Up against the wall...all of them!

Well- if he is an ex-copper now then good for him cuz only good copper is either dead or an ex one :)
We should not have any liberal illusions about "good" cops. If they would be good peeople,. they would have left ages ago.

We should a line with cops when they try and do the right thing. I think it would be good, for example, to speak to some cops that are genuinely angry about what's going on, if they would like to share information anonymously with activists. Of course, this would need to be done by an experienced activist and it goes without saying there would be no reciprocation on information sharing.

I think we must divide the police force by supporting unhappy rebellious officers (if there are any), I think it would probably be in our interests to do this.

If you are a police officer think about the amount of funds being wasted on NETCU, where would you like them spent? Think about the real crime that you could be fighting instead of being politicly deployed to demonstrations, what case do you really want to be working on in that time? Who's side will you be on when the govt. turn on your family?

If you are an officer demand, at the least, that the policing of activism be put below all other policing priorities. ACAB.....until you prove me wrong.

Of course - this is it!! Divide and conquer. The good cop/ bad cop routine subverted and turned back against them. I love it. Encourage "good cops" to out their "bad cop" colleagues with an anonymous posting to Indymedia: names, addresses, offences, tactics, planning, technology ... spill the beans.

There ain't nobody in the police who will protect you when the shit hits the fan. We - ordinary people - are all that you have left. Be aware of your actions ... what goes around, comes around.

God bless.

I spend much of my time being very angry with the police as an organisation and with many individuals. I have successfully sued them 8 times now and have had 7 complaints upheld. I am under no illusion that the police in general are as an organisation primarily concerned with protecting the powerful and that their remit is to stop effective activism.

However to deny that some police officers are fair, compassionate and decent is to deny my own experience, and I am not. Most of them are ordinary people who do not question what they are told. I like to give credit where it is due but of course if a police officer is decent to an activist to acknowledge this publicly is to get that person into trouble. The founder of the US ALF was reported to be a police officer and one detective sergeant from Scotland was imprisoned for ALF activities. I agree that ACAB as a general rule but there are exceptions to that rule.

This is a contradiction in terms. People with a conscience are not cops and never will be.

yeah... usually when someone exercises power over my life i'd box them and choke them... why should it be any different because they're in uniform? Protect yourself, nationalists FOD

I fully agree with the article and with Lynns comments.

A couple of so called anarchists have been using the cops to harass my family for the past couple of years. I can't blame the police for that as the charges were serious enough that they had to investigate. I fully blame the individuals, but also the wider anarchist community that has refused to intervene, the groups that they belong to, most especially Trident Ploughshares. I didn't mention the names of my anonymous accusers to the cops, I didn't see the point and I felt by telling the police anything would be betraying my principles. The last raid though left my dad hospitalised and at that point I was ready to murder. I broke all links with any anarchist or activist I know, to avoid them being associated with me and I planned the grasses violent deaths.

I decided to give the cops a full statement in advance, solely about the two informers and myself, including what crimes I've personally committed. At that point I was halfway through writing a story for IM about a nasty corporation, so I took what I was writing and handed that in evidence at the same time, I guess I did that to prove to the individual copper that there are major crimes they are not politically allowed to investigate. I approached one of the cops who had been around at my families house. Now cops all look alike to me, same clothes and haircut, but they don't all act the same. Some of them lie to your face and some of them never lie, for example. Some of them enjoy violence and some of them don't. Attributes like that make a big difference to anyone who is having to deal with cops - which means most serious activists at some point in their lives. So I chose the best cop I'd met and asked him to act as an intermediary. I wasn't pressed for any information about other activists, I wasn't bribed or pressured in anyway. I gave the cops my mobile phone number and told them if they ever wanted to question me about a crime then they could call me and I'd hand myself in. The cops agreed to not hassle my family anymore and to phone or email me instead, which was decent of them.

