Tag: Police

Britain is Authoritarian: we didn’t kill the bill & now democracy is dead

By Daviemoo

It’s been coming for a long time now, with klaxon warnings from scholars and activists all over the world. But today the United Kingdom truly embraced its role as an authoritarian state as the house of lords voted for the police, crime, courts and sentencing bill to effectively curtail our human right to protest. Those who endorse the bill will tell you that it is not stopping protest, only engendering co-operation with the police and asking that protests- mass gatherings of people- do not “disturb the peace”.
There is no peace, there is no, there is no democracy- in a country who throttles the voice of its citizens.

It’s hard to know where to start with the bill which Priti Patel has fought so hard to implement and my problems with it. Firstly a Home Secretary who was forced to resign for attending unauthorised meetings with foreign powers making decisions on legalities seems a far stretch: secondly, legislation written by a woman who erroneously said the death penalty is effective even in spite of evidence it is not.
The met police have voiced their own displeasure of Patel’s draconian oversight of their duties- but the met hardly have room to comment on poor leadership, or indeed of behaviours beyond the pale, including current accusations of a cover-up around partygate.
Patel has long disparaged actual champions of what right wing figures like herself so often champion as free speech- she is yet to apologise for speaking out against “lefty lawyers” which led to a knife attack against legal experts who work for human rights campaigns. And here is the strongest evidence yet in the damning indictment in the public eye that Patel does not seek to defend free speech, only speech she condones: the effective strangulation of protest rights in the United Kingdom.

Many of those who will clap like seals for this bill have spent time in the press decrying the restrictive regimes of China or Russia- we have watched, agog, footage of Russian people being arrested under similar laws for holding up blank pieces of paper. Once this law passes, the people of China would technically have an easier time of protesting than Britain- because even one man protests can now be punished with a custodial sentence.

It appears that protest will only be acceptable if the local police assent to a demonstration- and protests can be dismantled, including using police violence and arrests for protests which “disturb the public” or people “find intimidating”: and this, we can fairly conclude, proves that every single person who voted for this bill has never had to protest for their own rights or the rights of those they love- that they do not understand the essence of protest is to foreshadow civil upheaval should the voices of those protesting not be heard in peace.

Additionally, those who do attend protests face arrest with custodial sentences lasting years- for protesting against what they see as unfair, undue or dangerous legislative or public moves by the UK government.

The highest irony in all of this comes in many different flavours: the indifferent silence of the anti lockdown protestors who proudly marched gormlessly around London propagating a virus that is still killing over 1000 people a week. The confused smiles of people vox popped in the streets who didn’t even know this was happening and are entitled enough to know they will never NEED the right to protest because they are unaware that their lot in life could be better should they simply rise up- or the ever increasing frustration of activists who have worked increasingly hard to highlight the undue, unfair- unnecessary bill in its entirety. The entire UK seems to have entered into some collective malaise, with only the enraged detritus of we few, the minorities working hard to retain their own rights and safety or the few politically savvy people who are aware of the appalling nature of this bill fighting against it.
Violence was, more than once, used against peaceful protestors in Bristol, London, Manchester who simply wanted to ensure we retain our human right- it is a human right- to protest: yet swathes of football fans wrecked town centres and businesses, broke into stadiums with seeming impunity from police- because in the United Kingdom now it is seen as more dangerous to stand peacefully with signs of protest than it is to throw security staff to the floor and barge, unchecked into a stadium to watch a sports game. During the BLM protests, police hovered at the edges of the protests, hands on batons threateningly as though those desperate to be heard about civil injustices caused by the police themselves would be as great of a danger as angry ignorant people desperate to protect statues over human life and liberty.

The United Kingdom will continue its decline under fascist-leaning leadership like Patel and Johnson, under the baleful glare of politicians like Dominic Raab who wish to scrap the human rights act, along with institutionally corrupt pillars of societal maintenance like the met or the media who hide their collaboration with anti trans screeds, allow lesbian rapists to suggest murdering trans people and who have set us on course to continue to see our rights, our quality of living and indeed out liberty continue to dissipate in favour of a society only extant to keep the rich in money as we squabble- now quietly in fear of upsetting the peace- for what little dignity the tories care to afford us.

