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Category: police crackdown bill

  • Tory council candidate condemned after tweeting ‘just bomb Bristol’

    A Conservative candidate for Eastbourne council had to apologise after tweeting ‘”just bomb Bristol” in response to the weekend’s protests.

    Stephen Halbhuber was widely criticised for his response to the videos of police in Bristol clashing with the demonstrators as they protested the government’s policing bill:

    Immediate backlash

    Several Twitter users asked the Conservatives whether Halbhuber was the sort of person they wanted representing them.

    Halbhuber is running for the St Anthony’s ward in Eastbourne:

    Labour MP David Lammy also slammed the tweet as “disgraceful”:

    Apology

    After the negative reaction, Halbhuber tweeted an apology:

    I want to apologise unreservedly for my comments last night, and for any offence caused. Needless to say, it is not something that I believe or would advocate for. In the cold light of day, I completely regret them.

    I have a responsibility to residents to act with propriety and tolerance. Yesterday, I fell beneath that standard, and can only apologise and promise to learn from my mistake.

    Halbhuber has since deleted his Twitter account, but responses to his original tweet remain:

    The protest

    Halbhuber’s tweet referenced the Bristol protest against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. The bill, if enacted, will give police extra powers to impose conditions on protests.

    Demonstrators gathered in Bristol on 21 March to protest the bill, beginning peacefully, but ending with police clashing with demonstrators.

    Halbhuber’s suggestion to ‘bomb’ the city in response presents serious questions about the sort of people running for political positions as Conservatives, and whether the party will take action to condemn his words.

    Featured image via Flickr/NCVO London & YouTube/BBC News

    By Jasmine Norden

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • As the media fixates on Bristol, don’t forget thousands took to the streets this weekend to #KillTheBill

    As the controversial Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill languishes in the committee stage, an increasing number of people have shown their opposition to the legislation.

    But while the escalation at the Bristol protest has dominated the headlines, let’s not forget that thousands of people took to the streets to protest the bill across the country at the weekend.

    The bill will give the police increased powers to impose conditions on protests as well as criminalising Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.

    Birmingham

    Hundreds of people showed up to support the right to protest in Birmingham. Demonstrators socially distanced as they gathered at Victoria Square in the city.

    Brighton

    Over a thousand people joined a march against the bill in Brighton on Saturday 20 March. The protesters gathered at around 2pm and marched through the streets, disrupting some bus services and traffic.

    After hearing speeches, protesters moved through the city, raising chants such as “we will not be silenced” .

    The demonstrators reportedly started heading home after 4pm, after a peaceful march.

    Bristol

    The protest against the bill in Bristol has been widely reported, after some protesters set police cars on fire. Seven arrests have already been made.

    Prior to this, and until the police moved in, the demonstration which began on College Green, had been peaceful.

    Leeds

    Hundreds of people gathered in the centre of Leeds on Sunday to protest the legislation.

    Outside the Civic Hall, protesters listened to speeches and poems. As reported by the Yorkshire Evening Post, One speaker said:

    Throughout history many significant improvements have been gained through protest. We have stood collective in our fight of injustice many times before. It is our time to make history and fight for improvements for our children and grandchildren.

    They are already fighting climate change and we need to give them the tools to do that and the democratic right to protest is one of them. This Bill is impacting on our freedoms and we shall not let it pass. Make no mistake, this Bill comes from a place of fear. They are frightened of our collective action – and they should be. We are so powerful when we come together and they know it.

    Liverpool

    Two people were arrested at a protest against the bill in Liverpool on Saturday that attracted a large crowd.

    Manchester

    Thousands of demonstrators chanted “kill the bill” as they took to the streets of Manchester on Saturday.

    Protester Anna Preston told the Manchester Evening News: 

    We’re just angry and upset like everyone else. It’s the fact that the whole society we live in seems violent, particularly towards women of colour and disabled women.

    It’s getting worse. I wanted to come out as a tribute to the women who are murdered and assaulted.

    Protesters said demonstrations would continue until they were successful in stopping the bill’s process through parliament.

