police brutality

[poledark]

It seems to me that we are entering a new phase where "protestors" carry camera phones, their mates carry camera phones and they then set about persistantly aggravating the police until one of them responds....bingo........another copper suspended.

 

This enquiry may turn out not to recomend what a lot of "protestors" expect.

 

Den

[Emma two]

Who has been in a riot? some of you must have? not a mild 'we shall overcome' chanting demo about the closing of a primary school, or the building of a by-pass. Well I have lots of 'em, and you know what it's like waiting in an armoured vehicle, all tooled up, flack jacket, rifles, batons, rubber bullets, CS (the bloody stuff leaks out of the grenades and sets your eyes watering and you off sneezing), you hear the chants and the songs, the doors open and out you go, your turn to stand on the line, the brick ends and bottles shower into you, First time for me, I thought of the film of Agincourt and the 'whispering death' of incoming arrows. I pulled my visor down just in time as a glass bottle shattered against it. Those standing close to the flats were bombarded with television sets and fridges, the TV's explode on contact with the ground. the bitter baying mob, not disenfranchised rent a mob hippies, but what look like the people in your street, all ages and genders. They scream at you in English, difficult to write them off as some foreign aliens. The petrol bombs come out, the older women are making them in kitchens, bizzare comparisons with the pinnied ladies who make the sandwiches for village cricket matches. Two files down a friend is engulfed by flames, but we have it covered, out come the water soaked blankets and the fire extinguishers. A man hawks and spits into my face, it runs down my visor, he brings up a shinty stick in an attempted roundhouse, I thrust my rifle barrel into his solar plexus, a bayonet fighting move, without a bayonet, he vomits and staggers back, I visualise C/Sgt at Roukes's drift in the film 'Zulu', how can i be thinking about films amongst all this?

 

Then the gunmen move in, It's difficult to distinguish were the shots are coming from in this chaos of noise and violence, The firing positions could be anywhere, any one of the hundreds of windows in the sprawing estate, the opportunites to identify and return fire toward a legally legitimate target just dont come. Ricky was so hyped up that he didn't realise he had been shot in the leg until it gave away under him, Brian never knew that he had come under direct fire until he returned to base and found a fortunetly low velocity and small calibre round lodged in the shoulder of his flack jacket.

 

We stood firm, we were a county regiment, but overwhelmingly we felt excitement, the urge was there to sythe a sway through this rabble, but we didn't we had discipline, we were the best in the world in this type of environment, we didn't have the respectible maturity of civilian police officers, my first experience of this came at 18 years old, and already with one stripe on my arm, we were kids, we liked getting pi ssed in our Germany base, we frequented dodgy bars and delighted in European porn, we fought with Turkish workers and American servicemen, we were the most un PC animals you can imagine.

 

Can you imagine the contempt we now feel towards modern police officers who 'lose it' and start whacking people like we have seen in recent film footage. They are supposed to be professionals in their field, our primary role was to try and halt the progress of the 3rd soviet shock army (total war), and not handle sensitive civil situations on the streets of or own country.

 

It's clearly not the fault of individuial police officers, they are just people as we were, but their training, ethos and discipline is woefully lacking.

 

Conclusion a riot is a bloody exciting place to be, that excitement can lead the supposed peace keepers being as bad as the rioters.

Edited April 19, 2009 by Emma two

[kleinboet]

Lovely story - BUT.......

If a person joins the police force, he/she does it with the full understanding that they are upholders of the law, and are TRAINED as such - These pictures clearly show the individual police officers "losing it", and breaking the very laws that they have sworn to uphold. That is why police (and not army) are used for riot control. Now I have never been in a riot (unlike our previous poster) but I have received riot training and seen riots, both first hand and on TV.

If the police see someone agitating the crowd or breaking the law in any other way, the SOP is for TWO police officers to surgically "cut" the wrongdoer out of the crowd and arrest him/her!!!

 

This is done whilst setting the example of NOT breaking the law!!!!

[Emma two]

Lovely story - BUT.......

If a person joins the police force, he/she does it with the full understanding that they are upholders of the law, and are TRAINED as such - These pictures clearly show the individual police officers "losing it",

 

Why the 'but'? thats just the point I was making, and it wasn't a 'story' but rather an account.

