Drawing on discussions at a symposium in June 2012, on ‘Policing communities: race, class and the state’ (organised by the Institute of Race Relations and the Power, Conflict and Justice Research Group, Edge Hill University, in conjunction with the Tottenham Defence Campaign), the author reflects on public order policing, past and present, and traces the ways in which strategies used in Northern Ireland were and are transferred to Britain, especially in relation to black and minority ethnic communities. She draws attention to the ways in which emergency anti-terror legislation and numerous new laws further criminalise and control poor and marginalised communities today. It is only through showing solidarity that a new ‘frontline’ can be established to protect those communities no longer policed ‘by consent’, but ‘by enforcement’. Further analysis on the implications of policing following the Good Friday Agreement is presented by Daniel Holder in his commentary, ‘Police accountability, the Irish peace process and the continuing challenge of secrecy’, in this issue.
Although I prefer the term North of Ireland, Northern Ireland is the correct description of the legal jurisdiction referred to in this article.
2.
Early Day Motion (420) and parliamentary questions have been tabled on the use of plastic bullets. The subsequent written parliamentary (holding) answer provided by Nick Herbert (minister of state for policing and criminal justice) reveals that the government has carried out no reviews of the long-term medical effects of their use, either in Northern Ireland or in other jurisdictions, and that the decision whether to deploy plastic bullets is considered an operational matter for individual police chiefs. In response to a Freedom of Information request made in May 2012 by former Liberal Democrat member of the London Assembly, Dee Doocey, the Metropolitan police confirmed that, since the August 2011 riots, its stockpile of plastic bullets had increased to over 10,000 and that, between 2010–2011, the use of plastic bullets was authorised in the capital on twenty-two occasions. In July 2012, the Independent reported that plastic bullets bought from abroad, at a cost of more than £400,000, could not be used, as they did not pass British safety standards; see: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/400000-bullets-police-couldnt-use-7945541.html.
3.
This is currently the subject of a consultation process, although the government seems to be in favour of giving police officers of superintendent rank or above sole power to make operational decisions on the use of a new general power of curfew, while ambivalent on the question of safeguards against misuse of such an arbitrary power; see ‘Consultation on police powers to promote and maintain public order’ (London, Home Office, October2011).
4.
Currently, police curfew powers are limited to the ability to impose a curfew on an individual as a condition of police bail. However, police already have broad powers to designate an area a ‘dispersal zone’ (under the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 and the Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006), which allows for a ban on individuals from specific areas for up to forty-eight hours, and to impose child curfew zones, between the hours of 9pm and 6am, and escort home any unaccompanied child under the age of 16, irrespective of their behaviour. In 2005, a 15-year-old boy took a test case against the police and, in a landmark ruling, the High Court stated that the law did not grant the police power of arrest. However, the Court of Appeal overruled the High Court the following year.
In Northern Ireland, until at least the 1970s, many people were shot and killed or seriously injured just for breaking the curfew, for instance during the 1970 Falls curfew and the Ballymurphy massacre of 1971; see Colm Campbell and Ita Connolly, ‘A model for the “war against terrorism”? Military intervention in Northern Ireland and the 1970 Falls curfew’, Journal of Law and Society (Vol. 30, no. 3, September2003). For more information on the Ballymurphy massacre, see: http://www.ballymurphymassacre.com/cms.
Although there are many parades in Northern Ireland, it is the parades organised by the Protestant-Loyalist Orange Order in the run-up to 12 July, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, that are most associated with sectarian violence, as the Orange Order assert its right to march close to, or through, Nationalist or Republican areas. In one of the most recent incidents, on 12 July 2012, plastic bullets and water cannon were deployed after trouble flared when Loyalist marchers passed through the predominantly Catholic Ardoyne neighbourhood of north Belfast.
9.
The term ‘interface’ refers to residential areas where Nationalist and Unionist communities meet, and it is in these communities where sectarian tensions often explode into violence. One of the most notorious incidents in January 2002 involved Holy Cross, a Catholic primary school attended mainly by girls from the Ardoyne area of north Belfast, but located in a nearby mainly Loyalist area. The riot followed months of tension, during which, on a daily basis, the police and the military had to protect Catholic parents and children walking to the school from Loyalist picketers, who shouted sectarian abuse, threw stones, bricks, fireworks, blast bombs and urine-filled balloons.