    Newcastle

    Three people were arrested at a Sunday demonstration that attracted around 600 people. One of the arrested protesters was photographed being pinned to the ground by multiple officers.

    Protesters marched through the streets of Newcastle under heavy police presence. They called for the freedom to protest and an end to gendered violence.

    Truro

    Police monitored a peaceful protest against the bill in Truro in Cornwall attended by more than 200 demonstrators. The Resist G7 Coalition, who organised the protest said:

    We made it clear: The Cornish community stands against the government’s push towards authoritarianism. We can’t thank you enough. To those that came today and those that watched and shared from home – you did this.

    It is your continued support that grows this movement. It is your commitment to determined actions which will help us kill this bill. The streets are where we won our rights, and the streets are how we keep them. Do not let this inept government throw away your democratic freedoms.

    Wales

    Similarly, Saturday saw several protests against the bill in Wales. The largest was in Cardiff, but demonstrators also turned out in Bangor and Wrexham.

    In Wrexham, the demonstrators marched to lay their placards at MP Sarah Atherton’s office. Bangor saw protesters hold a minute of silence to “honour the sisters we have lost” and lay flowers of remembrance.

    People in Cardiff have been protesting against South Wales police since Mohamud Hassan died in January after being held overnight in police custody. Four police officers have been served misconduct notices in relation to his death.

    A country-wide movement

    A petition against the bill now has almost 200,000 signatures, meaning it will be debated in parliament.

    With more protests planned over the coming weeks, the number of people against this bill could not be clearer. With the bill still in parliament, we must continue to fight for our right to protest.

    Featured image via Emily Apple

    By Jasmine Norden

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Defend the right to protest, fight back against the police crackdown bill

    Our right to protest is under attack. Protest is being criminalised and it’s urgent that we act now before it’s too late.

    The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is being rushed through parliament. It will give the police powers to impose conditions on protests that they view as too noisy or cause “serious unease”.

    The Bill will ban protests that block roads around Parliament. It also allows the police to impose conditions on one-person protests. And it will introduce a new offence, punishable by up to ten years in prison, of ‘public nuisance’ for actions that cause “serious distress”, “serious annoyance”, “serious inconvenience”.  Yes, that’s right. If you cause serious annoyance on a protest, you could go to jail for a decade!

    Oh, and then there’s the ten year sentences for damaging a memorial or statue. Yep – you could get a longer sentence for damaging an inanimate object than the average sentence given to rapists.

    Home secretary Priti Patel doesn’t like protests. She thinks Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter protesters are ‘extremists’. She wants the police to take more action against anyone who dares to stand up to this government. 

    Meanwhile, a government report into policing is labelling anyone who takes direct action as an “aggravated activist”. It states that the police have gone too far in allowing protests to go ahead. It is also calling for increased surveillance, including the use of facial recognition technology on demonstrations.

    Make no mistake. This is the biggest threat to our freedom to protest that we’ve seen in generations. The police already abuse their powers. This new bill will give them unprecedented power to crackdown on protests. The UK has a long and proud history of protest. And it’s through taking to the streets that we’ve won many of the rights that we now take for granted.

    Our opposition to this bill cannot wait. We need to take action now before many of us end up behind bars for trying to make the world a better place.

    The Network for Police Monitoring is leading the fight against these extra powers with a charter that calls for the protection of protestors’ rights. Over 150,000 people have already supported the campaign to protect the right to protest.

    Get involved today and stop this bill becoming law!

    By Emily Apple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The old bill’s new bill

    Learn more about the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill here.

    Image description

    Under the heading “The Old Bill” is an illustration of a group of protesters carrying placards. The placards read ‘trans rights’, ‘climate justice’, ‘workers rights’, ‘BLM’, and ‘disability rights’. The police are illustrated dragging protests away and restraining them. Next to a restrained protester is a placard on the ground reading ‘rights 4 women’.

    Below this is the heading “The New Bill – *Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill”. This is illustrated with a prison and four protesters leaning out of the barred windows. They are holding signs reading ‘BLM’, ‘women’s rights’ and ‘workers unite’.

