Arrested for requesting a policeman’s badge number

From the Guardian today, shocking footage of two women being arrested at Kingsnorth climate camp in Kent last year.

The women had asked police officers who were not displaying their badge numbers, to identify themselves. They were arrested for “obstructing a police officer.”

The video, made by police surveillance officers, shows an officer holding one woman by the neck and the other woman being laid face down on the ground before having her legs bound.

Emily Apple and Val Swain were held in custody for four days but all charges against the women were later dropped.

They have complained to the Independent Police Complaints Commission and investigators will review the video as evidence.

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9 Comments

  • Posted 21st June 2009 at 10:39 pm | Permalink

    I was shocked watching this video, and I’m one of the people who was actually there being woken at 3am each morning by the police psy-ops attempts (playing the ‘theme tune’ of Apolcalypse Now at one point).

    Those officers should be sacked, as should any refusing to wear their number clearly visible.

  • Posted 21st June 2009 at 10:41 pm | Permalink

    Presumably this is why photographing police officers is to be prohibited.

  • Matt
    Posted 21st June 2009 at 11:12 pm | Permalink

    Gosh. Labour Britain. Doesn’t it make you feel goooood to be in a Socialist nation? (NO!)

  • Herbert Brown
    Posted 22nd June 2009 at 12:41 am | Permalink

    “Those officers should be sacked, as should any refusing to wear their number clearly visible.”

    Actually, what they were doing looked like a pretty serious assault to me, so why shouldn’t they be prosecuted?

  • Robert C
    Posted 22nd June 2009 at 7:51 am | Permalink

    I have seen this and I am so shocked and sickened by it I am fuming with rage at these brutal KGB thugs dressed up as British police officers. Pastor Niemoller’s poem comes to mind: “First they came for the communists….”

    Can we start a legal fund to pay for prosecution for assault?

    Clegg, please say something about this now. It is an outrage against freedom of expression and protest.

  • Posted 22nd June 2009 at 10:14 am | Permalink

    Disgusting but how will this change under a right wing government of the Tories!!

    I wasn’t that old, well I was 9 when Thatcher was about and raging but hello?? I’m never going to forget those photos’s of what the police used to do!!

    What about the Tories is pro civil liberties and not pro excess force by police etc??

    I never saw the diff between Mussollini’s Italy or Stalin’s Russia-left and right have more in common then not, the only difference which is a HUGE one, is that the right does not believe in a society and the left do.

    So all this Labour’s Britain brutality, blah, blah is a load of tosh.

    Just wait until the Tories can back into power, then you’ll really see civil brutality!

  • ColinW
    Posted 23rd June 2009 at 11:11 am | Permalink

    Time to arrest & prosecute police thugs. Any police not wearing numbers should be sacked instantly.

  • Posted 23rd June 2009 at 9:39 pm | Permalink

    I guess that she is lucky that this was in 2008, otherwise her photography would have been classed as terrorism and she would probably be under house arrest.

    Rantersparadise – 12 years of Home Secretaries who made all of the Thatcher Home Secretaries look positively Liberal kind of put lie to that comment.

  • Meandyew
    Posted 25th June 2009 at 4:03 pm | Permalink

    4 days, They were held for 4 days.

    That is astonishing.

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