Pre-emptive Policing 153

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I am deeply concerned about pre-emptive policing,  or arresting people who might be going to do something wrong.  I frankly don’t believe the BBC’s claim that intelligence indicated that anti-G8 protestors in Soho had weapons, or at any rate I do not believe it was honest intelligence.  I note there are no reports of these weapons actually having been discovered.

The rounding up, arresting and beating of groups of protestors before they had even begun to protest is so taken for granted in London now that I can find no reflection in the media of the outrage I feel.  If an old duffer like me feels completely alienated from the authoritarian state in which I find I now live, how do younger, more radical people feel?  There seems a terrible divide between the corporate-political elite surrounded by their massive Praetorian guard at Bilderberg, and everybody else.  Society is not stable.

The BBC has lost all sense of self-knowledge.  Yesterday it displayed scenes of police beating protestors for no apparent reason on the streets of London, which was presented as protecting innocent shoppers on Oxford Street.  This immediately followed very similar scenes of police beating protestors on the streets of Istanbul, which was portrayed as a terrible act of anti-Western suppression.  Irony is dead.

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153 thoughts on “Pre-emptive Policing”

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  • Phil

    Yesterday it was really hard to join the demo. I presumed I was walking stright into a kettle or mass arrest. And it’s easy to convince yourself that it’s not really worth the effort. Really easy. Then my missus returned having met a distressed neighbour heading to commit crime. A pensioner, forced to shoplift food as a direct result of the bedroom tax. So I felt obliged to help keep the rozzers distracted while she popped down tescos. Apparently the trick is to pay for dirt cheap shit whilst bagging prime steak at the automatic checkouts. You live and learn.

  • Fred

    @Dreoilin

    Harold Wilson and MI5 weren’t just on good terms, they didn’t trust him. It’s said that there were plans for a military coup to overthrow the Wilson government and install a government of business leaders led by Mountbatten which had the backing of MI5. Rumours had been started by some in the security services that he was working for the Russians.

  • Jemand

    I have said this for a long time – if you can measure the shape and deformation of a person’s skull, you can often detect the unmistakable sloping brow and cranial bumpage of the career criminal and have a solid case for pre-emptively locking him up before he commits terrible crimes such as paedophilia, terrorism, loan defaulting and parking offences.

    Failing the early detection of such felons, I recommend acquiring the necessary skills for dealing with them in another pre-emptive way; namely, the ancient Welsh martial art of Llapgoch.

    http://www.llapgoch.org.uk/

  • craig Post author

    Well, I would be on the streets but I still can’t walk! I think that qualifies me as an old duffer 🙂

  • Dreoilin

    “Rumours had been started by some in the security services that he was working for the Russians.”

    Well, Fred, it’s his ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that Hague is now pulling on. Probably not worth the paper it was never written on. And not because he was working for the Russians.

    Jemand, that was funny. But I must make clear that I love the Welsh, and their country. (Except during the Six Nations.)

    Craig, did you manage to see your private doctor yet??

  • KingofWelshNoir

    Jemand, you can joke, but in school in Aberystwyth in the 70s we were taught Llap Gogh as part of the curriculum. (Principally to defend ourselves against the school games teacher.)

  • Herbie

    With all of these abuses by the state and its agents, it’s clear that if mass media doesn’t make a stand then it’s as if it never happened. Media today doesn’t just not make a stand. It operates as PR agency for the abusers.

    That’s the challenge. It’s media.

    Get that right and the abusers will be rather more circumspect.

    That’s why the Medialens project is so important.

  • fedup

    Ann Clwyd is now maintaining contact with Bradley Manning, and she worries her calls may be tapped. That is nice get out close for the Saddam Shredding machine investigator, whom as the chairman of “INDICT” (a poxy acronym, similar to the rash of many other poxy acronyms so fashionable in the run up to the slaughter in Iraq) she was busy selling the war on Iraq.

    Ann Clwyd, Labour MP for Cynon Valley and chair of Indict, a group that has been campaigning since 1996 for the creation of an international criminal tribunal to try the Baathists, wrote of the shredder in the Times on 18 March — the day of the Iraq debate in the House of Commons and three days before the start of the war. Clwyd described an Iraqi’s claims that male prisoners were dropped into a machine ‘designed for shredding plastic’, before their minced remains were ‘placed in plastic bags’ so they could later be used as ‘fish food’. Sometimes the victims were dropped in feet first, reported Clwyd, so they could briefly behold their own mutilation before death.

    The same Ann whose appearance changed from an unkempt, and dishevelled harriden to a millionaire post the war on Iraq. The same Ann who allegedly has extensive financial interests in Iraq (as per the rumour mill). Why is this character in touch with that poor bastard Bradley Manning? Further, why has she asked Billy fourteen pints about eavesdropping on her conversations with the said Bradley Manning? Does she not know that Bradley Manning is under a regime of Total Surveillance?

  • mike

    Absolutely, Herbie. That’s why I said to a friend tonight: For the weather I watch TV; for knowledge I go online. But acting on that knowledge…that’s where Camus’ rebel has to take the first step. He has to say ‘no’.

    Or to paraphrase Peter Finch in ‘Network’: I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!

