Police using choke holds on women.

[Park Life 71]

Last week, the Independent Police Complaints Commission said it would investigate an incident in which a man in Nottingham was caught on video apparently being repeatedly shocked as one officer appeared to punch him near the head."

 

 

Love the way it says near the head.

 

Probably in the throat or the back of the neck if they were trying to cause maximum pain with the least visible damage.

 

 

Fuck me!! If that had been LA those cops would be dead.

[Fop 1]

Last week, the Independent Police Complaints Commission said it would investigate an incident in which a man in Nottingham was caught on video apparently being repeatedly shocked as one officer appeared to punch him near the head."

 

 

Love the way it says near the head.

 

Probably in the throat or the back of the neck if they were trying to cause maximum pain with the least visible damage.

 

 

Fuck me!! If that had been LA those cops would be dead.

 

Holt's Law would have had that woman in white, tasered, beaten, hog tied and taken off to Abu Ghraib for a couple of years though.

[Park Life 71]

 

Effective policing Holtstyle.

 

 

Shocking hillbilly policing.

[Fop 1]

 

Effective policing Holtstyle.

 

 

Shocking hillbilly policing.

 

Fortunately they do reel themselves in at the last second. Wouldn't like to say what would have happened had there been fewer witnesses there and no camera.

[Park Life 71]

Thought the elbow in the back of the neck on the vid (where he collapses immediately) was very harsh...

CCTV shows officers carrying man IPCC claimed walked into station and died

Footage captures police using aggressive techniques to arrest Faisal al-Ani, who died of heart failure in Southend police station

 

Link to this video

Newly obtained CCTV footage has revealed how police officers carried a bruised and apparently limp man into custody moments before he died, contradicting an initial statement by the investigating police watchdog that he had "walked into the police station" and then collapsed.

 

The footage, shown to Faisal al-Ani's inquest and released by the coroner after legal requests by the Guardian, also shows three officers pinning him to the ground while arresting him in Southend-on-Sea town centre. The restraint techniques used by the officers against Ani, a 43-year-old suffering from an acute psychotic illness, were criticised in a report commissioned by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

 

On Monday, the jury at Ani's inquest at Southend civic centre returned a narrative verdict that was broadly supportive of police actions, finding that the force used by the police to restrain Ani had been appropriate even though officers deviated from standard techniques, but that they had failed to take appropriate care of his physical welfare.

 

Vid

Edited July 22, 2009 by Park Life

[Fop 1]

Newly obtained CCTV footage has revealed how police officers carried a bruised and apparently limp man into custody moments before he died, contradicting an initial statement by the investigating police watchdog that he had "walked into the police station" and then collapsed.

 

See again with the lies (it's the common factor with the police and issues like this).

 

If they knew they did nothing wrong then why the need to lie about it?

 

 

 

 

Fairly sure that strike with the elbow to the back of the neck would be "unauthorised techniques" and seemed completely disproportionate and was, of course, frankly pretty dangerous (sure Chris "the Guvner" Holt will disagree ) - although again it's used because it gives maximum pain for minimum recordable/photographable results.

[Fop 1]

And they murder dogs as well.

[Fop 1]

Lessons will be learned.

[The Fish 9234]

You're right, it's much better that lessons aren't learnt.

 

Fascist Fop strikes again

[Fop 1]

You're right, it's much better that lessons aren't learnt.

 

Fascist Fop strikes again

 

In fairness if professional dog handlers (part of a force that regularly lectures on dog safety in hot vehicles) is that incompetent, what does it say?

 

 

And that's before you start to think about the poor dogs involved.

[Park Life 71]

Lucky it wasn't peoples left in the back I guess.

[Fop 1]

Lucky it wasn't peoples left in the back I guess.

They'd have likely survived, but yes it's probably quite indicative of their level of care.

[The Fish 9234]

Lucky it wasn't peoples left in the back I guess.

They'd have likely survived, but yes it's probably quite indicative of their level of care.

 

It's a good job the few cases reported in the news are representative of every police officer on the force. Make sweeping generalisations so much more potent.

[Fop 1]

Lucky it wasn't peoples left in the back I guess.

They'd have likely survived, but yes it's probably quite indicative of their level of care.

 

It's a good job the few cases reported in the news are representative of every police officer on the force. Make sweeping generalisations so much more potent.

 

When your job is to stop people doing certain things, the very least that can be expected is for you not to do those things (or at least for a ton of bricks to come down on you when you are caught doing it).

 

 

Police driving patrol cars and talking on their mobile phones is a small example, but one that Fop certainly sees quite regularly.

