Why would we want police to have more power?

At the beginning of the pandemic, people flocked to purchase copies of 1984. Are we ready to take on Big Brother?

In the spring of 2013, I spent a night in Michigan State University’s drunk tank with a girl from Grand Valley, a university about two hours north of Lansing where we were. She wasn’t much older than me at the time, eighteen or nineteen and she told me that the officer who brought her in had sexually assaulted her. He’d known she was drunk, he’d known she was alone and he probably thought that she wouldn’t say anything. Even if she did, who would believe her?

Experiences like this happen often. In 2019, the Guardian reported on police sexual misconduct in England and Wales and found that from 2012 to 2017, nearly 1,500 accusations of sexual misconduct had been made against police officers. These accusations included sexual harassment, child abuse and exploiting crime victims. These figures from 33 forces across England and Wales were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, which allows the public to make requests for information from public bodies and usually requires these institutions to respond in a certain number of days (~60 days). Amongst these forces, it was the London Metropolitan Police which took an extra year to respond, eventually providing their data in 2018.

It was also a Met Police officer who is allegedly responsible for the abduction and murder of Sarah Everard. It was the Met Police that failed to follow up on a report of that officer exposing himself. It was the Met Police who made national headlines this weekend for how they chose to handle the London vigil for Sarah Everard. The Mayor of London even tweeted about the mishandling of the vigil, and yet there is a bill being pushed through Parliament that would give police the power to determine what deems a protest ‘disruptive’. What the fuck is going on here?

Sami Chakrabarti wrote this morning that organisers of London Reclaim These Streets acted impeccably in their planning of the vigil. She writes,

They offered to work with the police to ensure the planned one-hour vigil was calm and socially distanced, complete with volunteer stewards so that public safety could for the most part be self-policed. Given that a police officer has been charged in connection with the death of Sarah Everard, you might have expected the Met to have gratefully accepted this plan. Indeed, this seems to be what happened at borough command level, before Scotland Yard intervened. This catastrophic misjudgment appears to have come from high up, as Reclaim These Streets resorted to a high court application to ensure the vigil could go ahead.

Yet police descended on the vigil anyway, pushing and shoving people and inciting violence. The very same precinct that employed the officer who brought them all to that place, to protest the murder of another person at the hands of the police. What insensitive and re-traumatising aggression to invade a vigil for a woman who was murdered at the hands of a police officer, particularly when many women who were at that vigil had previously reported to the Met Police their own experiences of sexual violence. Black and brown women, and especially trans women are at an even greater risk of police violence, sexual violence and racial violence and we do not talk about their experiences the way that we do white women like Sarah Everard. We do not hear about their disappearances the way we do white women like Sarah, because the media do not cover them.

Because of what happened at London’s Reclaim These Streets event, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill has been introduced today — and it is dangerously authoritarian. It gives police the power to determine what is a ‘disruptive’ protest, and it gives Priti Patel the powers to create laws without parliamentary approval, when the home secretary has already shown a distain for other peaceful protests such as BLM and XR. This bill feels like a power grab, and it is terrifying. The right to peaceful assembly and protest is a fundamental part of democracy. It enables and empowers people to use their voices, to speak out against injustice and to hold our government accountable. All too recently, I watched another familiar government take a turn at quashing democracy when it was inconvenient for them. The public is more willing to accept power grabs from the government during a crisis, and coronavirus has proved ample ground for it. First Trump, and now Boris, and here I am again, feeling the same existential dread — that democracy is not something that just happens without people who fight tooth and nail for it. That again, it needs our protection and outrage.

I implore you to use your voice.

• Write to your MP and demand that they vote no on this bill.
• Ask them to convince others to vote no on this bill.
• Sign the petition organised by the Network for Police Monitoring
• Read about the 11 point Charter for Freedom of Assembly Rights and help pressure the government to adopt it (or justify why they refuse to).
• And stay informed by following organisations such as @theracialjusticenetwork and @sistersuncut on social media.

I write this as a CALL to ACTION because MPs vote on this bill TOMORROW.