Ultimately the passing of this bill into law is a mistake which will cost not only the British public greatly, but the authoritarians in chief.
When you functionally illegalise peaceful protest, you take that avenue away yes- but not the need for it. People still want to, need to, are forced to protest for their liberties and against their injustices. Making peaceful protest as harshly punishable as violent protest leaves those of us who need protest as an avenue to start to make decisions we did not need before: firstly, can we be heard outside of protesting – and if so, how?
Secondly if protesting is our only means of being heard and it is now as harshly punished to be heard peacefully as it is to be more radical, do we choose the peaceful option and face punishment- or do we choose violence knowing that it may be the only way to be heard? This isn’t a decision any activist wants to make and the idea of having to harness violence to enact public change is truly a move for the desperate- but is that not where we are now under a government who blanket refuses to listen to the will of the people they so often expound upon?

Patel, Johnson, Raab- the tories continue to bind our hands and expect us to remain compliant but as our streams of expression for our displeasure evaporate before us the time is at hand to ask: if we can’t be heard peacefully, are our options truly as limited now as compliance, silence… or violence?

Daviemoo is a 34 year old independent writer, radicalised into blogging about the political state of the world by Brexit and the election of serial failures like Trump and Johnson. Please check out the rest of the blog, check out Politically Enraged, the podcast available on all streaming platforms and share with your like minded friends! Also check him out on ko-fi where you can keep him caffeinated whilst he writes.

When law-makers & law-maintainers & are law-breakers, who upholds the rule of law?

By Daviemoo

TW: Domestic abuse, sexual assault.

Last week, the country was treated to more frustration as the long awaited Grey report became the imminently released, redacted, gutted of substance Grey press release- grey is an apt colour for the report, stripped of the colour needed to understand just how deep the rot runs beneath Westminster. And the Met finally came forward to step up to the challenge of upholding it’s already tenuous reputation as investigative officers- but today, a damning report into the institutional misogyny and open disrepute of Met officers casts an even deeper shadow into whether those we are meant to entrust with the rule of law- both to create and to uphold law- can be trusted with those jobs.

“I would happily rape you”

This is a message sent from a serving met police officer to a female officer. Many would ask that we request context- but unless the context is “here is something I would never say to a woman”, nothing can justify this.

It’s been too long and widely known that misogyny is the bedrock of the police force- from a high rate of officers who have committed domestic assault (reported in the US though similar studies mirror this in the UK). Even in this report, officers confess – one stating that he needs to “take the missus out as an apology for backhanding her”. Another officer proudly declares “if you hit a woman they love it. Biologically programmed lol”.

These are the men we expect to enforce the law on fellow citizens who commit these heinous crimes. Another officer makes a joke about how easy it is to get a woman into a bed using a knife instead of a credit card. And of course, we’ll be told “context”, “banter”… but reports by psychologists show demonstrably that misogynistic jokes lead to increased hostility towards women. This culture of “lads jokes” perpetuates it’s own outcome. Women in the force have spoken out about men protecting each other, daily casual sexual comments and inappropriate behaviour- last week, reports of a university lecturer who was misogynistically abused during her arrest… and this very day of publication, a woman stripped naked and left dejected in a cell who was arrested wrongfully.

I’ve long puzzled over why men who claim to love women would also speak about them in these terms. The disturbingly high propensity of men who look at women as nothing but sexual gratification machines is a societal problem and must be dealt with- two years of social distancing has worsened this mindset amongst men already susceptible to these disgusting trains of thought.

But even this deep, dark layer of misogyny and casual admission of lawbreaking is only the surface: Should a force systemically infected by the foetid pus of bent coppery be the ones to hold the shining light of truth up to a government similarly infested with islamophobia, misogyny, racism and of course a derisive attitude to compliance towards safety laws? If the met, too, scorn laws behind closed doors, how does one divest them of the authority granted by the corrupt state?

There exists in depth a wealth of reporting and evidence into how police corruption is obfuscated behind legal loopholes, created in camaraderie with other officers willing to bend legality for others that they simply do not believe applies to them. Similarly, hot off the press is the scraps of the Gray report, which no doubt in the fullness of time will bolster the claims of top to bottom corruption, rulebreaking and a culture of intimidation which allowed the Conservatives to flout the laws that they themselves implemented for public safety- after all, this is not a government known to adhere to legality.

The rot of rulebreaking runs how deep?

The conservatives, like the met, are become the face of corruption already suspected, now confirmed. The entitlement of both civil servants and officers of the law, who feel that they need not treat other’s safety with the seriousness of we mere mortals is a worrying indictment of ageing institutions in need of either an urgent shakedown, a root deep clearout- or an imminent scrapping, to be replaced with those who are willing to uphold the laws they are bound to create and uphold.