10.
There was a precedent, which helped inform the agenda and design of the symposium. In June 2009, Professor Mark McGovern had brought Irish human rights activists and former political prisoners together with Muslim representatives at a symposium at the Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich, Falls Road, Belfast; see ‘Countering terror or counter-productive? Comparing Irish and British Muslim experiences of counter-insurgency law and practice’ (Edge Hill University, Liverpool, 2010), available at: http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/documents/news/CounteringTerror.pdf.
In a BBC Newsnight (12August2011) discussion about the riots, the historian David Starkey said that:The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion, and black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together. Its language, which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.
14.
At the time of writing, it seems likely that the evidence against this man is being provided either by ‘assisting offenders’ (colloquially referred to as ‘supergrasses’), who, under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005), can be given immunity from prosecution or a discounted sentence, in return for giving evidence, or by the testimony of ‘anonymous witnesses’, allowed under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009.
15.
Initially, in a ‘peacekeeping role’, the British Army ended up staying for thirty-seven years, the longest deployment in British army history.
16.
Thirty-one years after Blair Peach’s death and in the wake of the killing in 2009 of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 summit, the police released 3,000 documents into Peach’s death, including an investigation, suppressed by the coroner at the inquest in 1980, which had found that police officers from the SPG were responsible for.
17.
The phrase is Mark McGovern’s.
18.
New Scotland Yard, press release (24January1983).
19.
See Policing Against Black People (London, Institute of Race Relations, 1987).
For instance, Moazzam Begg was an honoured guest at the launch of the Free Museum of Derry.
22.
Two earlier attempts to introduce closed procedures into inquests (in the Counter-Terrorism Bill 2008 and the Coroners and Justice Bill 2009) were defeated in parliament following public campaigns, and the proposal in the Justice and Security Green Paper to extend closed material procedures to inquests was dropped in the Bill because of the level of resistance.
Stop and search grew exponentially under the impact of Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which allows police to stop individuals without reasonable suspicion ‘in anticipation of violence’, and under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which gave police similar powers in the context of terrorism. In 2010, the European Court of Human Rights condemned the stop and search powers under Section 44 in the case of Gillan and Quinton and, in July2012, they were replaced by more limited powers.
25.
See ‘Joint enterprise, racism and BME communities – an interview with Gloria Morrison’, IRR News (1February2012); also House of Commons Justice Committee, Joint Enterprise: eleventh report of Session 2010–12 (HC 1597), available at: www.parliament.uk/justicecom.
26.
McCullochJudePickeringSharon, ‘Pre-crime and counter terrorism: imagining future crime in the “war on terror”’, British Journal of Criminology (Vol. 49, no. 5, 2009).
The official name for those targeted is ‘gun crime nominals’, who are classified under three levels of risk: bronze, silver and gold. Once identified, a suspect will receive a hand-delivered letter from a Matrix Unit warning them that the police, working in concert with local statutory agencies and the CPS, will use ‘all available tactics’ of dissuasion, including surveillance, the taking of children into care, eviction and imposing Anti-social Behaviour Orders; see David Rose, ‘The guns go quiet over the Mersey’, Daily Mail (3April2010), available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1262573/The-guns-quiet-Mersey-321-police-officers-Liverpool-slashed-firearm-crime.html.
29.
The Law Lords said in their ruling: ‘No conviction should be based solely or to a decisive extent upon the statements and testimony of anonymous witnesses.’ The Metropolitan police said it was ‘very concerned’ by the ruling, which could impact on gang crime operations. The 2008 Act was a temporary emergency measure, lasting for just one year, but its anonymity provisions were placed on a permanent footing by the Coroners and Justice Act 2009.
This paragraph amalgamates points made at the symposium by Millard Scott, Stafford Scott, Mark McGovern, Lee Bridges and Breandán Mac Cionnaith of the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Association.
