UK: Policing road protests: the myth of impartiality
01 September 1999
Increased proactive policing amid calls for new legislation to combat road protesters seeks to completely undermine their already marginalised position.
The policing of the Birmingham Northern Relief Road (BNRR) - Operation Encompass - is expected to cost 12.5 million and will involve officers from three forces. The motorway is the first to be built as a bypass to a motorway and its construction will damage or destroy 49 sites of ecological archaeological or scientific interest
In an interview with Police Review Staffordshire assistant chief constable Stephen Green said of the operation:
It is not our job to ensure that the BNRR is built, to defeat the protesters, to climb trees, to act as security guards or bailiffs, or to enforce the will of the Highways Agency or contractor.
He also talks of "facilitat[ing] the right to demonstrate peacefully within the law". However Mr Green is also calling for new laws and police powers aimed directly at combatting the non-violent tactics of the protesters.
New legislation for new social movements
To combat the popular practise of building tunnels by road protesters Green is calling for a repeal of Section 6 of the 1997 Criminal Law Act for those who "construct fortifications"
The provision was drawn in respect to the rights of squatters but then used "as a cloak for protesters" who erected tents and then demanded rights under Section 6. Also called for is a new trespass law to make the construction of fortifications an offence "in its own right". Current trespass legislation requires the landowner to make a formal complaint to police before they can act. Sympathy toward road protests has in the past denied them this. Green would also like police to be given associated powers of search arrest and seizure of evidence. His calls mirror those made earlier this year in an HM Inspectorate of Constabulary report "Policing disorder" (see Statewatch vol 9
no 3 & 4)
The future of road protests is also under attack by the Home Office a consultation paper on "Legislation Against terrorism" proposes the adoption of the FBI's definition of terrorism which covers:
the use of serious violence against persons or property, or the threat to use such violence, to intimidate or coerce a government, the public, or any section of the public for political, religious, or ideological ends.
With the building of tunnels already seen by the courts to constitute criminal damage to land (see below) it is not difficult to envisage the recognition of serious violence against property. In any case serious violence is being redefined to include "serious disruption".
Hitting the safety button
The legitimisation of tactics geared to undermine road-protests has according to ACC Green been partly achieved by the police's branding of tunnels and bunkers as "death-traps". Averting the threat to the human safety provides the police with the "moral imperative" to intervene. Underlying this is a national "media strategy" to "hit the safety button"
The tunnellers of course dispute the deathtrap description and actual instances of physical injury are far rarer than the near-death incidents recorded by police suggest. As one protester notes the bailiffs first rule is never to put themselves in danger and those who construct "fortifications" have confidence in what they have built. He adds that if the bailiffs followed the correct eviction procedures there was no danger - the driving of large vehicles on to protest sites posed a greater threat to those in the tunnels.
Increased pro-activity
Last December the coordinators of Operation Encompass decided to act early against BNRR protesters who had constructed a bunker at Moneymore Farm in Staffordshire - police were to intervene as soon as the eviction notice could be served. After the farm's owner had "agreed to make a complaint of damage" a warrant was obtained under Section 6 of the Criminal Damage Act (this was the first time that the