[chesters1]

hate lies just under the surface in everyone you just have to find its trigger ,obviously the cops trigger was found and he reacted instinctively

Edited April 20, 2009 by chesters1

[kleinboet]

Emma2 - So you think it is ok to break away totally from your training, pretending in your mind that you are someone in a movie, and get excited at the chance to cause someone pain?

 

I thought that was for the rioters - not the police!!

 

When the women at Greenham Common were stopped, they used ANY means to abuse the police - smearing the police uniform with feces, smearing police faces with used tampax Brenda's brother had to be hosed down outside before he could enter the house). But the police stood firm!!

 

I am NOT supporting rioters - I think the public are mislead, I will support protesters but not rioters!!

 

But AFAIK the police are trying to lump all the protesters at that rally with the small amount of rioters that were there to cause trouble!!

Edited April 20, 2009 by kleinboet

[Emma two]

Emma2 - So you think it is ok to break away totally from your training, pretending in your mind that you are someone in a movie, and get excited at the chance to cause someone pain?

 

WTF are you talking about? does your talent at getting things so totally ar se about face know no bounds? Is English your first language? because you appear to have so much difficulty with it. how do you work out, from my account of what it's like to be in a riot (from the control perspective), that I 'advocate' anything other than steadying discipline, that discipline is needed becuase the mix of fear, adrenalin and typically youthful enthusiasm is liable to take hold and the whole thing go to a bag of rat s hit were it not in place. It was our training which held the thing together. using a rifle to hit somone in the soft body area, as they are about to try and knock your head off with a bloody great stick is entirely legitimate, and something trained to do, rather than wildly and dangerously whack in the head or on bones which might break or worse.

 

We didn't conduct ourselves like those policemen we have seen recently, many of us found ourselves in that madness as teenagers, we didn't knock off and go home to mam or wifey at the end of a shift, no going off to the pub to unwind, we were rocketed and mortared in our grotty vermin infested bases, on some ops we just knew we would come under fire, and going to some areas we knew that if we all came back it would be a first. Our 'job spec' initially didn't include policing sensitive civil disorder in our own country, but we learned fast and became the best in the world at it.

Edited April 20, 2009 by Emma two

[poledark]

So would you suggest that the police should be armed with rifles to prod the "protestors" Emma? I fully concur that "brutality" is not acceptable, but a slap on the face and a whack on the leg with a stick(?) is not brutal surely? I would feel much safer in that situation if I had a rifle in my hands.

 

But then, you say that about a parent administering a slap on the leg.

 

And of course, the army didn't really open fire on black monday did they?

 

Den

[kleinboet]

Emma2 - Is that why you were fired from the police?:

 

It was our training which held the thing together. using a rifle to hit somone in the soft body area, as they are about to try and knock your head off with a bloody great stick is entirely legitimate, and something trained to do, rather than wildly and dangerously whack in the head or on bones which might break or worse.

AFAIK piolice training specificaly forbids you hitting anyone unless they initiated it!! That was the whole idea, that is why police work as a team!! If someone you think is dangerous, you don't lay into him/her, you arrest him/her (using more than one officer) they can then go through due process through a court of law - what you are saying that they are trying to knock your head off, you are acting as judge and jury and beating the cr*p out of the person. Well unfortunately, there are now CCTV cameras (put there by our government) that is proving what the public has been suspecting for some time!

 

You forget the statement by the police, that the police "were not involved" with the fist case, and had to recant when CCTV proved that to be a lie!!

Now there are three cases put forward to the CPS and some 90 complaints still to be investigated!!

Edited April 20, 2009 by kleinboet

[Emma two]

So would you suggest that the police should be armed with rifles to prod the "protestors"

 

If and when the protestors become regularly backed up by trained and determined active service units armed with high velocity assault rifles and shoulder launched anti tank weapons, or even when they bring along molotov's by the crateload then, yes of course at least some of the police would need to properly armed. (Did you really need that pointing out?) When facing the disorder at it's present level then 'no', Although the initial marches in Ulster were to protest about the inequalities in civil rights, they often evolved into something very different. The most violent I experienced were confrontations between opposing groups of the civilian population.