Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently signed two bills into law designed to further harden the southern border. SB 3 provides $1.5 billion for additional wall building and to support more state law enforcement targeting of low-income immigrant neighborhoods, like Houston’s Colony Ridge. SB 4 gives local police the power to engage in immigration enforcement, including arresting people for not having the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Vigils and protests for Aubrey Donahue are being held in Western Australia and Queensland following the police killing of the 27-year-old man from Mareeba, east of Cairns. Kerry Smith reports.
Yesterday, prime minister Rishi Sunak announced that he intended to add new amendments to the Public Order Bill, one of the government’s latest legislative affronts against the people.
The Bill is already a vicious attack on everyone’s freedom to take to the streets in protest. It targets several of the direct-action tactics used by UK social movements. These include laws against campaigners locking-on or going equipped to lock-on.
The new legislation also aims to criminalise tunelling, a tactic which has often been used effectively by ecological movements, and seeks to increase police stop and search powers. It also proposes new Serious Disruption Prevention Orders. These orders would include forcing people to wear electronic tags to stop them from protesting. Police can impose these orders even when the person concerned has not been convicted of a crime.
Sunak proposed the following new additions to the Bill. His statement says:
police will not need to wait for disruption to take place and can shut protests down before chaos erupts
This amendment would further empower the police to preemptively shut down protests and arrest participants. In fact, the police already have plenty of powers to do this. For example, Section 14 of the existing Public Order Act allows cops to impose conditions and make arrests if they believe a protest “may result in serious public disorder”. But Sunak is hoping to give the police even more preemptive powers by broadening “the legal definition of ‘serious disruption’”.
Sunak also said that his amendments would mean that:
- police will not need to treat a series of protests by the same group as standalone incidents but will be able to consider their total impact
- police will be able to consider long-running campaigns designed to cause repeat disruption over a period of days or weeks
As someone who was part of a ten-year-long struggle – which involved weekly protests – to shut down my local weapons factory, I can tell you for a fact that the police already treat ongoing protest campaigns very differently to standalone protests. The police are there to back up the powerful. They will try to stamp out any sustained, effective resistance from below. During those ten years my comrades and I were beaten up repeatedly, arrested, imprisoned, dubbed ‘domestic extremists’. We were followed by uniformed officers when going about our daily business, slapped with civil injunctions, spied on by undercover cops, and repeatedly stopped under the Terrorism Act.
These police powers already exist, but Sunak wants to strengthen them. It’s up to us to resist.
Emily Apple of the Network for Police Monitoring remarked that the government’s press release was vague, and didn’t contain the actual proposed legal amendments to the Bill:
This is government by press release. I know I’m not the only person who’s been looking for the actual amendment and refreshing pages all day to be able to provide analysis based on actual legislation rather than government propaganda on this nonsense. #DefendDissent https://t.co/o5IRcXo73i
— Emily Apple (@emilyapple) January 17, 2023
Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, said that the Public Order Bill was more extreme than many counter-terror powers:
This is more extreme than many counter-terror powers.
Police already have wide powers to deal with many of the offences used to falsely justify the draconian new powers.
The Public Order Bill effectively creates pre-crime for peaceful protests.https://t.co/ipMSed8ohF
— Silkie Carlo (@silkiecarlo) January 16, 2023
Kevin Smith, head of media for the New Economy Organisers Network (NEON), noted that the Public Order Bill is being pushed through at the same time as the Tories are proposing anti-strike legislation:
The Anti-Strike Bill and the Public Order Bill both in parliament today – amazing how much damage an outgoing government can do to democracy by pushing through such structural changes to the means that people have to hold power accountable.
— Kevin Smith (@kevinjgsmith) January 16, 2023
Despite all this, Sunak said in a statement on 16 January:
The right to protest is a fundamental principle of our democracy
The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service echoed his bullshit:
It is clearly understood that everybody has the right to protest
On top of this, chief constable Harrington said:
“Policing is not anti-protest, but there is a difference between protest and criminal activism
These kind of statements from the government and police are written from a familiar template. They affirm their supposed commitment to the ‘right to protest’ while bringing in more and more legislation to take away people’s freedoms.
In 2013, in an article for Corporate Watch analysing the legislative attacks on our freedoms by successive Labour and Tory governments, I wrote:
The British government, like all liberal ‘democracies’, frequently proclaims itself a defender of freedom of expression and assembly. However, this is usually accompanied by the words ‘rule of law’… this provides a get-out clause, enabling governments to justify the repression of the same political freedoms they claim to defend. Since this ‘rule of law’ is created and developed by governments and the judicial system, it ensures governments can devise new ways with which to repress those who threaten state and corporate interests in response to changing circumstances and changing patterns of dissent. In this way the ‘rule of law’ serves to protect capitalist interests, in the name of public order, security and democracy.
