‘Serious disruption to the life of the community’. If there’s one legal phrase which catches the difference between climate campaigners on the one hand and the police on the other, it’s that one.
It comes from section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986. Where a senior police officer ‘reasonably believes that [a public assembly] may result in ….. serious disruption to the life of the community’ they may make ‘directions’ imposing conditions on those protests, public assemblies. If the conditions are breached, a criminal offence is committed and the police have the power to arrest and prosecute. This is the provision used against hundreds of Extinction Rebellion (‘XR’) activists in April and October this year.
The senior police officers, who have the power to make these directions, have applied a myopic, narrow and conservative interpretation to this term. The police don’t intervene when, say, conglomerates block major roads for months on end, to knock down small buildings to build a big new one. We all live – sadly increasingly – with the impacts on travel of unfavourable weather conditions. But where transport is delayed by protesters even for a relatively short period of time, a direction is readily imposed and the conditions are broad and open-ended. For the police it’s about protecting business, business as usual, commercial and apolitical activity. It may also be about maintaining control or seeking to do so, and about saving face, or seeking to do so.