     

    By Ralph Underhill

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Deploying undercover officers to ‘protect women’ is just making us more outraged

    CONTENT WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS REFERENCES TO VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN THAT SOME PEOPLE MAY FIND DISTRESSING

    It should possibly come as no surprise that the government is seizing upon the murder of Sarah Everard to roll out more Stasi-like undercover policing, all in the name of protecting women. Boris Johnson has announced that the government is going to send plain-clothes police officers to spy on people in bars and clubs around England and Wales. It’s part of a pilot scheme, Project Vigilant, which was launched by Thames Valley police in 2019, and is now going to be rolled out nationwide. The mainstream media is calling it a “drive to protect women“, and a scheme “to catch sexual predators“.

    Spy cops abuse women. They don’t protect them.

    But we’ve seen time and time again that undercover police abuse their powers, deceive women into relationships, and wreck their lives. More than 30 women have been tricked into relationships with spy cops. The exact figure is likely to be higher, because the government likes protecting the identities of undercover policemen who have infiltrated women’s lives. And they don’t like telling us whether the police are still doing it now.

    This latest announcement about deploying undercover police makes a mockery of the Undercover Policing Inquiry that is currently taking place, which should be investigating the disgraceful actions of undercover officers and their bosses. It’s a kick in the teeth to the women participating in that inquiry whose lives were torn apart by police spies.

    People have taken to Twitter to vent their frustration:

    The police aren’t here to protect women

    A serving Metropolitan police officer has been charged with Sarah’s murder. And the subsequent police violence towards protesters on the streets, showed the world that the police are definitely not here to protect women.

    And Sarah’s murder was just the tip of the iceberg. A document called #194andcounting shows that at least 194 women have been murdered by the police and prison system in England and Wales, either in state custody or in prison, since the 1970s.

    The Canary’s Steve Topple reported on statistics which show that between January 2009 and September 2020 there were:

    • 11 murders [of women] involving serving or ex-police officers. Eight were convicted. Three cases are ongoing. But nine of the 11 victims were police officers’ wives or girlfriends.
    • Over 90 charges of, or convictions for, rape among [employees of the criminal justice system]. The majority were against women and children. Several of the offenders committed multiple crimes. Dozens of these were serving police officers.

    And there are a number of other disgusting misogynist incidents involving police officers. I will list just a couple. On 15 March, the Sun reported that a Metropolitan policeman, who was guarding the spot where Sarah Everard was murdered, sent out a meme “containing six images of a uniformed officer abducting a woman”. In 2020, Metropolitan police officers took selfies of themselves next to the bodies of murdered women Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman.

    Also in 2020, a police officer from Avon and Somerset was found guilty of gross misconduct for his treatment of a domestic abuse survivor whose ex-partner broke into her house and “punched her head into a wall”. The policeman described the survivor as “anti-men”. The Canary spoke to the woman, who said:

    When you call the police, you expect to be treated with respect. You don’t expect to be treated with prejudice by an officer who clearly has an issue with you as a woman. Misogyny has no place in any police force. Misogyny kills.

    Giving the police more powers to act with impunity

    It’s all too clear to women that the police are institutionally violent towards us. But instead of addressing this, the Tory government is giving them sweeping new powers. The recently passed Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act legalises the criminal activities of undercover officers and agents working for the police, MI5, and other state agencies. The Act doesn’t prohibit murder or torture in the name of undercover work. So, essentially it means spies and their agents will be able to act with impunity.

    Meanwhile, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill currently being rushed through parliament will give police officers even more powers. Sisters Uncut argues:

    As the actions of police at peaceful vigils this weekend show, police abuse the powers that they already have – and yet the government plans to give them more powers in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.

    The death of Sarah Everard must be seen in context of the structures of violence against women in this country, which include the police who brutally manhandled grieving women on Saturday, and the routine failures of the police to investigate rape cases as well as their own record of domestic abuse against women.

    It continues:

    The police are institutionally violent against women. Handing them more powers will increase violence against women.

