Revealing the horrors of state violence at Law on Trial

This post was contributed by Guy Collender, Communications Manager in Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations.

The severity and frequency of incidents of state violence, including deaths in police custody and the provocation of protestors by the authorities, are disturbing. These excesses need to be exposed and warrant discussion, and that is just what happened as part of this year’s series of Law on Trial lectures about scientific evidence. The graphic and shocking session, entitled ‘State violence under the microscope’, was held at Birkbeck on Thursday 19 June.

Dr Nadine El-Enany, Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck’s School of Law, began by charting the historical roots of state violence and the justifications used for it. She referred to the Peterloo massacre of 1819, when 11 people were killed and more than 500 were injured following a cavalry charge to break up a 60,000-strong meeting in Manchester about political reform (suffrage for all men). El-Enany explained how the doctrine of unlawful assembly developed in three trials following the massacre, how large crowds were assumed to be treacherous, and how public order offences, rather than high treason, came to be used to prosecute protestors.

She described how this assumption that crowds are an “inherent danger” continues today, and how this perception underpins the law as the state tries to depoliticise protest and maintain the status quo.

Referring to the protests in 2010 against rising tuition fees, El-Enany spoke about how the police practice of kettling – confining protestors to a limited area during a protest – proves counter-productive as it can lead to violence.  She said: “Heavy-handed policing has been shown to increase, rather than decrease, disorder.”

Dr Chris Cocking, from the University of Brighton, spoke about psychological theories of crowd behaviour and reiterated how police tactics can backfire. Aggressive actions, such as charges and kettling, treat the crowd as one group, and provoke the crowd to respond as one group. He said: “Indiscriminate public order tactics unite previously disparate crowds into opposing police action and create a self-fulfilling prophesy of escalating conflict.” Cocking described how disorder occurs, not because of violent intent, but because of a clash of legitimacy between two groups, namely the police and the crowd.

Harmit Athwal, of the Institute of Race Relations, spoke about research underway to investigate the deaths of 400 Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) people in police custody, prison and immigration detention. She referred to the importance of scientific evidence and independent post-mortems during inquests to challenge the official version of events and the initial views of pathologists in controversial cases. Athwal said: “Scientific evidence is important as it offers an alternative narrative to blaming the victim.”

Dr des Eddie Bruce Jones, Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck’s School of Law, continued by highlighting BME deaths in police custody in Germany, where there is no system of inquests. He focused on the horrific case of Oury Jalloh – a Sierra Leonean asylum seeker who burnt to death in a police cell in Dessau in 2005 while he was shackled to a mattress. No forensic fire examination was conducted, the right questions about how the fire started were not asked, and the lack of an inquest meant that there was no forum to discuss how the death occurred.

The shocking examples and frank exposition of state violence presented by the speakers generated many questions, highlighting once again the School of Law’s interest in social justice and debate.

Listen to the audio recordings of the speakers at the event.

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