Sunak claims that the new amendments are aimed at preventing disruption to “the lives of the ordinary public”, but this is part of a tired old trope that we have been hearing all our lives. Don’t buy his bullshit. The Public Order Bill and its amendments are part of a state-orchestrated attack on people’s ability to act for change. They’re part of the same authoritarian strategy as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, and the recent legislative attacks on striking workers.
We need to reaffirm that it’s our communities who control the streets, not the government or the cops. Generations of struggling people before us have had to do the same, from the rebels of the Brixton uprising of 1981 who rose up against the police’s racist stop and search powers, to the striking miners, whose struggle unfolded against the backdrop of increasing anti-union legislation. To the coalition of radicals who reclaimed the streets in the 90s, in the face of an earlier Criminal Justice Bill.
Fast forward to 2011, and people rose up in many cities across the UK after police murdered Mark Duggan – yet another Black man killed by the state. And to 2021, when protesters battled the cops outside Bristol’s Bridewell Police Station, just weeks after the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer – and as the government was pushing through yet another law designed to take away our freedoms.
Its 2023, and the state is busy mounting fresh attack on us. It’s up to us to remind them of our strength and our power, and that the streets are ours.
Featured image via Eliza Egret
By Tom Anderson
This post was originally published on Canary.
Protesters gathered at Sydney Town Hall on Gadigal Land on Saturday June 18 to demand the removal of police guns from remote First Nations communities and demand justice for Kumanjayi Walker, who was killed by police officer Zachary Rolfe in 2019.
The rally heard from Yuendumu woman Aunty Audrey, the grandmother of Kumanjayi Walker, as well as a number of other speakers, including family members of others killed in custody .
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Hundreds marched through Sydney as part of a National Day of Action on June 18 to demand justice for Kumanjayi Walker, justice for the many deaths of First Nations people in custody, an end to the discriminatory Intervention powers and reassertion of community control.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
By Phil Pennington, RNZ News reporter
It took seven months for the New Zealand police to set up their first team for scanning the internet after the mosque attacks – but it was almost immediately in danger of being shut down.
An internal report released under the Official Information Act (OIA) said this was despite the team already proving its worth “many times over” in countering violent extremists.
The unit still does not have dedicated funding, despite a warning last July it risked being “turned off”.
This is revealed in 170 pages of OIA documents charting police intelligence shortcomings over the last decade, from pre-2011 extending through to mid-2020, and their attempts to overhaul the national system since 2018.
These show police had no dedicated team before 2019 to scan the internet for threats – what is called an OSINT team, for “Open Source Intelligence”.
“The OSINT team was stood up quickly last year with seconded staff to ensure… [an] appropriate emphasis on this new capability,” an internal report from July 2020 said.
In fact, police began the planning at the end of 2018, then “accelerated” it after the attacks, but it took till late October for the team to start, and training began in November 2019, a police statement to RNZ last week said.
This was all well after a January 2018 official assessment of the domestic terrorism threatscap said: “Open source reporting indicates the popularity of far right ideology has risen in the West since the early 2000s”.
When the police OSINT unit was finally set up, there was no guarantee it would last.
“This team is not permanent,” the July 2020 report said.
“This has meant uncertainty for staff and our intelligence customers.”
‘Seriously compromises’
The team had no dedicated budget, and lacked trained staff.
It also was still looking for tools to “quickly capture and categorise online intelligence elements”.
“The lack of a strong OSINT capability seriously compromises our intelligence collection posture, especially in major events,” said the report last July.
This is the sort of scanning that can pick up threats on 4chan or other extremist sites.
Despite the shortcomings, the internet team’s worth had already been proven “many times over in recent months, particularly in the counterterrorism and Countering Violent Extremism space”, the report said.
Three people have faced extremist charges in the last year or so.
‘Turned off’
An April 2019 report said police would begin recruiting for OSINT analytics and other specialists in April-May 2019.
Police had lacked a tool to search the dark web – where the truly egregious chat and trades take place on the internet – so bought one.
But last July’s report said “currently we run the risk” of OSINT “being turned off unless there is a dedicated budget”.
In a statement on Friday, police told RNZ: “The OSINT team has been funded as part of the overall allocation for intelligence since it was established.
“Maintaining this capability is a NZ Police priority, and dedicated funding is being sought as part of next year’s internal funding allocation process (note, this is funding from within Police’s existing baseline).
