Friday briefing: How Palestine Action ​arrests ​expose a ​new ​authoritarian ​edge​ to UK police

The Guardian

10 hours ago

Good morning. An award-winning poet, a decorated army officer, and a retired head teacher are handcuffed together in the back of a police van ... It's not the start of a terrible joke, but a representation of just some of the eyebrow-raising arrests the police have made in recent weeks.
These eminently establishment figures are just a few of the 700 arrested for showing support for Palestine Action after it was proscribed as a terrorist organisation. Many were in their seventies or older, and video footage made one of the mass arrests look like a giant garden party gone sour.
Safe to say, manhandling octogenarians is sub-optimal optics for the police. 'I've never been arrested before so I'm quite nervous, actually,' said one elderly man wearing a beige blazer.
But bigger shifts in policing appear to be under way. Most recently, new government guidance says police forces should look to disclose the ethnicity and migration status of suspects charged in high-profile investigations. Although this may solve one headache for the criminal justice system – stopping the spread of conspiracies about alleged offenders – it could create another by damaging race relations across the country.
For today's newsletter, Rajeev Syal, home affairs editor at the Guardian, discusses the police's pivot to a more authoritarian approach to protest, the potential impacts of releasing information about race, and which voters are being wooed. That's after the headlines.
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A total of 532 people were arrested in London last Saturday at the largest demonstration in support of Palestine Action. Most of them were simply holding supportive placards or signs. Half of the people arrested were aged 60 or older, according to police figures. Nearly 100 of those detained were in their 70s and 15 were in their 80s.
Police officers manning the protest were obliged to make these arrests. 'It's not how one would envisage the job. And they are just doing their job,' says Rajeev Syal. 'When you speak to officers privately, they know that they're not picking up thugs, they're picking up people who are motivated by politics and beliefs, and they're also peaceful. So it does certainly make police officers sit up and think.'
Such events illustrate broader changes in policing driven by changing priorities in the Labour government. 'I would say that this government has certainly moved towards a more authoritarian line on protests compared to previous governments,' says Rajeev.
'It does look as if they are pivoting towards an electorate who are less comfortable with asylum seekers in their constituencies, who are more worried about small boats coming over the sea. They know they have to win those people over in order to win a general election.'
The surge in Reform UK support has made the government nervous, even though we're barely a year past an historic landslide election. Labour remain focused on so-called red wall seats dominated by white working-class voters in market, former mill and seaside towns. 'Those are the places they think they've got to win people over,' explains Rajeev.
What is the logic behind revealing the racial identity of suspects?
In recent days, home secretary Yvette Cooper, welcomed new police guidelines that encourage forces to release the race and nationality of those charged in high-profile cases. It comes after an independent watchdog found that failure to share basic facts about the Southport killer last summer led to 'dangerous fictions' which helped spark riots across the country.
The policy is designed to work on two fronts, explains Rajeev. Firstly, the government wants to stop the rise of the far right and their ability to organise through misinformation and fomenting public disorder by spreading untruths about suspects (such as the Southport case). And secondly, it sends a signal to potential Reform UK voters that the government is taking the issue of people committing crimes while applying for asylum seriously.
'Reform UK politicians have promoted the idea that the government and the police are involved in a cover-up of information, and this allows the government to say, 'well we can't be',' says Rajeev. 'I think there's a lot of politics involved behind some of these decisions: it's the politics of winning over Reform voters and undermining Reform in those pivotal seats that will define the next election.'
What are the criticisms of the policy?
The family of Bebe King, one of the three girls killed in the Southport attack last year, have expressed their dismay at the decision. They have urged ministers to reconsider support for disclosing the ethnicity of serious crime suspects saying the information was 'completely irrelevant'. The family's position is that mental health issues, and the propensity to commit crime, have nothing to do with ethnicity, nationality or race. Their argument is that such tragedies are too often used as a political football, especially by the far right.
Campaigners have argued it could set a dangerous precedent for 'dog-whistle politics', Rajeev says: 'When a suspect involved in an alleged crime is thought to be a black or brown person, or an asylum seeker, there will be huge pressure on the Home Office from right-leaning media and on social media to release details … but there won't be as much pressure, when it's obviously a white man.'
'This will add to the distorted impression that minority ethnic people and refugees are responsible for a disproportionate number of crimes.'
What is the counter argument?
Lawrence Sherman, a criminology professor from the University of Cambridge, and ex-chief scientific officer for the Met Police, disagrees that it will inflame racial tensions – he believes the opposite to be true.
Last summer, after false rumours spawned online about the Southport killer's foreign nationality, the police were not in a position to correct the misinformation. 'I would say that was a problem with the rules,' he says. These rules have now been changed.
Sherman believes that stating the demographic details of suspects will help with transparency. 'Especially in an era of what Richard Hofstadter, the American historian, called 'paranoid politics', in which people are always suspicious of 'elites' trying to cover things up. Greater transparency about all these things will help to shape a dialogue around peacekeeping on one hand and proportionality on the other.'
And while the far right may be championing the changes, he cautions it may not have the result they are hoping for: 'Being transparent about it will remind people that there's a lot of very violent white people in this country.'
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