  • Indigo

    Craig,

    Hope you get it dealt with soon … get better … and get back out there.

  • Vronsky

    Pre-emptive policing? Predicted by Philip K Dick. Cross all your fingers and all your toes and hope that he was wrong about everything else.

  • Vronsky

    I saw a documantary once (back in the days when I watched TV) where a man who had been bitten by a venomous snake narrated, day by day, the progress of the poisoning. He began the project because he didn’t think he would die. But he did.

    Is that what we’re doing here?

  • John Goss

    Fedup, as regards Ann Clwyd I couldn’t agree more. Why would someone so pro the Iraq war, who made visits to the Kurdish regions to push the Blair line, suddenly have sympathy for Bradley Manning? In my eyes she was a despicable careerist, at least at that stage of her career. However, people do change, and if it is genuine (how does anybody know?) then she is one of the few warmongers who has moved against the Blair doctrine. Perhaps she has re-discovered the roots that brought her into the Labour Party. We will never know. Perhaps she has had a vision of the prospects of war-crime courts like those held at Nuremberg after the Second World War. They are coming if the military does not destroy the world as we know it.

  • JimmyGiro

    Nobody has mentioned Ritalin yet.

    Pre-emptive policing becomes redundant once pharmacological control is established. And the State can use genetic and or behavioural profiles, to target the ‘likely lads’ whilst they’re still at school.

    Remember when the film “Revenge of the Stepford Wives” was a brutish chauvinistic dystopian fantasy, where ‘freedom fighting women’ fought back, by killing a man? Now it’s those same women committing the real deal against boys; maybe the lads should strike a blow for liberty and equality?

  • kathy

    Fedup and John Goss your comments about Ann Clwyd are so true. Then I suddenly thought what if she isn’t an evil unprincipled witch but simply as stupid as she looks and swallowed unquestioningly a whole lot of Kurdish propaganda against Saddam!

  • Iain Orr

    Komodo’s rant ( 12 June, 10.14 am) was, I hope, prescient. Let’s be loyal Turkish dissidents, like Boris’s great-grandfather – Ali Kemal Bey.

  • Komodo

    Don’t be daft. Of course police tactics are considered. In my experience these protesters, on the sharp end, are far more aware of police tactics than theorists.

    And spontaneous mass uprisings are never entirely spontaneous – there is always a background of some sort of activists organising.

    I think I failed to get my point across clearly. Tactics, maybe. Not strategy. Not the bigger picture. Any demo you care to name has already been pre-empted, whether you as a demonstrator consider it a success or not. Its PR value – its only value, apart from adding to the list of personalities kept under surveillance, will automatically be nullified by police and government press releases which our wonderful press will print and broadcast intact and uncritically. Ensuring that no-one who doesn’t already feel that way, continues not to feel that way.

    And where there are ‘activists’ ‘organising’, there is a security breach. They’ve been infiltrated, 9 times out of 10. More than likely the press releases have been written before the demo takes place…in the press department there’s an assistant commissioner’s media specialist who’s getting very bored with his job.

    It’s a nice day out with your chums, enjoying the solidarity of a football crowd (the approved alternative?). You can learn about police tactics on the ground…it’s like a war game, isn’t it? But ultimately you achieve very little. Mr. Guardian says, yeah, right on, where’s my ciabatta? and Mrs Daily Mail says, they don’t look very clean and they sound rude. You’re not influencing anyone, ultimately.

  • Komodo

    I see Erdogan is dangling the poisoned carrot of a referendum on Gezi Square’s redevelopment in front of the protestors. He may mean it. It may even be a fair referendum, and he may even be forced to concede, and that will still be a gain for him, because it will take the steam out of the Western-journo attracting treehuggers who kicked the protests off, and leave him free to use the police in the traditional Turkish way to mop up the politicos, quietly, in the following weeks.

  • Villager

    Komodo, the referendum will make it all about politics and detract from the basic environmental impact that is so obvious. Its an effective way of diffusing the energy of the young people who just want to live freely and get on with their day-to-day lives. In other words, manipulative. The only ray of hope is that people turn this tool around to reject the corruption inherent in these developments.

  • Flaming June

    Public Accounts Committee (chair Mrs Hodge) on Google’s tax arrangements.
    http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmpubacc/112/11202.htm

    ‘HMRC must fully investigate Google over tax, say MPs
    Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, says HMRC should be “much more assertive”

    HM Revenue and Customs should “fully investigate” Google after information from whistleblowers “undermined” the firm’s defence of its tax arrangements, a committee of MPs has said.

    Google says that advertising sales take place in low-tax Ireland, not the UK.

    But the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said it had been told by ex-employees of the tech giant that UK-based staff are engaged in selling.’
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22878460

    Google connections to No 10.
    http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1371039262.html

    One of those mentioned in the list above is Naomi Gummer, daughter of Tory peer Lord Chadlington who is Cameron’s neighbour. She was installed in Hunt’s DCMS as a civil servant. She married Henry Allsop, brother of the ubiquitous Kirstie and godson of Camilla. The Camerons and the Hunts attended the wedding as did Camilla.

    Another illustration of the connections within a pervasive ruling clique.

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