Wednesday March 26th, 2008. 10:19 am by frog
Doesn’t the police response to the Rainbow Warrior protest yesterday sound a little bit unnecessarily miffed? It’s a bit hard to blame Greenpeace for a lone constable being attacked in a brawl in central Christchurch, when it was the police that decided protecting the property on a coal export ship was 30 times more important in term of police staff allocations than violence in the central city.
Posted in Environment & Resource Management | Justice & Democracy | by frog | Wed, March 26th, 2008 |
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March 26th, 2008 at 11:04 am
30 police to deal with six protestors does seem a bit silly, but police have often tended to prioritise the policing of protests in recent years. Once we had a dozen police and a paddy wagon for a handful of people doing anti-GE street theatre.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
What else were the police to do when there were pirates running amok in Lyttleton Harbour?
Didn’t you notice that the lone constable was on traffic duty. What was he doing in Cashel Mall in the first place. Surely there must have been one or two police in that police skyscraper across the bridge from the mall?
March 26th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
That fairfax story speaks volumes about the lens which they wish people to see the world. Here is the story from Greenpeace http://weblog.greenpeace.org.nz/ship-tour/the-aftermath/
Problem is they are succeeding in normalising this excessive police response to direct action, and marginalising anyone protesting the status quo.
We need to get out and active more to challenge this, or it is going to get harder.
March 27th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
This is the second time in about as many weeks that Christchurch has found itself without police cover. I’m not saying the deployments were wrong per se, but the undeniable truth remains that when police were needed, there were none there to be had.
And now on to Greenpeace… they say (in the article linked to above by McTap) that “there is no future in coal”; well, that depends on what you mean by “the future”; for values of “the future” measured in small numbers of decades, its pretty hard to argue anything other than coal having a very bright future. We (as in humankind) actually have some, we know how to make it do useful things. No-one connects that replacing a GLS lamp with a CFL lamp reduces coal burned, so there is no real drive for change. Lets burn that coal.
I just wonder if the UK will ever decide that Maggie’s actions in removing the UK coal industry were an act of treasonous proportions. But I suspect not, now that they’re going gung ho for more nukes…
March 27th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
That woman cop who heroically ‘Jumped ship’ gets the ‘Hillary Clinton courage under Bosnian fire’ award too!
March 29th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Maggie’s actions in removing the UK coal industry were an act of treasonous proportions? Maybe they should give her a gong for slowing climate change, even if she was the original accidental environmentalist.