| 20 Apr '04 |
SCOTTISH NATIONAL STANDARD BEARER:
Peter Dow
Having been arrested myself a few times for protesting, I can testify that some police officers are sadistic torturers who can hurt and injure people they have arrested simply because they enjoy it.
For example, the police are issued with rigid handcuffs - a rigid bar (not a chain) connects the wrist braces and police officers can exert excruciating bruising force on the arrested person's wrists, and cut off the blood supply to the hands. When they brutally misused rigid handcuffs on me, I screamed in agony but the police officers just laughed. A lot of police officers really enjoy hurting people. They are the sort of evil people who would happily have served in the Nazi SS as extermination camp guards. One Scottish police officer himself was injured and traumatised while being "trained" in the use of rigid handcuffs. He successfully sued.
Police officers are now issued with bone breaking metal truncheons and personal chemical weapon dispensers (Check out CS Sprays - police use, (Scottish Human Rights Centre under development), dangers, science, defence, manufacturer). (Perhaps next they'll be getting firearms routinely - perhaps to shoot someone daring publicly to give out a leaflet, or to display a poster?)
This police brutality is unofficially state sanctioned - police officers can in practice torture with impunity, whatever the theory of the police complaints procedure. For example, in a police station, I've been tortured at the Sergeant's desk, while on the wall, a poster about the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights is displayed (but utterly ignored). The state is completely hypocritical.
The design of these rigid handcuffs invites, and makes it easy for, brutal or careless police officers to seriously damage the health of the handcuffed person. It is not just the traumatising agony but permanent damage may be done both by crushing injury to the wrist themselves, or by injury to the hands and to other parts of the body by blood clots which may form if the blood supply to the hands is impeded for any length of time. If blood clots lodge in the hands themselves then death of the tissues in the hands may occur leading to partial or total permanent loss of the use of your hands - permanent disability may result. Ultimately, as in deep vein thrombosis, if blood clots travel from the hands and then lodge in the brain, then a stroke involving permanent brain damage may occur. If the blood clots lodge in the blood vessels supplying the lungs then a pulmonary embolism may cause death by asphyxiation.
Be under no illusion, if a police officer applies these handcuffs to you, too tightly and for too long, it is your life that the police are endangering.
Disregard anything that the civil service or the government may say about "existing guidelines for the police are to ensure that handcuffs are not applied incorrectly and to respond promptly to the arrested persons requests to loosen handcuffs" etc. Forget such worthless reassurances, many police officers don't care in the least about you, your health or any guidelines and if they happen to kill you with handcuffs and they can get away with that then that is exactly what they will do. When you beg them to loosen the handcuffs, many police officers will simply take enjoyment from your suffering and then tighten the handcuffs even more. Some police officers are sadists who will use these handcuffs to torture their victims. I know - they have done that to me! Such sadists are not fit or proper people to be employed as police officers - nevertheless, for now, police officers is what they are.
These rigid handcuffs are a menace to human health and they should be banned immediately but don't hold your breath while waiting for that ban. So long as the same perverts - senior police officers, HM Inspectors of Constabulary, civil servants and government ministers - continue to run the police, expect nothing but cruelty and indifference to victims of handcuff torture and injury.
Overthrowing a torturing fascist police state is a job for the professional military and/or paramilitaries and so good politicians should at the very least be asking the military to disarm the police of these rigid handcuffs, CS sprays, metal truncheons and other instruments of police brutality. The politicians should ask, but I can't remember when a Scottish politician last did so. Maybe one day they or newer, better politicians will ask for military help to sort the police out. However, before that great day dawns is there anything that we unarmed protesters can do to protect ourselves from injury by the police?
Generally, the best advice is to avoid situations of possible confrontation with the police but sometimes protesters may consider that their cause is of sufficient urgency that they are prepared to run that risk in order to be seen, to be heard and to make their protest. In which case, some form of protective clothing or wear for the wrist would be a useful addition to the protesters' leaflets, posters and megaphones.