[The Fish 9234]

[Park Life 71]

"A woman is to challenge the Metropolitan police in the high court, claiming she was handcuffed, detained and threatened with arrest for filming officers on her mobile phone.

 

Lawyers for Gemma Atkinson, a 27-year-old who was detained after filming police officers conduct a routine stop and search on her boyfriend, believe her case is the latest example of how police are misusing counterterrorism powers to restrict photography.

 

Atkinson's mobile phone recorded part of the incident at Aldgate East underground station on 25 March, one month after Section 58(a) – a controversial amendment to the Terrorism Act – came into force, making it illegal to photograph a police officer if the images are considered "likely to be useful" to a terrorist."

 

Vid here.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/ju...ile-phone-court

Edited July 22, 2009 by Park Life

[Fop 1]

"A woman is to challenge the Metropolitan police in the high court, claiming she was handcuffed, detained and threatened with arrest for filming officers on her mobile phone.

 

Lawyers for Gemma Atkinson, a 27-year-old who was detained after filming police officers conduct a routine stop and search on her boyfriend, believe her case is the latest example of how police are misusing counterterrorism powers to restrict photography.

 

Atkinson's mobile phone recorded part of the incident at Aldgate East underground station on 25 March, one month after Section 58(a) – a controversial amendment to the Terrorism Act – came into force, making it illegal to photograph a police officer if the images are considered "likely to be useful" to a terrorist."

 

Vid here.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/ju...ile-phone-court

 

 

 

 

Again police (as usual) lying about what is "legal" or not. And then resort to the usual bullying tactic (because she'd done nothing wrong, of course - Chris? ).

 

 

There is very little to nothing that uniformed police should be doing that should not be perfectly acceptable to be freely recorded.

[trophyshy 6443]

I watched The Changling the other night. I thought it was about aliens, turns out it was a rather telling history lesson about police corruption and brutality.

[manc-mag 1]

I'd be more interested in what other footage was on Gemma Atkinson's mobile tbh.

[Fop 1]

I watched The Changling the other night. I thought it was about aliens, turns out it was a rather telling history lesson about police corruption and brutality.

 

History?

 

Check out the scientific analysis of "kettleing".

[Guest alex]

Means your boiler needs fixing.

[Fop 1]

Why cops should trust the wisdom of the crowds

 

* 17 July 2009 by Michael Bond

* Magazine issue 2717. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

 

THE protests that took place on the streets of London on the eve of the G20 summit in April lived up to many people's expectations. Around 2000 protestors turned up, and were heavily marshalled by police. There was a bit of trouble, but the police tactics - specifically, the decision to corral the entire crowd into a small area near the Bank of England, an approach known as "kettling" - kept a lid on the violence.

 

That, at least, is the official version of events, and it reflects a belief about crowds that is shared by police, governments and to a large degree the general public across the world: that they are hotbeds of trouble and must be contained. Trouble is seen as especially likely when something goes wrong at a large gathering. Under such circumstances, the expectation is that the crowd will lose its head and all hell will break loose.

 

The "unruly mob" concept is usually taken as read and used as the basis for crowd control measures and evacuation procedures across the world. Yet it is almost entirely a myth. Research into how people behave at demonstrations, sports events, music festivals and other mass gatherings shows not only that crowds nearly always act in a highly rational way, but also that when facing an emergency, people in a crowd are more likely to cooperate than panic. Paradoxically, it is often actions such as kettling that lead to violence breaking out. Often, the best thing authorities can do is leave a crowd to its own devices.

 

"In many ways, crowds are the solution," says psychologist Stephen Reicher, who studies group behaviour at the University of St Andrews, UK. Rather than being prone to irrational behaviour and violence, members of a crowd undergo a kind of identity shift that drives them to act in the best interests of themselves and everyone around them. This identity shift is often strongest in times of danger or threat. "The 'mad mob' is not an explanation, but a fantasy," says Reicher.

 

All this has profound implications for policing and the management of public events. "The classic view of crowd psychology, which is still widespread, talks about the loss of selfhood, leaving people at best out of control and at worst generically violent," says Reicher. "That is not only wrong, it's also counterproductive. If you believe all crowds are irrational, and that even rational people are liable to be dangerous in them, then you'll treat them accordingly, often harshly, and stop people doing things they have a right to do. And that can lead to violence."

If you believe all crowds are irrational and treat them accordingly, it can lead to violence

 

All that said, there's no question that being part of a group can sometimes lead people to do appalling things that they would usually abhor. Examples of crowd-fuelled violence abound, from Hutu death-squads in the Rwandan genocide to racist lynch mobs in the southern states of the US. Likewise, the cover crowds offer can attract individuals who are intent on causing trouble. We can all too easily be led astray by the influence of others (New Scientist, 14 April 2007, p 42).