“Additional supplementary funding was also received in the last financial year to support the work of OSINT.”
They had known they needed the team, they said.
“Prior to March 15, New Zealand Police used some OSINT tools to support open source research of publicly available information and had identified the requirement to develop a dedicated capability.
“The development of this capability was accelerated by the events of March 15.”
‘9/11 moment’
The OIA documents show the OSINT intelligence weakness was not an isolated example.
These warned police needed to avoid “a ‘9/11’ moment” – a situation where police obtain information about a threat but do not understand it due to a failure to analyse how the dots join up, as happened to CIA and FBI before the terror attacks on New York in 2001.
The solution was to have “a complete intelligence picture”.
But the July 2020 report then laid out very clearly how police did not have this:
“Recent operational examples conclude there is no current ability to access all information in a timely and accurate manner,” it said.
“Currently there is no tool that can search across police holdings [databases] when undertaking analysis of investigations.
“We are still depending on manual searches.”
‘Locked down or invisible’
“Sources are either locked down or invisible to analysts. Our intelligence picture is consequently incomplete.”
The 31-page, July 2020 report detailed the police’s ‘Transforming Intelligence’ programme, dubbed TI21, that was begun in December 2018 and meant to be complete by this December.
It indicated the right technology would not be in place – or in some cases even identified – for 6-18 months.
As things stood, “there are many single points of failure in our intelligence system”, the report said.
Threat information was broken up into silos, without a centralised document management system or powerful enough analytic and geospatial software to connect the threats.
A section of the 2020 report detailing problems within the police’s High-Risk Targeting Teams has been mostly blanked out.
The OIA documents describe what is and is not working, especially when it comes to national security and counterterrorism, but also around intelligence on gang and drug crime, family violence, combating child sex offending, and the like, at a point many months after both the mosque attacks and the beginning of the system overhaul.
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the mosque attacks in late 2020 called police national security intelligence capabilities “degraded” – not just once but six times.
It showed weaknesses elsewhere when it came to OSINT: The Security Intelligence Service had just one fulltime officer doing Open Source Internet searching, and the Government Communications Security Bureau had few resources for this, too. It was not till June 2019 that the Government’s Counter-Terrorism Coordination Committee suggested “leveraging open-source intelligence capability”.
Police, unlike SIS, did not do an internal review of how they had performed in the lead-up to March 15.
They did get a review done of how they did 48 hours after the attacks, which praised their efforts.
Tools missing
Among the key systems police have been lacking are:
Police in a statement said they had now “achieved a number of milestones”.
Key among them was introducing a National Security Portal to manage persons of interest.
Also, they now had standardised ways of improving quality and a National Intelligence Operating Model to ensure a consistent approach.
“The OSINT team, a new case management tool and “refined intelligence support to major events… has increased the capability, capacity and resilience of Police Intelligence to reduce and respond to counter-terrorism risks”.
The “Transforming Intelligence” documents refer repeatedly to having three new Target Development Centres set up in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
However, this was jettisoned last year, while the overhaul did stick with introducing Precision Targeting Teams in August 2018, police said.
These teams aim to target “our most prolific offenders” early on “to reduce crimes such as burglary, robbery and other violent and high-volume offending”.
Pressure on
Police are plugging the holes in national intelligence while under pressure.
The volume of leads coming in had increased “considerably” since March 2019, the July 2020 report said.
“This has put increased strain on our people to manage cases of concern.”
The intelligence weaknesses have persisted under four police commissioners since the national intelligence system was set up in 2008.
Intelligence staff have been quitting at three times the average rate in the public sector, and the documents laid out urgent plans to improve career pathways and value the likes of field officers and collections staff more.
The July 2020 report said demand on workers at the Integrated Targeting and Operations Centre was “unsustainable”.
Deep-seated cultural problems across the police were recently uncovered by RNZ’s Ben Strang, whose reporting triggered an official investigation that found 40 percent of officers had been bullied or harassed.
The Transforming Intelligence 2021 programme covers 10 areas: Intelligence Operating Model, National Security, Open Source, Child Protection Offender Register, Critical Command Information, Collections, Intelligence Systems, Performance, Training and Intelligence Support to major events.
There is a stark contrast between how the police leadership described their intelligence systems, and what other documents state.
