The London Climate Camp begins next Wednesday (there's already a camp going on in Wales next to an opencast mine in Merthyr Tydfil) and in the Guardian Paul Lewis reports that the Met is launching a "charm" offensive ahead of the protest. This, of course, follows the controversy surrounding the G20 protests, where the Camp at Bishopsgate was kettled and viciously attacked by police, and last year's camp at Kingsnorth where protesters were subject to systematic harassment and intimidation, drawing heavy condemnation, including from the Joint Committee on Human Rights in an important report.
Representatives of Climate Camp have apparently been told that they will be met with a "community-style" form of policing with less use of surveillance and stop-and-search. They've also been told there will be no "ring of steel" around the camp and, unlike in Kingsnorth, police won't be blasting loud music at them to disrupt the camp and stop them from sleeping (it's revealing of the attitude of Kent police that they chose to blast the Clash's I fought the law at protesters committed to non-violence). Senior commanders who led at the G20 have also been replaced with new, female commanders for the operation.
It would perhaps be churlish not to extend a cautious welcome to the belated realisation by the Met - reinforced by strong criticism from the Met Police Authority and in recent reports by the HMIC and the IPCC - that in the age of camera phones and YouTube it's more difficult for them to get away with the kind of aggressive treatment of protest they have in the past. But it really does indicate just how bad things have got for the state of our democratic rights that a story along the lines of "Police may permit peaceful protest" is now news-worthy.
According to Lewis, the Met has been making more of an effort to improve communications with Camp organisers inviting delegates from the Camp to talk to police and launching a Twitter account to "to send operational information to protesters taking part in the camp". How exactly this new medium will be used is unclear. You can follow them @CO11MetPolice. So far they're following 1 person, have 54 followers and have tweeted just once to say "This is the official Metropolitan Police Twitter channel for #CO11".
There's no doubt better communication would be a step forward but too often the focus on this has distracted attention from the principal problem: police tactics. Police commanders frequently attempt to deflect criticism by complaining about the absence of "hierarchy" in the camps which apparently makes communication more difficult (even though there are always trained legal observers ready to relay messages and the police are known to have rejected engagement before April's camp). The efforts of the Met in this direction shouldn't obscure the fact that intimidating and shutting down peaceful protest is wrong no matter how well they communicate their intentions beforehand. Reading "@protesters we are about to kettle you and then attack you with shields and batons please RT" on your phone wouldn't make the experience any more pleasant or justifiable from a democratic point of view.
So, it remains to be seen whether this story amounts to anything more than a clever public relations exercise by the Met. The proof will be in the pudding - and not just at next week's Camp, but at all future protests where there will be less intensive media scrutiny. For the moment there is every reason to be sceptical. The use of Twitter and the introduction of female commanders alongside other superficial changes in the Met's approach have succeeded in winning some positive media coverage but there's no sign yet of serious change to the structure of protest policing and the attitudes that lie behind it.
If the Met were at all serious about becoming a facilitator of peaceful protest, rather than an obstacle to it, they would abandon the apparatus of control and surveillance they've brought in in recent years which seems designed to intimidate protesters and makes them feel like criminals. But the tactic of "kettling" peaceful protesters (which feels like a form of collective punishment and is almost guaranteed to inflame a situation) has been explicitly ruled in by police and presumably the Forward Intelligence Teams will still be there filming people for their illegal intelligence database.
As Kevin Blowe argues in an excellent blog post, only when there's an end to the kind of brutal police tactics we've witnessed in the past will we know the change is real. Beware the "charming" always struck me as a rather peculiar adage, but when it comes to the Metropolitan police in this case it seems like the only sensible strategy.