Guess what. The police passed my evidence about the corporation for prosecution. Now before the Afghan and Iraq invasions, I was involved in or know of several legal attempts to stop the wars from happening that were stymied by the police, and so everyone stopped even bothering to ask the police to prosecute obvious state and corporate crimes. From my experience I suggest it is maybe time to renew those efforts. At the very least, when you are in court for direct action, it is useful to prove that you have previously exhausted all legal alternatives to breaking the law.

I know this is out of step with all the 'Summer of Rage' crap that the Met were spouting, my impression is even most policement find that cringeworthy, but I've more respect now for my local police than ever before.

Let's just stop complaining when police treat us activists like we're all criminals and violent people because of some people who are.

Generalising people for what they do or movements they're in just helps the World go round so much better.

And, as we all know, all the police support the BNP and are all meat-eating murdering scum who don't question what they do or have emotions and would all happily and willingly hit people. I mean, none of them would have joined the force with the idea of actually stopping crimes like burglaries, murders, rape, assaults, muggings... They all came from backgrounds where they were exposed to protests on a daily basis and thought to themselves "ooh, I'd like a chance to destroy someone's civil liberties" or, of course, they were bullied in school and want to make themselves feel better...



Thanks, once again, Lynn, for some intelligent comments.

It's not personal, but they've chosen their role in our oppression, and one day they'll pay for it.

As for Danny, who cares about the opinion of a police informer?

No, that's not a recipe (cept for disaster), just the profile of coppers. There are some variations: those bullied at school who now seek power over others, self-important pricks who think THEY'RE the only people who can deliver a just world, people desperately needing the hierarchical structure of an important looking group (less dangerous than joining the army).
But what marks them all out is their love of domination and hierarchy which is everything I hate. I want peace, justice, kindness to others but I never felt the need to become a copper to have these things in my life.
I'm not saying they don't have some nice qualities, like most humans (even Hitler liked dogs), but I've been through the 'some are ok' phase and now have woken up to the reality that they are all total shits.

and the ones that seem like they are decent are generally playing "good cop" anyway.

Like social workers the police are trained to act like your best friend when the need arises. They know exactly how to work a person (even seasoned activists who think they know everything).

Give me your advice how I should have dealt with two admitted police grasses.The two people I 'grassed up' admit having been grassing me up for three years, leaking actions to the police and press. To be honest being grasses isn't the worst thing about them. One of them is a psycho who claims to have links to the SAS and MI6 and admitted here beating up teenage girls, the other one touches up underage girls. My only regret is I didn't identify them to the cops they were sending around sooner, but I thought anarchists would deal with it. Until we learn to police ourselves, meaning weeding out the rapists, kiddy-diddlers and the thugs who occasionally drift into our company, then we'll still need cops.
Oh, yeah, in the early '90's I reported a serious sexual assault on a girl I knew, just because the cops were more likely to catch the stranger who did it, so I guess by your standards I was already a 'police informer'. Saying that, if I was mugged out on the street then I wouldn't report that to the police. That sort of thing my local community can deal with without involving the cops, and I know no matter how bad a mugger is, he is only going to be worse after prison.

How is your local community able to deal with muggers Danny? Not sure many of the people where I live would want to deal with them.

And if (as many of you seem to want) the police were got rid of, what happens to seriously dangerous criminals such as rapists? What strategy does the left have for replacing the police? Or would it reform the police? If so, I have not heard many proposals for that either.

While I don't agree with some of the police tactics at protests, and I feel that they have been used as a weapon by the political class in the past (such as the Miners' strike), I feel the public do want a police force and feel that they protect them.

What we need is a debate within the Left on the police, not just opinion given as fact such as Siobhan's comments. If the police are all horrible, what about Brian Paddick?

>How is your local community able to deal with muggers Danny?