Timeline
2003
– The Government Audit Office underscores the importance of national security planning
– Police attempt to develop a national security plan deferred due to other priorities
2006
– Police appoint first national manager of intelligence – before this it was led at district level
2008
– New national intelligence model introduced, that lasts till 2019
2011
– March: Police national security intelligence review finds many gaps and recommends a slew of fixes
2014
– Police assess rightwing extremist threat nationally, the last time this happens before the end of 2018
2015
– Sept: Police review finds 2011’s shortcomings remain, recommends changes
– Police liaison officers begin work with SIS and GCSB
2018
– August: Precision Targeting Teams begin
– Nov/Dec: Police launch Transforming Intelligence overhaul, while praising the old model
2019
– March: Mosque terrorism attacks
– April: A report ramping up the intelligence overhaul celebrates the old model’s effectiveness
– Sept: Police approve high-level operating model for intelligence
– Oct: Police set up dedicated internet scanning team for first time
– Internet scanning team identifies counterterrorism threats
– Dec: Aim to set up professional development structure to reduce Intelligence staff attrition by 15 percent
2020
– National Intelligence Centre leadership team appointed
– Feb: Intelligence training plan in place; national workshops
– July: Stocktake of Intelligence overhaul finds many gaps
– Dec 2020-Dec 2021: Aim to identify new intelligence gathering and analysing tech, including a police-wide system
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
By Phil Pennington, RNZ News reporter
It took seven months for the New Zealand police to set up their first team for scanning the internet after the mosque attacks – but it was almost immediately in danger of being shut down.
An internal report released under the Official Information Act (OIA) said this was despite the team already proving its worth “many times over” in countering violent extremists.
The unit still does not have dedicated funding, despite a warning last July it risked being “turned off”.
This is revealed in 170 pages of OIA documents charting police intelligence shortcomings over the last decade, from pre-2011 extending through to mid-2020, and their attempts to overhaul the national system since 2018.
These show police had no dedicated team before 2019 to scan the internet for threats – what is called an OSINT team, for “Open Source Intelligence”.
“The OSINT team was stood up quickly last year with seconded staff to ensure… [an] appropriate emphasis on this new capability,” an internal report from July 2020 said.
In fact, police began the planning at the end of 2018, then “accelerated” it after the attacks, but it took till late October for the team to start, and training began in November 2019, a police statement to RNZ last week said.
This was all well after a January 2018 official assessment of the domestic terrorism threatscap said: “Open source reporting indicates the popularity of far right ideology has risen in the West since the early 2000s”.
When the police OSINT unit was finally set up, there was no guarantee it would last.
“This team is not permanent,” the July 2020 report said.
“This has meant uncertainty for staff and our intelligence customers.”
‘Seriously compromises’
The team had no dedicated budget, and lacked trained staff.
It also was still looking for tools to “quickly capture and categorise online intelligence elements”.
“The lack of a strong OSINT capability seriously compromises our intelligence collection posture, especially in major events,” said the report last July.
This is the sort of scanning that can pick up threats on 4chan or other extremist sites.
Despite the shortcomings, the internet team’s worth had already been proven “many times over in recent months, particularly in the counterterrorism and Countering Violent Extremism space”, the report said.
Three people have faced extremist charges in the last year or so.
‘Turned off’
An April 2019 report said police would begin recruiting for OSINT analytics and other specialists in April-May 2019.
Police had lacked a tool to search the dark web – where the truly egregious chat and trades take place on the internet – so bought one.
But last July’s report said “currently we run the risk” of OSINT “being turned off unless there is a dedicated budget”.
In a statement on Friday, police told RNZ: “The OSINT team has been funded as part of the overall allocation for intelligence since it was established.
“Maintaining this capability is a NZ Police priority, and dedicated funding is being sought as part of next year’s internal funding allocation process (note, this is funding from within Police’s existing baseline).
“Additional supplementary funding was also received in the last financial year to support the work of OSINT.”
They had known they needed the team, they said.
“Prior to March 15, New Zealand Police used some OSINT tools to support open source research of publicly available information and had identified the requirement to develop a dedicated capability.
“The development of this capability was accelerated by the events of March 15.”
‘9/11 moment’
The OIA documents show the OSINT intelligence weakness was not an isolated example.
These warned police needed to avoid “a ‘9/11’ moment” – a situation where police obtain information about a threat but do not understand it due to a failure to analyse how the dots join up, as happened to CIA and FBI before the terror attacks on New York in 2001.
The solution was to have “a complete intelligence picture”.
But the July 2020 report then laid out very clearly how police did not have this:
“Recent operational examples conclude there is no current ability to access all information in a timely and accurate manner,” it said.
“Currently there is no tool that can search across police holdings [databases] when undertaking analysis of investigations.
“We are still depending on manual searches.”
‘Locked down or invisible’
“Sources are either locked down or invisible to analysts. Our intelligence picture is consequently incomplete.”