Of course, if the police are determined to handcuff you and other protesters, then police officers will force you to the ground if necessary and remove any protective items that you are wearing before handcuffing you. Protective items alone simply slow the police up and won't prevent you from being handcuffed and arrested eventually.
If as well as simply wishing to protest, you decide to insist on your right to protest, a right being denied to you by bad police officers then I will caution you now that resisting arrest by bad police officers or trying to arrest bad police officers is a physically and legally dangerous thing to do and should only ever be attempted by committed and brave freedom fighters who understand the risks.
I'd suggest that freedom fighters might be able to assert our right to protest IF large numbers of we protesters outnumber the police AND IF many protesters come prepared and equipped to resist police arrest AND IF, in solidarity, we are ready to try to rescue any fellow protester in the process of being handcuffed, THEN AND ONLY THEN can wrist protector cuffs and other protective items help to even things up between protesters and police.
Indeed, there is little point in outnumbering the police if protesters simply stand by and allow their fellow protesters to be arrested a few at a time. If it is clear that the police are going to arrest (and possibly brutalise) genuine protesters then we should either abandon the planned protest or seriously plan to be able to handcuff the police using their own handcuffs - and let us see then if the police would like a taste of their own medicine? No, the police won't like that but it would be no more than the police deserve!
I personally cannot see that there is much point in having a crowd of protesters just standing there waiting for their turn to be arrested and brutalised. Getting arrested as a form of civil-disobedience relies entirely on there being a somewhat humane state that will not tolerate arrested persons being brutalised or killed. I think Thatcher killed off anything humane in the UK state and Blair and McConnell have not reversed that aspect of Thatcherism. In my experience, Scotland now suffers under a fascist police state that is not particularly humane and I don't trust the police here now to arrest anyone professionally and decently - unless the media's cameras are there but, sometimes, not even then and it is easy enough for the police to wait until they have taken the arrested person out of camera shot before brutalising him or her.
So the ground rules of protesting have changed in Scotland. They have changed more gradually here rather than as suddenly as they did in Northern Ireland after Bloody Sunday, but changed they have and we have police brutality to blame for that sad state of affairs.
Perhaps if protesters are sufficiently prepared and organised, just perhaps, the police may eventually learn to allow more non-violent protests now and then rather than be so eager to start a fight that they may not always win so easily. In my experience IT IS ALWAYS THE POLICE, crowd-following hot-heads or agent-provocateurs who are eager to start the violence - never genuine protesters, who may be loud but who are wise enough to know that if there is violence then that becomes the story and the point of the protest may be lost.
Remember however that the police have armed response officers and should it ever get to the point where the police in Scotland are prepared to shoot Scottish protesters who, having had enough of brutal policing, are quite reasonably resisting wrongful arrest or trying to arrest bad police officers then it really is well past time for politicians to call in the military to shoot the "killer-cops" police. In which case, if the military kill enough killer cops then the remainder of the police will no doubt review their oppressive conduct eventually!
It surely would be better and more honourable for us Scots to wage war on the police rather than to allow some brutal police officers to remove the right to protest and have then the Scots facing the frightening prospect of slavery or extermination.
Didn't you know? Once a fascist police state has succeeded in eliminating the political right to protest - then ALL OTHER RIGHTS can be systematically removed from the people, leaving some in slavery and sending others to be exterminated. That's what Hitler did, it's what Saddam did and it could happen anywhere that brutes and bullies gain the advantage over we compassionate humans.
The difficulty for the military is to tell the brutal police officers apart from the half-decent ones and therefore to target intelligently rather than just target everyone with a police uniform on, but it may have to come to that if the best police officers don't or can't help to put their own house in order. If the police generally are targeted then the more senior the police officer, the more tempting a target that officer is.
During the 2nd world war, in preparation for a possible invasion of Britain by the Nazi forces, a standing instruction to those British freedom fighters being trained for guerrilla warfare was to kill any chief constable who continued to "serve" under a Nazi occupation regime! Today's chief constables take note!
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