    We need systemic change

    While the government pretends to care by promising to provide us with undercover cops and better-lit streets, the reality is we need complete systemic change. Women are unsafe, whether they’re walking home or already in their house. In fact, 62% of women murdered between 2019 and 2008 were killed by men who were currently, or had previously been, in an intimate relationship with them. No amount of spy cops or street lighting will protect us from the misogyny and patriarchy within our society, ingrained in boys from an early age.

    We don’t trust the police, or the criminal justice system, to protect us. The number of successful rape convictions is at an all-time low.  The Centre for Women’s Justice’s Harriet Wistrich has argued that rape has virtually been “de-criminalised” because it’s so rare that a man will be convicted of the crime. It’s therefore unsurprising that, according to the Office for National Statistics, “less than one in five victims of rape or assault by penetration reported their experience to the police”.

    We are tired Johnson and Patel’s crocodile tears. We are tired of our behaviour being policed, of being told that we must not walk alone at night, just because we’re women. We are tired of being victim-blamed for being assaulted. Together we must fight for radical change.

    Featured image via a Bristol activist, with permission

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • One sentence from Priti Patel about the policing bill makes a mockery of government support for women

    Home secretary Priti Patel has made a mockery out of government support for women. Patel claimed yesterday that the government is committed to tackling violence against women, saying:

    I am listening to women and girls up and down the country.

    She went on to defend the policing bill, saying it would end the halfway releases of those convicted of sexual offences and extend the sexual offences act.

    But Patel isn’t listening even to women MPs, let alone women across the country. Because several of them have united to get her controversial policing bill thrown out amid accusations that it will allow police to crack down on the right to protest.

    Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Labour MP for Streatham, has put forward an amendment that would stop the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which is on day two of its second reading in the House of Commons.

    The amendment has been supported by MPs across parties, including the Green’s Caroline Lucas, Labour’s Apsana Begum, Plaid Cymru’s Liz Savile-Roberts, and the SNP’s Kirstin Oswald.

    It comes in the wake of multiple civil rights groups speaking out against the bill, and protests against it across the country.

    The amendment

    The proposed amendment blocks the bill progressing further on the grounds that it is an attack on civil liberties and could increase racial and gendered inequalities in the criminal justice system, such as:

    • Restricting freedom of assembly rights in the Human Rights Act that enshrines the right to take part in protests.
    • It does not address discrimination and racial bias in the police against Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities.
    • It does not contain measures that specifically protect women and girls from male violence.
    • It contains new measures “that will disproportionately affect Gypsy, Traveller and Roma communities”.

    Ribeiro-Addy said:

    Rather than acknowledging the genuine injustices raised by protesters from a range of movements, this Government has shown time and again that they would prefer to simply legislate and police protest out of existence.

    The events of the weekend prove that criminalising protest and giving the Police further powers to curtail it are the last things we should be doing right now.

    The Bill would mean some offenders receive harsher sentences for damaging statues than for assaulting women, and also introduces provisions that appear to target the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, already among the most marginalised groups in the UK.

    We cannot accept such a fundamental assault on minoritised communities or on the right to protest.

    The bill

    The proposed legislation would give the police new powers to impose conditions on protests, such as limits on the amount of noise a protest can make. The home secretary would also have the power to define how and when a protest causes “serious disruption”.

    The bill will also make ‘public nuisance’ a statutory offence and expand sentencing powers for offences like damaging memorials. Both will be punishable by up to ten years in prison.

    There has been renewed scrutiny of the police and the bill after police intervened in a vigil for Sarah Everard at the weekend, arresting some of the women gathered. Their actions have been widely condemned as disproportionate.

    Further opposition

    People around the country gathered to protest the bill yesterday, calling for MPs to “kill the bill”.

    Groups advocating for women’s safety have been among its strongest critics. End Violence Against Women, which just had a case about the CPS’s treatment of sexual offences thrown out, has criticised the bill.

    Sisters Uncut, a group protesting cuts to domestic violence services, said:

    The police protect themselves. The police do not keep us safe, and plainclothes police won’t protect us. On Saturday night, the police were drunk with power. And now the Government is voting to give them more power. We say no.

    Featured image via Flickr/Andy Thornley & YouTube/Guardian News

    By Jasmine Norden

    This post was originally published on The Canary.