Are we being too hard on the techniques that the Metropolitan Police used to terrorise, intimidate and crimnalise the G20 protesters? Sure it’s easy to get outraged and start swearing at the telly when you see a cop anywhere thumping someone over the head with their truncheon or smashing their shield into a defenceless person’s face. But isn’t that only half the story? Shouldn’t we be more appreciative of the valuable educative role they are carrying out when, to pick random recent examples, they arrest 114 people in a “pre-emptive strike“ against environmental protesters or push and club a man walking away from them who dies minutes later?
When people hear Marxists explaining that cops are a paramilitary force with the principal function of limiting dissent and defending wealth and privilege it can sound a bit disconnected from daily life. Getting whacked over the head by a cop while taking part in a peaceful protest goes a long way to clarifying the finer points of the theory of the repressive role of the bourgeois state. That’s a two hour educational meeting condensed into a split second. And maybe a split skull. You definitely learn more by experiencing something than by listening to someone talking about it.
The serious point in all this is that the cops appear to have recently been on a mission to teach thousands of anti-capitalist protesters that the state is organised force. What they don’t seem to have anticipated is that what they intended to be a series of small tutorial sessions are now prime time TV. They got away with the execution of Jean Charles de Menezes and it’s a fair bet that no heads will roll over the G20 attacks. The big problem it leaves them with is that their public profile is that of a gang of unsupervised hoodlums who are free to dole out random violence with impunity to anyone whose views don’t coincide with the Daily Mail.
The cops made a judgement about the balance of forces on the G20 protests and who was involved in them. Having concluded that the protesters were relatively marginal and few in number they felt free to lay into them. If Ian Tomlinson hadn’t died the cops would have got away with their new form of terror policing. Now they have to work out how they can continue to use their preferred intimidatory techniques while limiting some of the PR damage. We know that they quite haven’t worked this out because that inspector who headed their media operation before and during G20 has been mute since. Just at the time when he could have the run of any TV news programme he fancied.
Liam redux 
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