Cops Prize Anonymity, Arrest Women Asking Questions

In democratic countries, people have a right to — as our Bill of Rights puts it beautifully — "peaceably to assemble." Because police officers are our in our service and we are their bosses, we also have the right to ask them questions, some of which they must answer by law; no cop may withhold his name and badge number from a citizen interested in learning them.

Here's footage of how those rights are working out in practice in the U.K. — footage that also shows what happens when you train a camera on a police officer. It ain't pretty.

The video is one of those you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it jobs that may evolve into a cultural touchstone of sorts, a watershed moment — along with the video of a bystander at another recent demonstration who actually died after being needlessly attacked by his uniformed protectors.

England seems to turn a little scarier every week. Good to see some people (such as the Kingsnorth protesters) refuse to stand idly by while their country descends into soft totalitarianism.

Comments

[hermesten]

For the most part, the public, here or in the UK, views "protesters" as pieces-of-shit (POS) (and in the video the cops are even wearing latex gloves, so this is more than a metaphor). Granted, members of one's own tribe aren't POS --abortion protesters aren't POS to the anti-abortion crowd, but climate protesters are, and vice-versa.

Conceptually, cops don't give any more of a fuck about the role of protest in a supposed democracy than the general public. For them, a bunch of climate protesters are both a pain-in-the-ass and a chance to flex their muscles and assert their authority. And they can do it with impunity because they know that 99% of the public thinks climate (or whatever) protesters are nutty, pain-in-the-ass, extremist POS (anyone protesting anything, is of course, an "extremist").

Until the general public develops the attitude that protest is a healthy part of self-governance, and feels more solidarity with protesters than the State, the cops will treat protesters like POS. In other words, because we live in societies where merely asking unpleasant and discomforting questions is routinely condemned as being "negative," and protesters by their nature are part of small minorities (whatever the cause), they're always going to be treated like POS.