welcome back

since the security settings were changed some time ago the hope is that more people can gain access to this potted history written during the month of August.Since that time another trawl through the Echo revealed a strange tale.Dated 19thSeptember 2011 it concerned a police statement that they vow to keep the peace,Nothing strange about that - it is just that the man making the statement is the same officer who presided over a press conference earlier in the month at which reporters were told that thousands of anarchists had plans to hijack the eviction -at that time just six weeks away.Different messages coming from the same source.

job creation

A Council official  says that because of "underspend"they are creating a new post of Community Liaison Officer on a tempoary basis (1year) to work with Travellers at Dale Farm.
Sounds like the stable door closing after the horse has bolted.
"£28k for council job to help out Travellers" is the headline in the Echo, 1Sept 2013.  
Seems there is money left over from the £13 million tyhe government promised in 2011.

End of the line

Reporting on the 1st July 2011 the Echo covered the previous day's meeting of Basildon Council which dealt with  financial arrangements to assist the police, after which the eviction of Dale Farm could go ahead. The Labour and Libdem opposition were at pains to point out that plans should not go ahead until the Council had explored the offers made by Lord Avemore to find alternative sites on  government land.So far they had dismissed this idea out of hand..In the vote that followed the Conservatives won by 27 to 12.

 Tony Ball maintains that the Council have done their utmost to find a peaceful solution and have left no stone unturned and that is why they have pressed ahead with a forced eviction because they have been left with no alternatives.This is plainly untrue and was demonstrated,one year later,when Lord Avemore visited the site and said the eviction was a colossal waste of taxpayer's money because there had been other solutions which the Council had not bothered to explore-or dismissed out of hand.

Obviously some other solutions would have involved slowing up the process and may have taken some time to implement but think of all the money that would have been saved and all the distress to so many families that could have been avoided.

Tony Ball's argument is that the Council has been more and more dilligent in its effort to seek a solution whilst the residents have been more and more intransigent and difficult to deal with but the facts do not bear this out.

The opposition Councillors were talking sense but the Tory majority were always categorized as people in a hurry to get things done and not averse to taking shortcuts.At the High Court this is something that the judges remarked upon more than once.

The residents at Dale Farm have claimed all along that they would be willing to leave if a suitable alternative was offered to them and Lord Avemore has always said he was willing to  look around and find somewhere on government owned land that would prove to be suitable.

Why would this not prove attractive to Tony Ball?

My guess is that such a move would mean the Council
 might be forced to guarantee planning permissions as part of a deal: something they would find unpalatable.They were determined to get rid of this unwelcome minority and this would be made easier if they were branded as lawbreakers.

John Baron.(Tory) in the House at PMQs looked forward to the time when the greenfield land would be returned to the law-abiding majority.

Doing the Business

I am not a business person but I understand that large corporations like to keep tabs on their more expensive operations by means of cost benefit analysis beforehand and audits afterwards.They expect the CEO to come and explain in detail what has been accomplished and at what cost.The drawbacks and methods of improving performances in the future -financial gains and losses being uppermost in mind-before the BOARD has to report to the shareholders at the AGM .
Public bodies have similar systems of accountability - but what of the Police ? It used to be the case that the Chief Constable reported back to the Police Authority.Now that these have been scrapped a link with the general public has been severed.The plans to evict residents of Dale Farm were well under way in December 2010 see setting the Scene,elsewhere on this blog.
The information document published by Essex Police might be thought of as a preliminary report but even as such it is woefully inadequate.It would make most business people squirm with embarrassment because it does not explain what happened.
In an addition which was put out later and withdrawn from Utube it revealed that the police had entered the site at dawn.This was being economical with the truth as it did not say in what manner this was done (a raid by over 300 riot police).As you appreciate assistance given by other police forces has to be paid for  so a kind of chart is included to show how much involvement each county force played on and off during the preparations. (A list of injuries sustained and arrests made is a welcome feature)after that there are just a few minor talking points,for example comment upon messages received from the public which were 41 in favour and slightly less expressing concern.
Expressing concern in the police vocabulary is different from making a complaint.A complaint is a very special sort of thing and only two types are recognized.On this occasion there was one of each type and so there  were in total only two complaints registered against Essex Police.
Beyond this trivia there are lacunae aplenty:
Nothing about who was in charge,nothing about the chain of command,nothing about who made the decision to abandon the long standing tradition of being neutral in civil cases,nothing about arming some few officers with tazers,nothing about misuse of Tazers (on various videos officers can be seen waving these potentially lethal weapons in a threatening manner.
In many another operation one gets a warm commendation from a senior officer to say how well his men have performed the tasks given them but here - as at the eviction itself -senior officers are notable by their absence perhaps because it would not do to be photographed conducting an eviction whilst at the same time on their website saying that they do not perform evictions.
New York Times Headline................POLICE EVICT TRAVELLERS.

Excess Zeal

Some ideas encountered in the information document published five months after the Dale farm eviction hve their place in the annals of local history others are puzzling.

Objectives

1)to maintain the Queen's peace

2)to see that positive action is taken to prevent crime and minimize disorder

3)to enable the targetting of persistentoffenders and minimise disruption by

     by efficient gathering and dissemination of intelligence

Other Strategies include:

to.....To comply with our positive obligations under the Human Rights Act,1988 to facilitate peaceful assembly,freedom of expression and protect the rights of all involved in legitimate activity.

.........Where offenses are committed by any person or a group we will seek best evidence with a view to prosecuting those involved.

***********************************************************************

An examination of people present at Dale Farm  on that day in October suggests that they could be classified in 3 groups-Residents,Human Shield protestors,and the International Press corps.This begs the question...

At which group was all the paramilitary activity directed ?