The 31-page, July 2020 report detailed the police’s ‘Transforming Intelligence’ programme, dubbed TI21, that was begun in December 2018 and meant to be complete by this December.
It indicated the right technology would not be in place – or in some cases even identified – for 6-18 months.
As things stood, “there are many single points of failure in our intelligence system”, the report said.
Threat information was broken up into silos, without a centralised document management system or powerful enough analytic and geospatial software to connect the threats.
A section of the 2020 report detailing problems within the police’s High-Risk Targeting Teams has been mostly blanked out.
The OIA documents describe what is and is not working, especially when it comes to national security and counterterrorism, but also around intelligence on gang and drug crime, family violence, combating child sex offending, and the like, at a point many months after both the mosque attacks and the beginning of the system overhaul.
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the mosque attacks in late 2020 called police national security intelligence capabilities “degraded” – not just once but six times.
It showed weaknesses elsewhere when it came to OSINT: The Security Intelligence Service had just one fulltime officer doing Open Source Internet searching, and the Government Communications Security Bureau had few resources for this, too. It was not till June 2019 that the Government’s Counter-Terrorism Coordination Committee suggested “leveraging open-source intelligence capability”.
Police, unlike SIS, did not do an internal review of how they had performed in the lead-up to March 15.
They did get a review done of how they did 48 hours after the attacks, which praised their efforts.
Tools missing
Among the key systems police have been lacking are:
Police in a statement said they had now “achieved a number of milestones”.
Key among them was introducing a National Security Portal to manage persons of interest.
Also, they now had standardised ways of improving quality and a National Intelligence Operating Model to ensure a consistent approach.
“The OSINT team, a new case management tool and “refined intelligence support to major events… has increased the capability, capacity and resilience of Police Intelligence to reduce and respond to counter-terrorism risks”.
The “Transforming Intelligence” documents refer repeatedly to having three new Target Development Centres set up in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
However, this was jettisoned last year, while the overhaul did stick with introducing Precision Targeting Teams in August 2018, police said.
These teams aim to target “our most prolific offenders” early on “to reduce crimes such as burglary, robbery and other violent and high-volume offending”.
Pressure on
Police are plugging the holes in national intelligence while under pressure.
The volume of leads coming in had increased “considerably” since March 2019, the July 2020 report said.
“This has put increased strain on our people to manage cases of concern.”
The intelligence weaknesses have persisted under four police commissioners since the national intelligence system was set up in 2008.
Intelligence staff have been quitting at three times the average rate in the public sector, and the documents laid out urgent plans to improve career pathways and value the likes of field officers and collections staff more.
The July 2020 report said demand on workers at the Integrated Targeting and Operations Centre was “unsustainable”.
Deep-seated cultural problems across the police were recently uncovered by RNZ’s Ben Strang, whose reporting triggered an official investigation that found 40 percent of officers had been bullied or harassed.
The Transforming Intelligence 2021 programme covers 10 areas: Intelligence Operating Model, National Security, Open Source, Child Protection Offender Register, Critical Command Information, Collections, Intelligence Systems, Performance, Training and Intelligence Support to major events.
There is a stark contrast between how the police leadership described their intelligence systems, and what other documents state.
Timeline
2003
– The Government Audit Office underscores the importance of national security planning
– Police attempt to develop a national security plan deferred due to other priorities
2006
– Police appoint first national manager of intelligence – before this it was led at district level
2008
– New national intelligence model introduced, that lasts till 2019
2011
– March: Police national security intelligence review finds many gaps and recommends a slew of fixes
2014
– Police assess rightwing extremist threat nationally, the last time this happens before the end of 2018
2015
– Sept: Police review finds 2011’s shortcomings remain, recommends changes
– Police liaison officers begin work with SIS and GCSB
2018
– August: Precision Targeting Teams begin
– Nov/Dec: Police launch Transforming Intelligence overhaul, while praising the old model
2019
– March: Mosque terrorism attacks
– April: A report ramping up the intelligence overhaul celebrates the old model’s effectiveness
– Sept: Police approve high-level operating model for intelligence
– Oct: Police set up dedicated internet scanning team for first time
– Internet scanning team identifies counterterrorism threats
– Dec: Aim to set up professional development structure to reduce Intelligence staff attrition by 15 percent
2020
– National Intelligence Centre leadership team appointed
– Feb: Intelligence training plan in place; national workshops
– July: Stocktake of Intelligence overhaul finds many gaps
– Dec 2020-Dec 2021: Aim to identify new intelligence gathering and analysing tech, including a police-wide system
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Unions in Fiji say it is hard to believe the Prime Minister only found out about the controversial draft Police Bill after public uproar.
