Spies, kettling and repression – how British policing became militarised

The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.

Sarah Pickard, National Union of Students march, London, 2012. All rights reserved.

Dissent
and protest are on the rise in Britain, as well as
in other advanced democracies. The organisers of protests, the reasons for
protest and the nature of protest have all been shifting within the context of
neo-liberalism, the fall-out of the global financial crisis and austerity.

Traditional
marches and demonstrations remain an important type of popular protest.
However, there has been an increase of protest networks that are inventing creative direct-action
repertoires,
including short-notice events with the aid of digital media and a growth of ‘Do-it-Ourselves’ protest politics mostly
youth-led.

In
parallel, there has been a notable growth in state repression of protest
characterised by a distinctly punitive turn. In Britain, this has
taken two main forms that together have created a more authoritarian
environment, at odds with the right to freedom of expression and the right to
freedom of peaceful assembly enshrined in the Human Rights Act 1998, which came into force in 2000. First,
there have been substantial additions and amendments to legislation. Second,
there have been important introductions and changes to policing methods.

Increasing legislation
to criminalise and penalise dissent

The
legislative landscape pertaining to dissent has been transformed considerably
since the 1980s (see Table 1). New criminal justice laws have been passed or
amendment and existing laws drawn up ostensibly for other purposes have been
applied to protests and protesters. The clear aim of successive governments
through all these layers of legislation has been an attempt to dissuade and
discourage protests, partly through the criminalisation of dissent.

The
key piece of legislation is the Public
Order Act
1986, passed by the Thatcher-led Conservative Government after riots at the end
of the 1970s and early 1980s that were followed by violent clashes during the
year-long miners’ strike (1984-1985). As well as creating many public order
offences, the law imposes various conditions on the organisers of public
‘processions’ (i.e. moving protests or marches) and assemblies. At the same
time, it allows the police to prohibit marches and impose conditions on
protesters. For critics, the obligations and restrictions contained in the law
are an affront to civil liberties and an infringement of the human rights
enshrined in the European Convention on
Human Rights (ECHR).

The
Labour Government of Tony Blair also introduced decisive legislation affecting
public protests in the form of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, that gave more powers to the
police and placed further restrictions on protesters. Crucially, this was
achieved through the ambiguous and subjective notion of anti-social behaviour
(ASB): “conduct which caused or was likely to cause alarm, harassment, or
distress.” The legislation was not drawn up initially with the aim of
controlling dissent, but it came to be used by the police in public protest
situations. This led to anxiety that the police could further reduce freedom of
expression and freedom of peaceful assembly. The statute was modified by the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003, that gave
additional powers to the police. Subsequently, the Conservative-Liberal
Democrat coalition government further reinforced the legislative framework with
the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and
Policing Act 2014, which consolidated, expanded and bolstered law enforcement powers.
For example, it allows the police to create ‘Dispersal Zones’ and it permits
the pre-emptive dispersal of people – including peaceful protesters – for the
purpose of “reducing the likelihood of alarm, harassment, or distress”.
Crucially, non-compliance and breach of a dispersal order is a criminal offence
that can lead to a
prison sentence.

A
further controversial development within the legislative framework has been
recourse to laws developed for the purpose of preventing terrorism being used to thwart,
curtail or end peaceful protests. For example, the Terrorism Act 2000 (section 44) authorised police to ‘stop
and search’ members of the public without the need for reasonable suspicion
that terrorism had taken place or was likely to occur. Indiscriminate stop and search was
deemed incompatible with the European
Convention on Human Rights, which became applicable in the UK with the Human Rights Act 1998. Consequently, the
then Home Secretary Theresa May was obliged to repeal section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

The
parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights underlined in its March 2009
report Demonstrating Respect for Rights? that “counter-terrorism
powers should never be used against peaceful protesters” and in a follow-up report, it once again deplored the
“obvious overuse of section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 in recent years”. In 2010, in a case
brought by a peace protester and a
journalist,
the European Court of Human Rights ruled the police powers of stop and search
in the context of peaceful protest to be unlawful. This was because the police
lacked sufficient safeguards to protect basic civil liberties, i.e. the right
to freedom of expression and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly. Thus,
indiscriminate stop and search was deemed incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, which became
applicable in the UK with the Human
Rights Act 1998. Consequently, the then Home Secretary Theresa May was obliged to repeal section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and introduce “a new
suspicion threshold”. Nonetheless, stop and search continues to be used in
peaceful protest situations.

Moreover,
there has been a conflation of peaceful protest with terrorism, in part due to
a very broad or loose or definition of ‘terrorism.’ For example, the Occupy
London movement that camped out in the capital in 2011-2012 was classified by
the City of London police as “domestic extremism” in a counter-terrorism
document.
For Liberty, the counter-terrorism
laws are too broad, thus undermining civil liberties and human rights
especially for peaceful protestors.