 

However, crowd violence is actually extremely rare. "If 100 football matches happen on a Saturday and there is violence at one of them, we know which will appear on the front pages the next day," says Reicher. Widespread panic during crowd emergencies is also uncommon and only occurs in special circumstances, such as when escape routes start to close, says Tricia Wachtendorf of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware in Newark. In most situations - particularly those involving large numbers of strangers - the crowd ends up behaving remarkably sensibly.

 

Evidence against the irrationality of crowds has been building for some time, largely from studies of emergencies. In a study to be published in the British Journal of Social Psychology (DOI: 10.1348/014466608X357893), a team led by John Drury at the University of Sussex, UK, talked to survivors of 11 crowd-based disasters or near-disasters, including the 1989 Hillsborough stadium crush that killed 96 soccer fans, and a free concert by Fatboy Slim on Brighton beach in 2002 that was swamped by 250,000 people, four times as many as expected, and led to around 100 injuries. In each case, most interviewees recalled a strong sense of unity with those around them as a result of their shared experience. Rather than being competitive or antagonistic, people did their best to be orderly and courteous - and went out of their way to help strangers. Researchers think that without such cooperation, more people could have been injured and killed.

 

The team found a similar pattern of solidarity and cooperative behaviour in a study of the suicide attacks in London on 7 July 2005, which led to crowds of commuters being trapped underground (International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, vol 27, p 66). "The public in general and crowds specifically are more resilient than they are given credit for," says Drury. During disasters, governments should treat them as the "fourth emergency service", he adds.

 

If anything, a crowd's disinclination to panic can work against it. "It's often difficult to get people to move and act," says Wachtendorf. An analysis of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, for example, performed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, showed that most people prevaricated for several minutes after the planes struck, making phone calls, filing papers or shutting down their computers before attempting to escape.

 

Having established that unruly mob behaviour is the exception, researchers are now getting to grips with the psychological processes that can transform hundreds or thousands of individuals into a unit. The key, according to Drury, Reicher and others, is the recognition that you share something important with those around you, which forces you to identify with them in a meaningful way. "It is a cognitive shift, a difference in self-appraisal, in understanding who you are and how you stand in relation to others," says Reicher.

 

The trigger is often a dramatic situational change such as a fire in a public place or aggressive police tactics at a protest march, but group solidarity can also arise from seemingly inconsequential circumstances, such as being stuck together in a train carriage. Reicher describes it as a shift towards intimacy: "People start agreeing with each other, trusting each other," he says. At the point when members of a crowd start to share a common social identity, the crowd goes from being a mere physical entity to a psychological unit, according to Clifford Stott at the University of Liverpool, UK, who specialises in the behaviour of soccer crowds.

United by circumstances

 

A study carried out by Drury, Reicher and David Novelli of the University of Sussex, to be published in the British Journal of Social Psychology, provides a graphic illustration of how quickly and easily we throw ourselves into "psychological crowds" united by circumstances. The researchers divided a group of volunteers into two according to whether they overestimated or underestimated the number of dots in a pattern - a deliberately arbitrary distinction. They then told each person that they would be talking to someone either from their own group or the other, and that they should arrange some chairs in preparation. Those who had been told they would be talking to a member of their own group placed the chairs on average 20 per cent closer together than those who had been told they would be talking to a member of the other group (DOI: 10.1348/014466609X449377). "We want to be closer to fellow group members, not only metaphorically but also physically, and physical proximity is a precondition for any kind of action coordination," says Reicher.

 

The fluidity of group psychology was also demonstrated in a 2005 experiment on English soccer fans by Mark Levine at the University of Lancaster, UK. He found that supporters of Manchester United who had been primed to think about how they felt about their team were significantly more likely to help an injured stranger if he was wearing a Manchester United shirt, rather than an unbranded shirt or one of rival team Liverpool. However, fans who were primed to think about their experience of being a football fan in general were equally likely to help strangers in Liverpool shirts and Manchester United shirts, but far less likely to help someone wearing an unbranded one (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 31, p 443). This shows the potency of group membership, and also how fluid the boundaries can be.

 

This also happens in the real world, resulting in group bonding which, though transient, can override social, racial and political differences. A good example is the poll tax riots in London in 1990, when protestors from a wide spectrum of backgrounds and interest groups joined forces in the face of what they saw as overly aggressive police tactics. "You had people who were previously antagonistic - anarchists, conservatives, class-war activists - who in the context of the baton charges were united in common group membership," says Stott. This temporary homogenisation is common: think of the cohesiveness of soccer fans supporting an international team who might be hostile when supporting their own local clubs.

