UK Cops 'Ashamed and Sick' of Enforcing Ban on Anti-Genocide Group Palestine Action
"Instead of catching real criminals and terrorists, we are arresting pensioners and disabled people calling for the saving of children's lives," said one Metropolitan Police officer.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/palestine-action-arrestsOpen linkView original on lemmy.zip263
Comments66
They can literally not do it...
Cops have an insane amount of power because they can just not do their job whenever they feel like it
I doubt it's that easy. There will be disciplinary systems. And if they quit, I'm sure the govt will find people with fewer morals to take their place.
How can they discipline you for not seeing something? Also, no one is saying to quit. They should keep working, but just become blind to these "criminals."
Sort of like a police strike for better conditions for the public.
Your talking about their discretionary powers and that's not going to be relevant on a protest enforcement action where their senior officer in command will have laid out exactly what the criteria to arrest is.
So stop doing it then you fuckwits
If you're ashamed of the job you are doing, find a new job.
This isn't like working in fast food, where you can just find another job right away. You're talking about abandoning a career the officer has spent years building.
Principles aren't principles if you only follow them when they're easy.
Easy for us to say.
I'm not claiming to be the moral arbiters of the nation though, am I. They are, that's the job they chose to do, it's not my fault they suddenly don't like it. Same for the military in the US wandering aboud LA, and DC.
Demanding they quit because of this has definite "I live with my parents" vibes though. I doubt that person has a mortgage.
This is bullshit. I'd rather sell my house and move to a poorer area and find a job where I don't hurt people for half the pay, then to hurt people as a police office or in the military. I would expect a wife and children to be pretty understanding of that. And yes I have a mortgage, and no I'm not rich.
Again, they were aware that was always a possibility when they took the job. If you have a job that involves following orders so there is always the possibility that you will be given orders you don't agree with, you should think about that before signing up.
Seems a bit daft. The answer then is to have either no police, or to have police who will mindlessly follow any order?
No police would be great, but in the absence of that ideal, I'd rather have people in the role who question the morality of what they're doing. Compare this response with ICE in the US who kidnap people off the streets and send them to concentration camps and don't complain that they disagree with what they are doing
Easy to say but my job is shit and what real choice do I have? Sure I can look for something else but there isn't much out there.
Are you a cop? If so then you don't need me to tell you about all of the private security gigs that are going because you 100% already knew about them.
Principles can be in conflict though. The promise to provide stability for your family, for example, is often more urgent than more lofty political principles. In this situation, looking actively for another job whilst continuing to perform the tasks you disagree with at a level of bare minimum compliance might be an ethically acceptable compromise.
You dont have a line you wouldnt cross at work? Arresting someone carries a risk of harm, would you harm someone else daily whilst looking for new work?
There are tons of lines I wouldn't cross at work, but those lines would be different in another job. If arresting people is generally part of your job description, then I would expect you to have different red lines.
It is a fine principle to uphold the law. In this particular case it is the law that's an ass, not the enforcement.
Yeah cuffing pensioners is a real skill that must be honed with years of hard work & training
https://www.joiningthepolice.co.uk/training-progression/training
18-22 weeks of classroom based training, then three months supervision on the job. Then they will be getting promoted as they get more experienced.
It's a lot to just walk away from.
“Just following orders” you say? You could choose not to do it. You could choose to not participate in injustice. What you are doing is bad and you should feel bad for doing it.
Not a good policy for police to choose what laws to enforce.
I take it you have some kind of experience of reporting a burglary and having them follow it up at all then?
That's more inability than unwillingness.
The whole point of protesting is visibility. The whole point of burglary is invisibility.
Feddit.org users brains cannot comprehend.
I don't, indeed. Please explain it to me.
It just was but here we are
Then they should refuse to do it, and make the police force go through the trouble of firing them.
This. Right here. Don't make it easy on the brass by quitting
They should be more like the Italian dock workers.
Resign, pigs.
Quit your shitty job
Do you have a mortgage by any chance? Or pay rent?
Do you always make excuses to make shitty decisions? Or just contrarian?
ACAB holy fuck.
If my boss told me at my job, I had to attack genocide protesters or I would be fired, I think I would rip out his jugular with my teeth and then quit
To be fair, cops have no other marketable skills, so rage quitting has more serious consequences than for normal people with transferable skills.
Fuck Israel, genocidal scum!
Palestine Action was banned after they breached into a military base and damaged RAF jets
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn81g4e0nlyo
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr742e8n0rxo
A lot of their supporters are good people that simply aren't aware of what the group did.
I think arresting their supporters is going too far. It's a waste of resources.
Everyone knows what they did. That's not the issue that people have. The issue is proscribing them as a terrorist group when they quite clearly aren't a terrorist group in a monumental trivialisation of what terrorism actually is and an obvious attempt to silence people.
I had no idea what they did, wow, I like them even more now
They painted a few planes, they're hardly the IRA.
It begs the question, in whom have they inspired terror?
"Budgie the Little Helicopter" and "Jimbo of the Jet Set" are both terrified.
Jimbo has, in fact, suggested he might like the freshen up and Budgie's just happy to be less Epstein adjacent.
Thomas the Tank Engine had bricked himself into a tunnel.
Paint can do severe damage to engines
Damaging an aircraft engine is a far cry from a campaign of kneecapping, bombing and murder.
Damaging government property is terrorism now?
Yes but nobody is afraid of them. They haven't hurt anyone.
Plane lives matter.
Oh wait, planes aren't alive. Gee, sounds like it was a non-violent crime then, huh?
Try attacking ultra high cost military property in any part of the world and tell me how you did.
Say it with me:
Non-
Violent
Crime
They have labeled a group as terrorists for performing an action that literally harms no one. In fact, it does the opposite.
I think plenty of their supporters knew what they did and frankly they absolutely deserve to be punished for criminal damage. Proscribing them as a terror organisation, however, is waaaay disproportionate and in my personal opinion an abuse of the law. I think their supporters feel the same and are making a stand against this.
Reckon it was because of the UK supplying over 500 RAF spy flights over gaza?
Nope, because the planes they damaged weren’t spy planes.
So? What they did has nothing to do with terrorism at worst it's vandalism.
Which under British law is terrorism if politically motivated.
Not only do the vaste majority know what they did. They know Starmer as a lawyer successfully defended very similar actions under the Blair administration. As not criminal due to intent to save lives.
The level of hypocrisy within the current government is beyond belief. Starmer is clearly the puppet of someone. What or who is the only thing up for debate.
Yes everyone knows that.
No that is incorrect, what you are trying to do is make it look legitimate for them to be prescribed. I don't know of anyone who both supports them but also doesn't know what they were accused of.
`damaged´
Throwing paint into a jet engine really is damage. You gave to take the engine apart and meticulously clean out the paint before you can run it again, because otherwise the engine could do itself serious harm next time it's started. That's a very expensive thing to do.
That actually makes it a very effective act of protest, which is why the government has come down so hard on them
Were the actual people who performed the action caught?
That's something that would cost thousands to fix if done to a car, as the paint needs to be sanded back and repainted. On an aircraft, it could easily be a six figure job, in addition to a multimillion dollar aircraft being unable to be flown.
Calling it terrorism is silly, but it's absolutely damage.