Comments on: Police and the state of NSW

By: tony harris

tony harris — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 05:06:50 +0000

Jeremy,
Shellharbour Council might have acted lawfully when it expelled this person from an earlier meeting becaue he had allegedly disrupted that meeting. But Council has no power to punish a person by excluding that person from a subsequent meeting. This is what it did and the police abetted that illegal act.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 02:22:06 +0000

Councils do have a power to expel people from meetings under s10 of the Local Government Act 1993. And Reg 258 of the Local Government (General) Regulation 2005 empowers the police to remove someone who has been expelled. These might be bad laws, but it’s not entirely clear from your post how the actions of Shellharbour Council and the police are illegal.

Likewise, the Federal Court didn’t strike down the regulation allowing people to be told to leave a WYD area, but only struck out the ‘annoyance’ ground of removal. ‘Inconvenience’ and ‘obstruction’ remain, amongst other grounds. Again, that might be a bad thing, but it’s not at all clear that what the police did was illegal or whether it conflicted with the Federal Court decision.

By: Philly

Philly — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 09:23:49 +0000

For anyone who grew up in Joh’s Queensland such developments are particularly chilling not least because such police MO was ostensibly reigned in by the Fitzgerald Inquiry.

By: Tel

Tel — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 23:40:02 +0000

The thing is, people vote for it. Every election they hear “zero tolerance”, “more police powers”, “more police”, “emphasis on law and order”… and they like what they hear. Authoritarianism get the votes.

http://www.snarl.org/texts/features/freequency.htm

Nearly 15 years ago, we saw identical modus operandi, same removal of name badges that we saw at APEC, they even had an investigation and yet again concluded that while police had broken the law, no action would be taken.

Funny how “zero tolerance” applies only in one direction.

By: Ken Lovell

Ken Lovell — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 22:07:10 +0000

Most people of course will dismiss even the possibility of our fair democracy becoming a police state. The notion challenges their fundamental mental model of the world they live in. As usual, however, the USA is showing us the way. Reporting on events he observed at first hand, US blogger Glenn Greenwald reports:

Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than "fire code violations," and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying. ... In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house.

But if you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.