By being a community and grouping together when someone is attacked. By communally identifying the attacker, locating them then by persuading them to make ammends and change their ways, the same sort of thing that used to happen before we had police forces. There was a mugger a few streets away who I heard was caught and had his head flushed down a toilet a few times until agreeing to give his loot back to the victim. I guess that is a form of water-boarding but it's better than prison.
Other examples. A girlfriend of mine was attacked by a taxi driver when she was drunk, and so instead of telling the police we told a taxi driver. The taxi drivers found him before the police would have, and while I don't feel sorry for him I do think he was adequately punished and unlikely to reoffend. The cops appreciate this. When I was a kid someone smashed up my face with a bottle and two cops sitting next to me in A&E asked what had happened. They gave me their badge numbers and said to go along to my assailants house with a few friends with baseball bats, and promised they'd get any subsequent charges dropped. You'd maybe be surprised at the seriousness of crimes that get ignored. If two known gangsters stab each other here the cops aren't going to waste £25k prosecuting them. I think the best cops are the ones who know when not to get involved.

The police are here mostly as social control, which is why the elite rarely get prosecuted, why RBS are suing some penniless activist rather than Goodwin, but when they do prosecute politicians and businessmen and war criminals then they should be applauded. When they do help you out or turn a blind eye, you should acknowledge that to encourage more of it. The law would be much less objectionable if it was applied fairly to everyone, like trying Blair at the ICC.

>I feel the public do want a police force and feel that they protect them.

I reckon 90% of the prison population could be let out tommorow on probation without serious repercussions. I reckon 90% of laws could be safely be done away with tommorow. If you want to take a tested road then follow the Finnish example and do that over twenty years, but we could do it tommorow. I reckon that within 5 years you could close most prisons and turn the rest into hospitals.

he wasn't expressing regret. In fact he wrote: 'I see my lot have murdered someone again. Oh well, s*** happens.'

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1175610/Police-officer-posted-online-message-man-died-G20-protest-resigns.html

>he wasn't expressing regret. In fact he wrote: 'I see my lot have murdered someone again. Oh well, s*** happens.'

I saw that too but I've not read the rest of the guys page - has anyone? I don't think that sentence on it's own should be reason to resign, especially as the cop who lashed out walks is employed. I think he been made to resign because he used the word 'murder'.

I think it was a throwaway comment that any of us could have made, a mixture of lighthearted gallows humour and world weariness. He is the only cop to have gone and he is probably the only one who should have stayed.

He should've stayed?

He basically said "We've killed someone.. but never mind eh, who cares?".

I'm glad he has gone.

>He basically said "We've killed someone.. but never mind eh, who cares?"

If he had said 'killed' then he would still be in a job. He said Tomlinson was murdered. How many cops have admitted that yet, even to themselves? The cop who said he was going to bash hippies, he is still employed. The cop who murdered Tomlinson, the cops who witnessed that and did nothing, the other cops who were assaulting innocents, and the senior cops who are responsible for that, they are still employed. I've no idea if the sacked cop is a bastard or not, but I'd rather have him as a neighbour than the murderer he correctly labelled.

Im not an anarchist. I have had dealings with the police when other people within my community have called them and when family members have called them for assistance.

i have never called them out and doubt i ever would.

in all my dealings with them they have been arrogant, unable to be of any assistance other than as a point of necessary adminstration for someones housing insurance claim.

on one particular occasion that comes to mind they inflamed a domestic matter to the point where i was threatened with arrest for attempting to rescue the property of the person i was assisting, who was attempting to get her white goods from a house she had shared with an abusive partner. on another occasion, i was threatened with charges of kidnap for holding an abusive and drunk repeated stalker until they arrived (someone else had called them)

i recently had dealings with them when they pulled over a car of a young relative of mine at around 10pm at night, for no other reason other than he was young and driving at 10pm. i questioned them upon their reasons for pulling us over... and basically that was it. They asked whether he was working, where he worked and what he did. which is NONE of their fking business. he had all the necessary legal documentation to be driving, his car was roadworthy and he had not been drinking alcohol.