The draft legislation would have given police more surveillance powers if passed in Parliament.
Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama pulled the plug on the bill last week following widespread condemnation from civil society groups, individuals and opposition parties.
READ MORE: More reports on the Fiji Police Bill
The prime minister had said he only found out about the controversial draft legislation after the public uproar.
But the Fiji Trades Union Congress (FTUC) said it was surprised that Bainimarama had pulled the plug on the proposed Bill.
FTUC national secretary Felix Anthony said the whole country was aware of the draft bill because the consultations were launched publicly.
He said there was even a cake-cutting ceremony to mark the occasion in Suva with representatives from the New Zealand High Commission and UN development programme present.
NZ, UNDP funding consultations
Both New Zealand and the UNDP are co-funding the public consultations.
Anthony said the prime minister was obliged to tell the public how he was not made aware of it.
“Bainimarama needs to tell the public what actually happened and not only that, but we believe that there needs to be full consultation on any proposed Bill with the public and all parts need to be addressed,” the FTUC said in a statement.
The unions said it was “crazy and an insult” to the people of Fiji to ask them for their opinions on the proposed Bill which breached the Constitution.
“It is simply crazy that they know what was wrong with it, they know it was breaching the Constitution, yet they wanted to ask the people to tell them what is wrong with it, which is simply crazy and an insult to the people of Fiji.’
Following the prime minister’s retraction of the public consultations, his minister in charge of the police force, issued an apology.
Defence Minister Inia Seruiratu said he was sorry for allowing the draft Police Bill to go for public consultations.
Seruiratu said the ministry had overlooked the process the draft document needed to go through.
“I did the launching because of the work we had prepared,” Seruiratu said. “We have overlooked the process and we sincerely apologise for that.”
The Draft Bill is now under review, the minister said.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
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.
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’.
This post was originally published on The Canary.
By Christine Rovoi, RNZ Pacific journalist
A proposed draft Police Bill in Fiji has come under intense scrutiny from civil society groups and opposition parties.
The draft legislation will give police greater surveillance powers if passed in Parliament.
The proposal is now open to public submissions and the government says it will replace the Police Act 1965.
The draft Bill gives police the powers to secretly or forcefully enter any premises to place tracking devices.
Police can secretly monitor and record communications of people they suspect are about to commit a crime or have committed one, the Bill states.
The draft law also allows police to recruit an informer or anyone else who can provide information in relation to a police matter.
The government has not stated why it is necessary for police to search a crime scene and seize potential evidence without a warrant as stated in the Bill.
Police powers need ‘updating’
But the Minister for Police, Inia Seruiratu, said the Police Act 1965 needed to be updated because officers were now tasked with enforcing laws aligned to new and emerging challenges such as the global govid-19 pandemic, terrorism, transnational organised crime and other crimes evident around the globe.
Seruiratu said the Bill was a preliminary draft of submissions received by police during three days of consultations with the force’s key stakeholders in May 2019.
“Policing has developed beyond the traditional roles it is known for and the Fiji Police Force needs an enabling foundation that not only assists them in the work they are constitutionally mandated to do but will greatly enhance our national efforts to effectively respond to the rapidly evolving criminal landscape.”
However, the opposition parties have condemned the draft legislation and warned it encroaches on the civil liberties, democratic values and fundamental rights of Fijians.
The leader of the Social Democratic Liberal Party, Viliame Gavoka, said they would do everything in their power to ensure the draft legislation did not reach the floor of Parliament.
Gavoka said the “draconian” draft Bill would turn Fiji into a “police state”.
“There’s lots of uproar in the community about police brutality as it has been ongoing for some time,” he said.
“And then to introduce a Bill like this is truly frightening.
People ‘fearful of the police’
“The mentality of the country right now is fearful of the police. And here we have a Bill that gives them more powers to virtually do whatever they want to do with you.”
The president of the National Federation Party, Pio Tikoduadua, said the government’s plan to introduce a law that could allow authorities to enter and search anyone’s property through force at any time was “frightening”.
Tikoduadua said it was “inconceivable, ridiculous and insane”, adding a provision in the proposed Bill would make police force subject to military law in emergencies.
“So, when police are subjected to military law, does it make them soldiers? This is unthinkable in a democracy. It is martial law and can be invoked at any time.”
Former opposition leader Mick Beddoes said the proposed legislation would empower the police to suppress instead of protecting the people who had paid $US1.8 billion in wages to the security forces since 2017.
Beddoes said the Bill would dilute people’s constitutional rights and impose on them some of the harshest penalties and fines.
