The Metropolis

Peaceful Protesters Tricked into Mass Arrest — Counted as Disorderly

Chuck Ansbacher | Tuesday 29 March, 2011 15:09

Saturday was a big day in London, with relatively few arrests. Of the estimated 250,000 that showed up around the city to protest the drastic public spending cuts there were only 201 arrests. That speaks volumes to both the restraint on the part of the police, and the respectfulness of the vast majority of the protesters.

That 201, however, would have been a dramatically smaller number if one group of protesters had not been locked up. That group — a tax-avoidance protest group known as UK Uncut — added 138 arrests to the tally. That’s roughly 70% of all the arrests made on Saturday, which is a very sizeable chunk. Not only that, but they are being counted as a huge majority of the 149 “violent” protesters arrested. And as Ben Goldcare helpfully points out, 149 minus 138 is 11. Quite a conflated number.

Video of their arrest and what preceded it has been made available to The Guardian, and it is worth watching. The protesters, who were occupying Fortum & Mason’s, were clearly told by the police that when they left, they wouldn’t be arrested. And then they were. All 138 of them.

Of course, while lying to people isn’t cool, and while these guys most certainly were anything but violent, the justification for the arrests doesn’t seem that far fetched, does it? They were, after all, trespassing — which is exactly what they were arrested for. Yes, the police lied to them, but to what end? To avoid an potentially violent showdown with a group whose tendencies were a complete unknown? In a department store of all places? Probably. Yes, the police tricked them, but they did prevent Fortum & Mason’s from being damaged — an event that we can all imagine getting pretty ugly.

At the end of The Guardian’s piece on this, they quote one of the organisers for UK Uncut as saying “Perhaps I shouldn’t expect the police to tell me the truth.” While that may be true, and may also be a valuable lesson, an even more valuable takeaway from this incident might be “Perhaps I shouldn’t protest in department stores and not expect to get arrested.”

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