There is somehow something inherently slightly funny about the police protesting, but their march ten days ago wasn’t the easiest thing to photograph. There really was very little about the police themselves that made the kind of visual hook that we need to work on as photographers. Very few placards, and they were rather lacking in interest. People dressed in ordinary and generally rather dull clothes, walking without animation, rather like fans leaving a match where their team has suffered a humiliating defeat. The big visual idea that the Police Federation had come up with was black caps, 16,0000 of them, and it wasn’t one that I really found inspiring, try as I did.
There were a few who had made more of an effort with t-shirts showing on the front the police warrant badge with the message ‘Her Majesty Gave Me This’ and on their back a knife and blood ‘May and Winsor gave me this’ but photographing the front and back of a t-shirt proved a little tricky (at least if like me you don’t set things up) and I didn’t quite manage it.
So like many other photographers on the day I was pleased to see some real protesters who livened things up a bit, including a group from Occupy London, who joined in the march, though not entirely welcomed.
Their demands for the police had some overlap with those of the bulk of marchers, and certainly both are opposed to the privatisation of the police forces, but Occupy want the police to be more accountable and more concerned with justice. Our police have the job of enforcing a system of law in which the concept of property is paramount, and work for an administration that sometimes seems to care little about justice, and be more concerned with sweeping things under the extensive carpets of the Crown Prosecution Service and the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
One thing that many of us watching the police march were joking about was the number of marchers; police estimates being often on the ludicrously low side. The first number I was given by someone from the Police Federation was 10,0000, but later this went up to 20,000 and later still to 30,000. There were nothing like any of these numbers when I arrived at Millbank where the march gathered at the appointed time, but certainly they were belivable when marchers were still filing rather dumbly past me over an hour after the leading banner and I decided it was time to go home.
What had detained me so long was not the police, but other groups of protesters. A group with the ‘Defend the Right to Protest’ banner stood shouting about the many unexplained and often hardly investigated deaths at the hands of the police, in few if any of which has justice been seen to be done, and was faced by a row of a dozen or more on-duty uniformed police staring at them. If there were there to protect anyone they would have had their backs to these protesters.
But more interesting to me were the Space Hijackers, who, as at the previous police march in January 2008, were there with their ‘professional protest stall’, giving advice to the police on how to make effective placards and suggesting a few useful chants. Unlike in 2008, when many of the marchers were visibly angered by their presence and suggestions for placards (such as ‘No Justice No Peace We Are the Police‘ and ‘Without Us, Democracy Would Triumph‘) many of those marching past seemed to be visibly amused.
Not so the uniformed officers who stood in front of the stall glaring at them, and the Space Hijackers were threatened with arrest for displaying a placard with the acronym ‘ACAB‘ on it. As a kid in the 50s I learnt the traditional English song (I’ll sing you a song and it won’t take long…) and the abbreviation was in common use in the miner’s strike and as a prison tattoo long before it became a minor punk hit in the 80s. I’m told it can also mean All Cats Are Beautiful and Always Carry A Bible.
My London Diary: Police March Against Cuts and Winsor
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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