He said the proposed new law was ‘unwarranted and unjustified’.
NGOs claim draft Bill violates rights
The draft bill also forbade officers from joining a union and it would be unlawful for them to go on strike or to take any other type of industrial action.
Human rights activist Shamima Ali said this violated the fundamental rights of police officers who risked their lives on the front-line to ensure Fijians were safe.
Speaking at the International Women’s Day in Suva this week, Ali said i was time to push the barriers.
“The Police Bill has the potential to further shrink us,” she said. “We might think, ‘oh it doesn’t concern us. We’re only concerned with bread and butter’. This concerns everyone.
“We already have high rates of police brutality, pending cases and other criminal allegations. There are some hardworking, honest officers in the force but there are also the bad cops.”
The Coalition on Human Rights said this was not the time to be giving police more powers when Fiji was facing a pandemic of police brutality cases where individuals had lost their lives at the hands of police.
Its director, Nalini Singh, said this was unacceptable and a disgraceful reflection on the force which should be the bastion of lawfulness in this country.
Raised human rights concerns
“As the Coalition on Human Rights, we have repeatedly raised our concerns about the excessive force used by the Police during arrests on individuals, and the lack of transparency and urgency from the Police in investigation processes.
“And yet our call for urgent action have been left unanswered. This proposed Police Bill 2020 is a sad reflection of Fiji’s priorities in its commitments towards upholding and respecting human rights of Fijians.
According to data from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, between May 2015 and April 2020, 400 police officers were charged with serious violent-related offences.
The ODPP data showed the offences included 16 charges of rape, two charges of murder and nine charges of manslaughter.
The largest women’s group in Fiji, Soqosoqo Vakamarama iTaukei, said police officers had the right to be part of a union.
The group’s spokesperson, Adi Finau Tabakaucoro, said the Bill was supposed to help facilitate the work of the force.
Meanwhile, the Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Commission said it would, in its substantive submission, call for alignment of the Bill with the state’s human rights obligation under the domestic procedures and international conventions and treaties that Fiji had ratified.
Submission after tabling
Commissioner Ashwin Raj said his office would make its submission when the Bill was tabled in Parliament.
Raj said any commentary on the draft bill, before it was tabled in Parliament, was “premature”.
Meanwhile, police and the roads authority received an application for a protest permit march next week against the draft bill.
Lautoka-based businessman Ben Padarath also lodged applications with the Suva City Council.
The move has been supported by Opposition Whip Lynda Tabuya who said she would gather signatures for a petition to be presented to Parliament when it sits next month.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
By Christine Rovoi, RNZ Pacific journalist
A proposed draft Police Bill in Fiji has come under intense scrutiny from civil society groups and opposition parties.
The draft legislation will give police greater surveillance powers if passed in Parliament.
The proposal is now open to public submissions and the government says it will replace the Police Act 1965.
The draft Bill gives police the powers to secretly or forcefully enter any premises to place tracking devices.
Police can secretly monitor and record communications of people they suspect are about to commit a crime or have committed one, the Bill states.
The draft law also allows police to recruit an informer or anyone else who can provide information in relation to a police matter.
The government has not stated why it is necessary for police to search a crime scene and seize potential evidence without a warrant as stated in the Bill.
Police powers need ‘updating’
But the Minister for Police, Inia Seruiratu, said the Police Act 1965 needed to be updated because officers were now tasked with enforcing laws aligned to new and emerging challenges such as the global govid-19 pandemic, terrorism, transnational organised crime and other crimes evident around the globe.
Seruiratu said the Bill was a preliminary draft of submissions received by police during three days of consultations with the force’s key stakeholders in May 2019.
“Policing has developed beyond the traditional roles it is known for and the Fiji Police Force needs an enabling foundation that not only assists them in the work they are constitutionally mandated to do but will greatly enhance our national efforts to effectively respond to the rapidly evolving criminal landscape.”
However, the opposition parties have condemned the draft legislation and warned it encroaches on the civil liberties, democratic values and fundamental rights of Fijians.
The leader of the Social Democratic Liberal Party, Viliame Gavoka, said they would do everything in their power to ensure the draft legislation did not reach the floor of Parliament.
Gavoka said the “draconian” draft Bill would turn Fiji into a “police state”.
“There’s lots of uproar in the community about police brutality as it has been ongoing for some time,” he said.
“And then to introduce a Bill like this is truly frightening.
People ‘fearful of the police’
“The mentality of the country right now is fearful of the police. And here we have a Bill that gives them more powers to virtually do whatever they want to do with you.”
