cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/news/t/316149
Metropolitan police approved their use at Notting Hill carnival and Black Lives Matter protests in 2020
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Known as plastic bullets, baton rounds have never been fired during public order incidents on the British mainland, but have been used in Northern Ireland, where earlier versions of the weapons led to deaths.
Liberty Investigates submitted a request asking the Met whether police chiefs had approved the potential use of baton rounds – which are officially called attenuating energy projectiles [AEP] – before events from 2013 to the present.
Oliver Feeley-Sprague from Amnesty International said: “The Met’s pre-authorisation of their use at Notting Hill and at Black Lives Matter protests smacks of racist decision-making from a force already notorious for its institutional racism.”
“They have been authorised as a precaution in a very limited number of situations in recent years, including protests in central London in 2020 where serious violence was anticipated and occurred, resulting in significant injuries to more than 40 officers.
“This was prompted by serious concerns about a further escalation in disorder, with large numbers of people anticipated and an indication that counter-protesters could travel to London, leading to potential confrontations between groups.”
Victor Olisa, a former Met chief superintendent, said other events during the period in question, some of which turned violent, were not assessed as potentially requiring baton rounds.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Im kinda surprised they didn’t use them against the Irish
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Paragraph 3. They did, just not in the last 6 years.
And dogs.
Shocking. Or not.
Notting Hill Carnival is a bit dodgy, by I can’t blame them during the BLM stuff seeing the riots that kicked off over it in the US.
This is exactly the kind of thinking that the (notoriously (and institutionally) racist) Met used.
It seems like smart thinking to me, people were burning down and taking over chunks of cities in the US, personally I don’t want that happening in London and if it did would support the, well not very big guns in the grand scheme of things, being brought out. To be fair, I’d support them doing the same to far right protests if the same level of rioting took place.
love to support the police brutalizing black people who are asking the police to stop brutalizing black people
scratch a liberal and suddenly you’re drowning in fashie blood, and not in the good way
I’m not asking them to open fire into a peaceful crowd inindiscriminately am I? I’m saying if it kicked off and they started burning buildings and looting like the US BLM riots, then I wouldn’t be opposed to the use of the rounds.
the demonstrations in the u.s. were largely peaceful aside from police violence. a ransacked Target is not worth the police running people over or blinding them with rubber bullets