Other
statutory powers have been introduced into British legislation that allow the
monitoring of groups and individuals. Notably, the Data Retention and Investigatory
Powers Act 2014 authorised police and intelligence agencies to
access telephone and internet records. This was described as “spying on citizens” by opponents, the well-known MPs
David Davis (Conservative) and Tom Watson (Labour), and it was ruled unlawful by the High Court in 2015.
First it was amended by the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act
2015, which enables “the Secretary of State to require communications service
providers to retain an additional category of communications data, namely data
that will allow relevant authorities to link the unique attributes of a public
Internet Protocol (IP) address to the person (or device) using it at any given
time.” It was then replaced by the Investigatory
Powers Act 2016 that allows certain surveillance powers and certain
safeguards to them. For example, the Occupy London movement that camped out in the
capital in 2011-2012 was classified by the City of London police as “domestic
extremism” in a counter-terrorism document.

The considerable information gleaned through such
means and others (see below) is held on various searchable police data bases,
including the Police National Computer (PNC) and the Police National Database (PND) that are
due to be replaced by the National Law Enforcement Data Programme that will “introduce new and
enhanced data sets into LEDS such as, Biometrics, Images from DVLA &
Passports, ANPR and analytical tools”. Other databases comprise IDENT1,
the National DNA Database (NDNAD) and the Crimint (criminal intelligence) database used by the London Metropolitan Police Service (the Met).
Strikingly, information is held on convicted criminals and suspected criminals,
but also political campaigners and protestors (see below).

In brief,
there has been a move towards tougher legislation, ambiguous terminology, lower
thresholds and legislation that allows the police greater rights to restrict the dates of marches, the routes of marches, the numbers of
people permitted to march, the right to disperse crowds, to make arrests, to
stop and search, to collect biometric data and to store information on
searchable data bases. Furthermore, other policing methods have also been called
into question within the context of policing protest.

More militaristic
policing

In recent years, there has been an escalation of
oppressive and militaristic forms of policing used during protests. British
police officers and most notably the Met have diversified their tools and
strategies, which form a tryptic of policing methods that are far removed from
traditional ‘policing by consent,’ a principle that dates back to the early
nineteenth century.

First, there is more covert and overt surveillance
or monitoring, with information stocked on data bases. Second, there has been a
growth in the physical methods made available to police officers, including
containment (kettles), tear gas, tasers and water cannon, as well as the use of
‘unnecessary force’ and violence being used on bystanders and peaceful
protesters. Third, police are using various practices to prevent people from
protesting, such as mass arrests, pre-emptive arrests, detention and
conditional bail.

The overt and covert surveillance of peaceful
protesters during marches is undertaken by different types of police officers,
notably Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT), Police Liaison Officers (PLO), and Evidence Gathering Teams
(EGT) (see photographs). During
demonstrations, Forward Intelligence Teams observe and track participants, noting appearance,
behaviour, communication, movement and associations. For Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), “one of the tactics employed by FITs is to seek out persons likely to
engage in disorder and follow them to monitor their actions. The purpose of
this is to deprive the person of the ability to engage in disorder, due to the
proximity of police officers. This tactic has been criticised by a number of
protest groups as oppressive and constituting harassment of peaceful
protesters”. Netpol and other critics allege that Police Liaison Officers deployed during
demonstrations and marches also fulfil a role of intelligence gathering, as
explained by Val
Swain in openDemocracy.

Evidence
Gathering Teams mostly photograph and
film participants, which may involve identifying, spotting, following and
monitoring particular people with the aim of preventing and detecting crime. This
can be seen in the pictures shown here taken in November 2012 during a National
Union of Students (NUS) march. According to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of
Constabulary (HMIC), “police use of overt photography
raises significant human rights issues, notably the question of whether police
action is compatible with the right to private life protected by ECHR.” This is all the more concerning,
as images of peaceful protesters and bystanders not engaged in
any illegal or provocative behaviour are also obtained and retained. The information
and images are stocked on searchable data bases (see above) and ‘spotter cards’ are produced for identification uses. Such surveillance can
be intimidating and have a deterrent or ‘chilling effect’ on peaceful
protesters, thus preventing people from exercising their democratic right to
peaceful protest. It may also
encourage persons to cover their faces and resist police surveillance by other means. It creates
a divisive ‘them and us’ atmosphere and represents a departure from traditional
consensual policing. Images of peaceful protesters and bystanders not
engaged in any illegal or provocative behaviour are also obtained and retained.

Other
surveillance tactics have included police operatives with fake identities
infiltrating political groups, for example environmental activists, in order to
carry out covert surveillance of law-abiding protesters and disrupt protests.
Most disturbingly, there have been several cases of police officers involved in long-term intimate relationships with the targets of
their monitoring, including at least two who fathered children and then
disappeared. Some have acted as agent provocateurs by initiating,
organising and encouraging civil disobedience. This all obviously raises
considerable ethical issues and the infringement of civil liberties and civil
rights.

