What is the MPS thinking?

Another demo, another round of stories that raise serious issues about how the Met police these events.

This is particularly egregious -  and fantastic to see that the police are not the only 'great British institution' to engage in the bullying of wheelchair users (not that being in a wheelchair makes you automatically defenceless or helpless, of course, as Jody McIntyre demonstrates toward the end of the interview) - but some of the stories coming out around the kettling last week are if anything even worse.

If reports such as this are true, and the Met is using kettling as a tool of collective punishment intended to dissuade people from attending demos in the future, then we are talking about policing practise that far far exceeds any reasonable remit. There are many other reports of the events last week, e.g. here, but these talk only of collective punishment in the abstract. The post on Critical Legal Theory is one of the first I've seen that implies officers on the ground know that this is what they're doing. I say practise, rather than policy, because I sincerely doubt that it is a policy in any formal sense. But it doesn't have to be if the officers involved understand what they are doing to be directed in this way. And it's hard to interpret the request to shut the coffee shop that the people 'contained' were using - not smashing up - in any other way.

Random unprovoked violence on the part of the police, while never, ever, acceptable, is at least understandable 'in the heat of the moment'. Human frailty and all that. Those who engage in it could and should be weeded out on a case-by-case basis without undermining the whole notion of 'policing protest' (that they aren't is of course a major problem in and of itself, but not what I'm getting at here). Deliberately depriving people of their liberty in order to deter them from exercising their democratic rights is an entirely different thing. It does indeed suggest that the protest is not being policed but attacked.