Thread by @IRR_News

#ImpunityEntrenched Pt 2
🚔Police impunity: in & beyond the pandemic

As revelations of police racism, misogyny & brutality mounted in 2021, the government gave police more powers & protections.

This THREAD details key developments. Get the full picture👇
irr.org.uk/article/polici…

The Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Bill is an enormous and wide-ranging piece of legislation with 179 clauses and 20 schedules.

Its sheer size and range impede proper scrutiny, as the House of Lords Constitution Committee (@HLConstitution) pointed out
committees.parliament.uk/publications/7…

As IRR Director Liz Fekete argues, the Bill not only privileges the police’s wellbeing & protection through the Police Covenant, but also establishes them as a commanding authority to which other public bodies are accountable. irr.org.uk/article/polici…

This multi-agency partnership to tackle serious violence, like the Prevent duty, blurs the boundaries of policing, obliging local authorities, health, youth and education workers and other public agencies to disclose information on service users to police irr.org.uk/product/preven…

The Bill’s provisions on Serious Violence Reduction Orders (SVROs) target anyone with a weapon-related conviction, including those convicted under joint enterprise laws without ever carrying a weapon.

Again, the target is poor & racialised communities. irr.org.uk/article/police…

The order, which can last for up to 2 years and is renewable, allows police to conduct suspicionless stop and searches.

People marked out for an SVRO can be:

🛑Stopped & searched at any time.
🚏In any public place.
⏱For extended periods

More on SVROs⬇️

https://twitter.com/IRR_News/status/1480507901135491072?s=20

The PCSC Bill impacts another racialised and marginalised minority. Its criminalisation of unauthorised encampments, targets Gypsies, Roma and Travellers and, as the @HumanRightsCtte points out, violates their rights to a home & respect for family life.
committees.parliament.uk/publications/6…

The bill authorises police to extract information from electronic devices.

The Home Office promised safeguards to avoid invasions of privacy, but these were deemed wholly inadequate, by rights groups such as @privacyint, @BigBrotherWatch and @libertyhq.
privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/…

This part of the Bill also applies to immigration officials, who appear to have been acting illegally in seizing phones and extracting data for some time.

An FOI by @BylineTimes revealed that over 7,000 phones were seized between July 2019 and May 2021.
bylinetimes.com/2021/08/26/hom…

Digital extraction is one of many areas where concerns are raised by the extension of digital forensics and data analytics. According to @privacyint, the Data Services and Analytic Unit, a secretive Home Office unit, has data on 650 million people. wired.co.uk/article/home-o…

Facial recognition technology in policing has been controversial for years, due to racial bias and many other issues.

In November, @ICOnews told Clearview AI, whose facial recognition software is used by police forces, to stop processing UK personal data
bbc.co.uk/news/business-…

Clearview AI is closely associated with the US far Right, and is notorious for scraping social media sites to harvest users’ facial data to amass probably the largest facial database in the world, with over 10bn images. artificialintelligence-news.com/2020/04/08/cle…

Beyond the bill, we've seen numerous cases of police violence, racism and misogyny

Over 100 incidents of police intimidation and harassment against climate activists at the November @COP26 summit in Glasgow were alleged in a @netpol/@article11trust report theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/d…

In June, a serving officer was convicted of manslaughter for the killing of Dalian Atkinson in 2016, by firing a stun gun into him for 33 seconds – 6 times longer than the norm - before kicking him twice in the head, so hard he left an imprint of his boot. theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/d…

In December, two Met officers were jailed for misconduct in office for taking and sharing photos of murder victims Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, along with racist and misogynist comments. theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/d…

Later that month, it emerged that a Merseyside officer had been dismissed in November for similar activities, carried out over years on an ‘almost industrial scale’.
theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/d…

As our Director Liz Fekete told the Guardian, ‘Cases such as these… are proliferating because these officers believe they are above scrutiny due to a culture of denying racism and silencing whistle-blowers within the force.’ theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/d…

This culture of impunity and denial is present in disproportionate stop and searches.

In 2019-20, black people were stopped 9x more than whites.

The Met commissioner Cressida Dick denies that structural racism informs the gross disparities in policing. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan…

A 14-year-old boy complained in November of being stopped and searched 30 times in the past two years despite never having been charged or convicted of an offence.

The Met’s response revealed only bureaucratic defensiveness, no regret. theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/n…

This disproportion is also seen in taser usage.

According to an @IOPC_Help analysis of 101 cases over 5 years, while black people were no more likely to be tasered than white, those tasered were far more likely to be subjected to a prolonged discharge. theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/a…

The over-policing of racialised minorities has also been seen in the police’s use of emergency powers during the pandemic, creating a threat to public safety with tactics such as kettling and police refusal to wear masks.

Read our report by @EthnicityUK
irr.org.uk/article/polici…

RESISTANCE

There is huge anger at the PCSC Bill, with numerous public demonstrations mainly defending the right to protest, which Lords protected in a series of votes last night. There is also anger at provisions criminalising unauthorised encampments.
bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi…

But it may take some time, and the experience of policing once the Bill is enacted, for widespread resistance to build to other parts of the PCSC Bill, such as the Serious Violence Prevention Duty - and the other policing measures and proposals as detailed in this thread.

Get the fulll analysis of all the policing related policy developments and legislation in Part 2 of #ImpunityEntrenched
irr.org.uk/article/polici…