Regarding the militarisation of policing tactics in
public order and protest situations, a contentious development has been the
increased use by the police of containment or ‘kettling.’ This is the encircling of people (protesters,
bystanders, observers) in a specific area (for example, a public square, a road
or a bridge) by police officers who can then control the movement of the people
contained. The people kettled are detained and deprived of their freedom of
movement, sometimes for hours without having committed or being suspected of
having committed any criminal activity. For example, police used containment on
peaceful protesters at anti-G-20 Climate Camp in London, in April 2009.
Subsequently, the High Court of Justice ruled that the Met had used undue force
and that containment was inappropriate. On 9 December 2010, the Metropolitan
Police went on to use containment in Parliament Square and on Westminster Bridge for
several hours into the night during protests (against the trebling of annual
university tuition fees, higher education funding cuts and the scrapping of the
Educational Maintenance Allowance). The people
kettled are detained and deprived of their freedom of movement, sometimes for
hours without having committed or being suspected of having committed any
criminal activity.

Containment is indiscriminate and inflammatory; it
can be frightening and dangerous. Kettling permits the police to restrict the
movement of those inside with the purpose of reducing potential disorder. But
containment is also carried out to harvest personal information (for example,
names, addresses, and fingerprints via mobile digital fingerprinting devices), making release
contingent on the provision of information with intimidating threats of fines
and arrest for noncompliance, although such requests are not officially allowed.  

There has also been an increase in the procurement
and use of weapons by the police in the context of public protest, which raise human rights issues. CS
spray (tear gas), for example, was used on UK Uncut protesters staging a
peaceful sit-in against corporate tax avoidance, in a crowded area on Oxford
Street, London, January 2011. Six members of UK Uncut sued the Commissioner of
Police of the Metropolis, who was obliged to apologise for the use of
“unnecessary and unlawful” “excessive force” when protesters were sprayed in
the face at close range causing, “intense pain, momentary
loss of sight, and feelings of panic and fear.” He also apologised for the police
preventing people from “exercising their fundamental right to protest” and the
Met awarded damages to the protesters involved.

Another
example of excessive force and violence taking place is when police officers,
“use of the edge of a shield against individuals” as a “public order tactic.” There have been
notable cases of excessive force being exerted on young protesters, such as on Alfie Meadows in 2010, which brought
about the creation of the organisation Defend the Right to Protest (DTRTP).

Tasers are ‘conducted electrical weapons’ or
‘electro-shock weapons’ that fire electrically charged probes, incapacitating
the target. Following pilot schemes around the country, most police forces
started using Tasers in 2009, including in protest situations. An upgraded more
powerful version ‘Taser X2’ was authorised for use by police in England and Wales by the Conservative Home
Secretary, in March 2017. Amnesty International and other organisations have
raised concerns about the use of CS Gas and Tasers by the “trigger happy”
police, for example, when West Midlands police officers dealt with a student sit-in at Warwick University in 2014.

“Austerity
measures”

In
January 2014, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the Association
of Chief Police Officers commented that “ongoing
and potential future austerity measures are likely to lead to continued protest”
they
expected water cannon to be required. A few months later, the then Conservative
Mayor of London Boris Johnson purchased
second-hand water cannon for the purpose of public order management in the capital
(a first on mainland Britain). His Labour successor Sadiq Khan considered them
inappropriate and wanted to sell them, but there have been no
buyers.

Last,
another militaristic development in policing has been the authorisation for
police firearms teams in London
to deploy attenuating energy
projectiles (AEP), also called baton rounds or rubber bullets. Importantly,
such permissions were issued prior to student demonstrations against higher university tuition fees, for example, in November 2011.

Neither water cannon nor rubber bullets have been
used on protesters on mainland Britain. But their procurement is a clear
illustration of the militarisation of policing methods in recent years. When
amalgamated with other practices, such as mass arrests, pre-emptive arrests and
pre-charge bail with exacting conditions leading to no prosecution, etc, they
contribute to a repressive environment in Britain surrounding lawful dissent.

Taken
together, new legislation, amendments to legislation, the enforcement of legislation
combined with the subsequent changes to policing tools and strategies since the
end of the 1970s have resulted in the increasing militarisation of the policing
of public order and protest in Britain. There have been successive challenges to legislation
and policing methods in the UK High Court of Justice and the European Court of
Human Rights with reference to the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR),
the Human Rights Act 1998. There have been successive challenges to legislation and policing methods
in the UK High Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights with
reference to the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), the Human Rights Act 1998.

This raises
crucial questions about what will happen to these fundamental checks and
balances as Britain withdraws from the European Union. Moreover, it should not
be overlooked that the repression of protest by the State through legislation
and policing creates feelings of injustice and anger among young protesters that
can be expressed through resentment and hostility towards politicians and the
police. There
are of course certain protesters and activists who are very provocative and
aggressive towards the police and some are violent and break the law. However,
this does not justify the increasingly authoritarian behaviour towards peaceful
protesters many of whom are young.

 

This article is based on the
following chapter:

Sarah Pickard. Governing,
Monitoring and Regulating Youth Protest in Contemporary Britain. In Governing
Youth Politics in the Age of Surveillance.
Grasso,
Maria and Bessant, Judith (eds.). 2018. London:
Routledge, pp. 77-90.

The photographs illustrating
points raised in the article were taken by the author Sarah Pickard when acting
as an independent observer on the 21 November 2012 National Union of Students
(NUS) march in London.