Police tactics set the scene for violent G20 showdown

These fears are the result of recent warnings by senior Metropolitan Police officers. Superintendent David Hartshorn of the Met’s public order branch flagged up the potential dangers in February when he warned of a “summer of rage” in which previously unpoliticised members of society took to the streets to vent their anger at the financial downturn and those they blamed for it – namely bankers.

Last week Scotland Yard Commander Bob Broadhurst told reporters that planners of a collection of quasi-anarchist protests on April 1 – the eve of the G20 summit at the ExCel centre in Docklands – have “some very clever people” working for them.

Recent policing of peaceful protests has seen pepper spray and baton charges

Writing for The First Post today, Matthew Carr warns against “the police and media talking up the protests in such apocalyptic terms”, noting that this sort of “pre-publicity tends to generate expectations that can become self-fulfilling.”

It can also create a “justification” for the sort of police brutality that has occurred during crackdowns against G8 and G20 protests in recent years in Seattle and Genoa in 2001, where a protestor was shot dead and the local police were accused of torture and gross over-reaction.

Recent policing of environmental protests at the Kingsnorth power station last year and at Heathrow airport in 2007 saw riot police attacking peaceful activists with pepper spray, baton charges and horses. “Such behaviour,” notes Carr, “harks back to the worst excesses of the Thatcher era,” and with police enjoying protection from fresh terror legislation, the constraints on them are less than ever before.

With the very act of photographing a police officer now a criminal act under Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act, one of the brakes on police misconduct that previously kept them in the line ­ that is, media coverage of their activities ­ has now been removed.