Not sure I get it, if you think kettling is wrong you shouldn’t do it. A much greater point would have been to teach the bullying police the error of their ways by joining in with them peacefully.

Yeah this is people being dicks.

The police are in dispute with the government, who want to have private security firms patrolling our streets (they say they don’t but the tendering specification leaked says they do).

If the police are privatised then massive conflicts of interest will be introduced, especially with the destruction of the forensic science service and the farming out of forensics to any private company.

The tendering document explicitly talks about about patrols and investigation of crime being given to private companies.

Private companies will be investigating crime, not the police (who will simply be there to make arrests). If you have the profit motive tied to people being found guilty and private companies doing the investigation and forensic work, and everyone on targets and unaccountable to the public (who will not have a say in whether the police are privatised or not, and who takes over policing), unless they introduce a regulator (OfCop or something) then you have a police force with no incentive to find the actual culprit rather than someone who can’t prove it isn’t them.

I imagine many people think this will not effect them, as they aren’t criminals and can’t think of a situation where they run afoul of the police. However there is talk of private police being able to hand out on the spot fines with no judicial process. This would be pure profit for the companies involved, and if they put their patrolling employees on targets, or they can keep a percentage of what they take from the public, then they’ll go after people that look like they have money on them.

Dropped something? Littering, £80 fine, no sir, it doesn’t matter that you picked it up again straight away.

Imagine night club bouncers with significantly more power to abuse.

It’s very dangerous to democracy to have an unaccountable police force, because we use policing by consent in this country, where the vast majority of people consent to the police to deal with crime and disorder. Imagine if every interaction with an ‘order enforcement operative’ was a potential money making opportunity for them to fine you for some tiny infraction.

I’ve reported crime and given witness statements in the past, but to the police, not to G4S or Capita or Halliburton. I don’t consent to be policed by them.

I don’t agree. This is very funny.

I don’t consent to be policed by them.

I doubt you’ll be in the minority. And if the riots taught us anything, it’s that when a sizeable portion of the populace withdraws it’s consent to be policed, anarchy follows.

Whenever I see the word ‘activist’ why do I always think of people called Tarquin or Jocasta ?

@ 5

“Whenever I see the word ‘activist’ why do I always think of people called Tarquin or Jocasta ?”

Is it because you lack the intelligence to understand and discuss policy, and instead have to fall back on conducting arguments via ad homs based on your snobbish views?

Oh, look, step 94 in the continuing degeneration of the British left into a bunch of self-righteous, self-regarding, know-it-all, sneering middle-class twenty-something retards.