The president of the National Federation Party, Pio Tikoduadua, said the government’s plan to introduce a law that could allow authorities to enter and search anyone’s property through force at any time was “frightening”.
Tikoduadua said it was “inconceivable, ridiculous and insane”, adding a provision in the proposed Bill would make police force subject to military law in emergencies.
“So, when police are subjected to military law, does it make them soldiers? This is unthinkable in a democracy. It is martial law and can be invoked at any time.”
Former opposition leader Mick Beddoes said the proposed legislation would empower the police to suppress instead of protecting the people who had paid $US1.8 billion in wages to the security forces since 2017.
Beddoes said the Bill would dilute people’s constitutional rights and impose on them some of the harshest penalties and fines.
He said the proposed new law was ‘unwarranted and unjustified’.
NGOs claim draft Bill violates rights
The draft bill also forbade officers from joining a union and it would be unlawful for them to go on strike or to take any other type of industrial action.
Human rights activist Shamima Ali said this violated the fundamental rights of police officers who risked their lives on the front-line to ensure Fijians were safe.
Speaking at the International Women’s Day in Suva this week, Ali said i was time to push the barriers.
“The Police Bill has the potential to further shrink us,” she said. “We might think, ‘oh it doesn’t concern us. We’re only concerned with bread and butter’. This concerns everyone.
“We already have high rates of police brutality, pending cases and other criminal allegations. There are some hardworking, honest officers in the force but there are also the bad cops.”
The Coalition on Human Rights said this was not the time to be giving police more powers when Fiji was facing a pandemic of police brutality cases where individuals had lost their lives at the hands of police.
Its director, Nalini Singh, said this was unacceptable and a disgraceful reflection on the force which should be the bastion of lawfulness in this country.
Raised human rights concerns
“As the Coalition on Human Rights, we have repeatedly raised our concerns about the excessive force used by the Police during arrests on individuals, and the lack of transparency and urgency from the Police in investigation processes.
“And yet our call for urgent action have been left unanswered. This proposed Police Bill 2020 is a sad reflection of Fiji’s priorities in its commitments towards upholding and respecting human rights of Fijians.
According to data from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, between May 2015 and April 2020, 400 police officers were charged with serious violent-related offences.
The ODPP data showed the offences included 16 charges of rape, two charges of murder and nine charges of manslaughter.
The largest women’s group in Fiji, Soqosoqo Vakamarama iTaukei, said police officers had the right to be part of a union.
The group’s spokesperson, Adi Finau Tabakaucoro, said the Bill was supposed to help facilitate the work of the force.
Meanwhile, the Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Commission said it would, in its substantive submission, call for alignment of the Bill with the state’s human rights obligation under the domestic procedures and international conventions and treaties that Fiji had ratified.
Submission after tabling
Commissioner Ashwin Raj said his office would make its submission when the Bill was tabled in Parliament.
Raj said any commentary on the draft bill, before it was tabled in Parliament, was “premature”.
Meanwhile, police and the roads authority received an application for a protest permit march next week against the draft bill.
Lautoka-based businessman Ben Padarath also lodged applications with the Suva City Council.
The move has been supported by Opposition Whip Lynda Tabuya who said she would gather signatures for a petition to be presented to Parliament when it sits next month.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
By Anish Chand in Suva
Fiji police will have sweeping powers to monitor communications and forcefully enter premises to place tracking devices under the proposed Police Bill 2020.
The draft legislation is now open for public submissions and will replace the Police Act 1965 once passed by Parliament.
Police will have the powers to secretly or forcefully enter any premises to place tracking devices, states the draft law.
They will need to obtain a warrant from a High Court judge and “specify the vehicle, craft, or conveyance of any kind or goods that may be tracked, specify the premises, vehicle, craft, or conveyance of any kind that may be entered pursuant to the warrant”, states the draft law.
Police can also secretly monitor and record “communications” of persons about to commit a crime or have committed a crime if the draft law is passed in its current form.
The law also allows police to recruit an “informer” who is described as “any person who, whether formally recruited by police or otherwise, provides information in relation to anything sought by police for any lawful purpose”.
Police officers will not be allowed to join a union, states the draft law and it will be unlawful for them to go on strike or to take any industrial action.
Fiji Village radio website reports that the draft bill proposes that a police officer or special constable would be able to search a crime scene and seize potential evidence without a warrant.
The proposed law says a police officer or special constable may search any person, animal, vehicle or vessel at the crime scene or in the immediate vicinity of such crime scene.
Any person who fails to comply with this could be sent to prison for up to five years.
Anish Chand is a Fiji Times reporter. This report is republished with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.