People who were previously antagonistic - anarchists, conservatives, class war activists - end up uniting in common group membership

 

Not everyone agrees. One criticism is that the cohesiveness of crowds is superficial, and that people preferentially draw close to those they know or are related to and remain far less attached to strangers around them. Anthony Mawson, an epidemiologist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, maintains that people's typical response in times of threat is to seek out people familiar to them (Public Health Reports, vol 123, p 555). Strangers can develop a shared identity only when they are together "for long enough that a sense of camaraderie develops among them", he says.

 

Yet studies by Drury and others suggest the bonds that form between strangers in crowds are very robust, and although people might help family members first in an emergency, they will also help others irrespective of their connection to them. "What is really of interest," says Drury, "is why so many people - strangers without any formal organisation, hierarchy or means of communication - join together and act as one."

 

So where does this inclination come from to empathise so strongly with others on the basis of shared fate alone? Nobody is really sure, though it appears to be uniquely human. As Mark van Vugt at the University of Kent, UK, and Justin Park at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands point out, no other species appears to have the capacity to form rapid emotional attachments to large, anonymous groups (The Psychology of Prosocial Behaviour, published by Wiley-Blackwell next month). The tendency of people to form strong social bonds while experiencing terror together also appears a universal human trait. "This is well known in traditional societies where boys going through puberty rituals in the transition to manhood are often put through frightening experiences," says Robin Dunbar, who studies the evolution of sociality at the University of Oxford.

Control and contain

 

What are the lessons from all this? One of the most important is that the current approach to managing crowds, which is all about control and containment, can be counterproductive. Police tend to assume that people in crowds are prone to random acts of violence and disorder, and treat them accordingly. But aggressive policing is likely to trigger an aggressive response as the crowd reacts collectively against the external threat. This is why many researchers consider kettling to be a bad idea. "You're treating the crowd indiscriminately, and that can change the psychology of the crowd, shifting it towards rather than away from violence," says Stott. He has found that low-profile policing can significantly reduce the aggressiveness of football crowds, and that if left alone they will usually police themselves.

 

Emergency services should also take note: in a situation such as a terrorist attack or fire, a crowd left to its own devices will often find the best solution. Attempts to intervene to prevent people panicking, such as restricting their movements, could make panic more likely. The key, says Wachtendorf, is to give crowds as much information as possible, as they are likely to use it wisely.

 

If you find yourself in a crowd emergency, the worst thing you can do is resist the group mentality. One of Drury's conclusions from his research into disasters is that the more people try to act individualistically - which results in competitive and disruptive behaviour - the lower everyone's chances of survival are. This is what some researchers believe happened in August 1985 when a British Airtours plane caught fire on the runway at Manchester Airport, UK, killing 55. Non-cooperative behaviour among passengers may have made it harder for people to reach the exits.

 

It can be hard to shake off the idea of crowds as inherently violent or dangerous, but it is worth remembering that they have also been responsible for just about every major societal change for the good in recent history, from the success of the US civil rights movement to the overthrowing of communist regimes in eastern Europe. Good leadership and individual heroics are all very well, but if you're looking for a revolution - or even just a good way out of a difficult situation - what you really need, it seems, is a crowd.

 

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2032....html?full=true

[trophyshy 6443]

I watched The Changling the other night. I thought it was about aliens, turns out it was a rather telling history lesson about police corruption and brutality.

 

History?

 

Check out the scientific analysis of "kettleing".

 

Yes, it was a historical piece.

 

A search on 'kettleing' and 'science' brings up this hit first;

 

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/in...15306#msg215306

 

Fascinating stuff indeed.

[Fop 1]

I watched The Changling the other night. I thought it was about aliens, turns out it was a rather telling history lesson about police corruption and brutality.

 

History?

 

Check out the scientific analysis of "kettleing".

 

Yes, it was a historical piece.

 

A search on 'kettleing' and 'science' brings up this hit first;

 

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/in...15306#msg215306

 

Fascinating stuff indeed.

 

 

Fop took all the Google-Fu out of it..... and you still missed it.

[Guest alex]

I watched The Changling the other night. I thought it was about aliens, turns out it was a rather telling history lesson about police corruption and brutality.

 

History?

 

Check out the scientific analysis of "kettleing".

 

Yes, it was a historical piece.

 

A search on 'kettleing' and 'science' brings up this hit first;

 

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/in...15306#msg215306

 

Fascinating stuff indeed.

 

 

Fop took all the humour out of it.

FYP.