It’s a very societally typified fear to dilly dally over changing failing or failed institutions. Politics runs through our every aspect of life, from pricing of goods to working hours and wages- it’s inextricable from the lives we’re currently leading and therefore must be approached cautiously when looking to change it’s facets, to ensure that we do not accidentally create more problems than we solve. But when it comes to the met, policing is becoming a more obviously not fit for purpose drain on public expenditure- record numbers of officers refusing vaccine mandates both in the UK and stateside, the BLM protests and subsequent exposure of systemic racism to people who had previously been allowed to hold the shield of ignorance with impunity and this report which shows an indifference towards public wellness- the huge expenditure of public funding to an institution as archaic as the police when it’s members are so keen on ignoring the laws they are employed to maintain… it hardly seems a good public investment.

Many members of the public support our style of policing without listening to experts in prison abolition- this, of course, does not mean a lack of policing, but a reform of a system that is designed only to punish those who have (or are found guilty of, to be more precise) committed crimes- recidivism (the tendency to commit crime again if you have done so already) is disgracefully high because there is no element of rehabilitation that works functionally in our prison services, and rehabilitation must come forefront in the efforts of law enforcement to actually deter offenders from committing further crimes and to make their lives better, otherwise a vicious cycle is maintained which will only worsen the strain on the system, and those subject to it’s failings.

 But indeed, turning from the police force and it’s deeply ingrained failings to the government, do we not see the parallels? A system created long ago, maintained in its archaic presentation (from lingo to the preference of parliament as the seat of power), a system now subject to the weathered scrutiny of a public who have watched with increasing horror and anger as our elected officials desecrate the office. And powerless are we to change this decomposition of our political probity… or so we are led to believe.

Perhaps there is a reciprocal nature between our institutions – from a royal family scandalised by accusations of racism and sexual assault to a government slowly disappearing into it’s own salacious reports of ineptitude, on to a police force crammed with officers who close ranks on fellows who commit the crimes they are tasked with investigating. And here, at it’s roof- the dislocation we do not wish to acknowledge. Where does that invisible gap between “us” and “them” start and finish- what would we have to do to escape investigation into coronavirus law breaches? Who would we have to be descended from to escape scrutiny for sex abuses? Is it money? Name? Influence? Or simply the you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours of one group of corrupted individuals propelling forward more corruption by protecting another, back and forth like blades of grass, rotting in the same field? And again beckons the urgent question- how do we deal with it?
Let us be honest here and everywhere- let us shine our own lights into the dark and confront it together: we must not be burdened by institutions that do not protect us, that do not enhance our lives.
What is good for society? Institutions that serve to make it better- not maintain, not enforce- improve.

Until we overhaul our institutions, until they work for us, we continue with the foot-on-the-neck obedience of rule by oligarchy.

Police- corrupt

Politics- corrupt

Monarchy- corrupt

And so I ask you reader, as I run out of road- what comes after?

Daviemoo is a 34 year old independent writer, radicalised into blogging about the political state of the world by Brexit and the election of serial failures like Trump and Johnson. Please check out the rest of the blog, check out Politically Enraged, the podcast available on all streaming platforms and share with your like minded friends! Also check him out on ko-fi where you can keep him caffeinated whilst he writes.

The Met Police are not fit for purpose

By Daviemoo

From the foolish bleating of “I’m very sorry” from top brass Cressida Dick, to disconnected and out of touch advice like “run away” or “flag down a bus”, the Met Police has shown itself to be an institution awash in corruption and unable to fulfil it’s purposes of truly protecting and serving the public.

When an institution is corrupt in the way the met police is, the obvious signs are an unwillingness to change even in the face of the evidence that this is required. Some would say that enforcing new laws which prohibit protest is a condemnation of any police force- that a police force which serves the public should- MUST allow protest to be undertaken as a show of the civil rights and liberties of the citizens of the country. The BLM protests in the UK were vitally and correctly aimed squarely at the doorstep of a government who perpetuates the kind of insidious, quiet but ever present racism that continues to propagate poor reception to people of colour, all the while denying that this takes place. But it also pointed the finger of blame directly at the police who are so often involved in horrific incidents of police violence against people of colour for doing nothing more than existing in black skin.

Any institution which was meant to serve the public would rightly have heard the cries of discontent from people of colour and from their supporters and turned their beady eye inward, looking for the causation of this discontent. Independent panels would have been appointed, focus groups set up to engage with communities whose trust in the institution of policing are fractured, new ideas on engagement and constructive policing put forward to allow policing to find its faults and fix them. Those who suffered so terribly under corrupt officers would have their voices elevated.

This did not happen.

