for Sunday Herald, 26 April 2009
One of the aims of police informers is to undermine, demoralise and divide protest groups, but in fact they can have the opposite effect.
At least that’s what campaigners said yesterday as details of attempts by Strathclyde and Minister of Defence police to offer cash for intelligence emerged.
“They want us to break up and disband but exactly the opposite is happening,” said Dan Glass, from the anti-airport group, Plane Stupid. “We’ve had lots of people getting in touch and offering us their support.”
The police tactics had caused activists to change their behaviour, he said. “Of course we have to be extra careful about security. We don’t talk on the phone, we don’t talk by email and there’s a lot of face to face contact and we’re very careful about what we say and to whom.”
The campaign wasn’t organised in a hierarchical way, and relied on autonomous, decentralised groups, Glass explained. So when the police asked to know who their “head honcho” was, they had entirely missed the point.
Another way of responding to police infiltration would be to do everything in a completely open fashion and give advance notice of all protests, Glass argued. That was the approach now being adopted by some climate campaigners.
Glass was one of the 114 environmental activists arrested in a school near Nottingham on 13 April, and accused of conspiring to cause criminal damage to a nearby coal-fired power station. That was due to an informer, he claimed.
“I’ve been bailed to avoid every airport and power station in the UK,” he told the Sunday Herald. “That’s the police doing their best to reduce my carbon footprint by keeping me at home.”
“They try and suggest that we are a threat to people, but that’s not true. We are non-violent young people just trying to protect people and the planet.”
Angie Zelter, a veteran peace activist from the anti-nuclear group, Trident Ploughshares, argued that infiltration and spying was deliberately designed to undermine protest. “It can divide people and stop them trusting each other,” she said.
It had destroyed a Trident Ploughshares group in Holland, she disclosed, and that was an experience people had learnt from. “The answer is to welcome people with open arms and carry on trusting.”
In a way, she argued the constant knowledge that you were being watched made you more aware of your responsibility to be non-violent. “But it’s an incredible waste of police resources,” she said.
Jane Tallents, another Trident Ploughshares activist from Helensburgh, thought that the police sometimes exaggerated their network of spies to try and engineer “paranoia” amongst protesters.
“In Trident Ploughshares we judge people on a personal basis,” she said. “We work with affinity groups of people we trust. We don’t have inquiries or scapegoats. People work with people they can trust.”
“If you do something big and new people come in you assess them and you work accordingly.”
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