cordon was used because missiles were being thrown at officers. Police rights to use such measures were reinforced in 2005 when a judge ruled that surrounding and holding 3 000 protesters in Oxford Circus, London, for seven hours at the May Day protests in 2001 was reasonable in order to stop violence and damage to property.
Around the corner from the Bank, at the Bishopsgate climate camp, protestors succeeded in their aim of closing the road and pitching their tents. Those participating put the laid-back police approach down to the peaceful demonstration. ”We want to keep ourselves very separate from what is happening outside the Bank of England,” said Rob Bailes, a legal observer. ”We’re peaceful protesters. I think violence begets violence. The police here have been very friendly with us, because we have been friendly to them.”
Bailes also believed the recent report into the policing of a similar climate camp at Kingsnorth power station, in Kent, which found that police tried to smear protesters, had forced the Met to allow the camp to form unchallenged.
One officer said he had been told the demonstrators would be allowed to stay until 1.30pm on Thursday. —