In fact, a closing of ranks occurred around the BLM protests and formented the sort of impenetrability of change that is still being fought so hard against, specifically because of what came next; when a woman was murdered and another died in suspicious circumstances, Blessing Olusegun and Sarah Everard, women rightly were both furious and terrified. Little has seemingly been done to solve the mysterious death of Blessing Olusegun- her mother held a vigil recently in her memory and in the article regarding this vigil we read the statement from Sussex’s police force who deny that they failed to investigate the death properly due to ethnicity- put perhaps ethnicity is part of the problem, the next part being that Blessing was a woman.

Everard’s death at the hands of a police officer – and he WAS a police officer at the time no matter how many times the Met Police try to distance themselves from this- has rightly terrified women. At the time it was said that you can do everything right, wear the right clothes, be cautious (and even then those sentences struck me as odd- the blame being laid at the door of the person under threat), but to find out that her killer was a police officer who used his status to kidnap and murder her lent another sickening blow to the news. How are you meant to feel safe when those you’ve been told for so long will protect you are the killer themselves? How do you know what constitutes a “legitimate” arrest, a “legitimate” detainment? The police would of course say “know your rights”- but surely “don’t violate my rights” would be apropos.

Evidence is still emerging that Everard’s murderer was sending vile content to other officers via WhatsApp- misogynistic, homophobic, racist- five officers other than he who seem to find inequality a joking matter- good, then, to know that these are the people we are meant to turn to in the event of being discriminated against. One must question how many conversations Sarah’s name is in right now, and whether these oh so upstanding officers all over the country are treating her name with the gravity it so deserves.

Just look at the response to the vigil- thousands of women gathered, masked and social distanced, to pay their respects to someone they felt connected to, knowing it could have been them but for a random twist of fate. How did the police- one of whom had perpetrated this terrible crime- respond? With handcuffs and violence. Just like he did.

If this doesn’t tell you that policing is fundamentally corrupt, that police will strongarm women at a vigil but allow football hooligans to storm a stadium, that they will prowl the outside of a BLM protest but ignore anti lockdown rioters then you miss the message: that policing is only ever about punishing the noncompliance of those who question the system of policing, not about protecting those who do not break laws.

Look to the knowledge that the police view fundamental stances on human rights- equality for POC, for the LGBTQIA community as “political” standpoints (as proven in the case of Harry Miller who said that his transphobic tweets were just that). These things should NOT be political. Human dignity should be granted to everyone and yet is not- this should be the blazing issue for those whose job is to uphold law and liberty, rather than lobbying for an ever growing budget or working hard to obfuscate the dizzying number of police officers involved in committing their own crimes.

Look too, to the ridiculous advice from the Met: run away or flag down a bus if you’re worried by the officer arresting you… firstly, the white privilege it must have taken to think this an appropriate response when person of colour after person of colour has TOLD US that any noncompliance is met with violence. The met does not care to hear the public’s cacophony of complaints about it’s behaviour in favour of remaining exactly how it is- tight lipped, preferring to protect even those most corrupt of officers- it was even reported on Tuesday that some officers still spoke supportively of Everard’s murderer.

All of these issues fit into a society so determined not to upset the status quo that it is willing to overlook the failings of it. Women feel endangered and must go so far to protect themselves- but it’s not that many women it happens to? Oh but it IS that many women it happens to? Well have they tried to wear different clothes, carry protections, not listen to music, hold their keys in a certain way, make a route, check in with friends?

There will, there must, come a moment where society realises how fundamentally it is letting down women and it must- there is no other way forward- address the behaviour of men- not just policemen though statistics do show (by JUNE 2021 the police had recorded EIGHT HUNDRED CASES of police domestic violence) that the police attract a worrying sub demographic of those who engage in horrific domestic assaults. I cannot find the most up to date figures but almost a thousand reported cases of this crime- knowing how many incidents are not reported, this is a frightening figure- and that was only halfway through the year.

And the injustice continues unabated- anyway – Sabina Nessa, murdered in a London park for the terrible crime of- being a woman alone. The names of these countless women thrown under the runaway train of misogynistic violence must be etched deep in stone for men to see, to take stock and to account for their actions and, indeed, their inaction.

Until society addresses the way men behave and feel is appropriate these heinous crimes will continue and will propagate. Until men realise that it is not women who must change but men must account for their, and their fellows’ problematic practices, this horrific cycle of murdered women written off as isolated incidents, as incels committing terrorist offences in the name of their own repugnance will only go around again, and with a terrifying knot in our collective stomach we must ask – who will the next murdered woman be? Will we know her? And what will become of the man who decides his sexual desires or fantasies are more important than human life.