 Surely,judging by the court cases that followed most transgressions involved people obstructing the Bailiffs and most of these were made by people who set up Camp Constant for that very purpose in August -saying they would accept the consequences in order to highlight the cruel nature of the actions being taken by the Council against the Irish Travellers (a recognized ethnic minority) They were trying to show that other solutions might have been adopted other than the maximum display of force.

Force was not proportionate and was used against protestors  whom the police-under the Human Rights act - are pledged to assist.

Anarchy:the Stats

Essex police

....."of those arrested 35were for obstructing Bailiffs,two remain on police bail and six people have been cautioned,the remaining 26 have been reported for the offences which will be prosecuted by Basildon Borough Council.

The remaining ten people were charged with offenses including

2 counts of violent disorder

5 counts of Public Order offense

1count of racially aggravated Public Order offense

1 count of failing to remove a face covering ***

1 count of assault by beating

1 count of causing bodily harm by wanton or furious driving

1 count of resisting an officer

1 count of using behaviour likely to cause harassment,alarm or distress.

*********************************************************************

***This was the first case to come to court and resulted in an humiliating defeat  for the police when the defendant produced two videos exonerating her.

*********************************************************************

Elsewhere the local papers reported that three protestors had pleaded guilty to urinating on police stationed below the gantry and another local man pleaded guilty to throwing a piece of concrete which fell short of police lines. The cases came to court in an haphazard fashion and one person charged with a serious offense had 4/5 postponements before being acquitted.(The others were given community service orders )

 At first glance these results might seem similar to any found in any country town an an average Friday or Saturday night when the pubs and clubs release their revelers and most police forces have learned how to cope with these contingencies without calling upon riot squads.What ails the Essex Police ?

A partial answer may be found in the September press conference chaired by Chief Supt.Tim Stokes who estimated that several thousand undesirables whom he called anarchists were preparing to hijack the eviction.

The team assembled in Basildon to investigate all matters concerning Dale Farm concentrated on the social media which is notoriously unsafe and unreliable and indeed during the run up to the big event Facebook,for example,was almost unusable there was so much interference from persons for whom "monitoring" seemed to involve removing messages and posting Spam in their place.Other police forces have dedicated teams of officers who go round schools telling pupils how to use the new media responsibly and how to be wary and not trust the small screen - where you can seldom be sure of the identity of the person trying to get in touch with you.

Raj Chada the solicitor representing the lady with a face covering told the Judge that the police were hounding his clients as if anxious to boost their reputation in law enforcement

There you have it  they had put on a big expensive operation supposedly to deal with a massive threat of violent disorder from a large group of determined rebels which never materialised.They were dealing in fantasy policing - not rooted in the gathering of evidence-and not conducted in a measured,proportionate set of responses. They were OTT     Over the top  by a country mile.

Dale Farm -the Artistic heritage.

Now we are free to speculate so nothing we discuss with the same gravity we have used so far....

As I understand it a play has already been performed in a college or school in the region and been well received.A documentary film made for the BBC by Panorama has been shown(although the troubled Corporation seems reluctant to give it a second viewing).Could Hollywood be interested ?Are there any epic  features ?Certainly we cannot boast a Monument Valley as a backdrop to the action although we do have our very own crusader for law and order-the Leader of the Council.Is it a story of confrontation like the O.K.Coral ? Who are the baddies and who are the goodies ?

If the account given by the Essex police in their September 2011 press conference is credible there lay waiting,all tooled up with stockpiles of dangerous substances,an army of two thousand fierce anarchists who were prepared to use any amount of force.

Yes, there is a story after all:

sending 300 of our finest to raid the place and face numerical odds of 4 to 1 that is something like the "Charge of the Light Brigade" It might appeal to the Hollywood producer.Did our Guys raise a flag when the job was done as they did in the war in the Pacific?

A frisson of excitement was caused when I was reading in the police information document details of injuries sustained by officers at Dale Farm.The first was when an officer was pulling down a fence and something sharp pierced his glove.The second was when an officer stumbled over a newly demolished wall and damaged a knee.

Now...there we have it ...WOUNDED KNEE...makes a good title. There is a snag because the officers although clad with body armour and equipped with shields and visors would not be protected from dangerous chemicals said to be stockpiled on the site, also.... according to he police document only seven officers had Tazers provided for their personal protection though why this was so was never explained.Of the 18 or so injuries reported only one was selected and issued as a police press release (I read it in the Belfast Telegraph although it probably went round the world) It concerned a man who was weilding a big piece of wood with huge nails protuding who is said to have attacked a female officer.Another observation:none of the protestors found on the site seemed to be wearing clothes which would protect them from handling dangerous chemicals and nobody it seems gave dangerous chemicals a thought when the Council contractors dug up the plots in the illegal part of the site.

At present nothing monumental emerges from this story other than the miscalculation of the threat and danger proposed by the protestors who had claimed from the outset that they would resist in a peaceful manner when the Bailiffs came to remove the families.They had explained they would act as human shields and the residents welcomed this kind of support as something they had never experienced before from settled people."We stood because Ye stood" is how one resident put it but there came a time when the pressure got to the old and frail members of the community and further resistance outside the courts became problematical.

Some film might be made of the make belief and the fantastical which Essex policemen have shown some aptitude for in their gamesmanship.A recent report put them at the bottom of the list in dealing with domestic violence and the judicial review blamed them for confusing intelligence (unverified stories)with evidence.

Military men will tell you that raw data must be sifted and carefully analyzed before any decisive action is undertaken.Otherwise one falls victim to counter intelligence and commits fatal blunders.So far this means in the case of Essex police merely that they have lost credibility and their reputation for neutrality in civil cases has been compromised.