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UK Cops 'Ashamed and Sick' of Enforcing Ban on Anti-Genocide Group Palestine Action
"Instead of catching real criminals and terrorists, we are arresting pensioners and disabled people calling for the saving of children's lives," said one Metropolitan Police officer.
Sep 04, 2025
A pair of British police officers on Thursday expressed feelings of shame and guilt over having to arrest peaceful protesters—many of them elderly—for showing solidarity with Palestine Action as seven more of the anti-genocide group's supporters were charged with terrorism offenses.
"Instead of catching real criminals and terrorists, we are arresting pensioners and disabled people calling for the saving of children's lives," one Metropolitan Police member, identified as "Officer A," told Novara Media's Harriet Williamson under condition of anonymity. "It makes me question why I'm even in this career anymore."
While Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said he is "proud" of how the department is handling the situation, Officer A said they felt "ashamed and sick" about having to arrest Palestine Action defenders—nearly half of whom are over age 60, with many older than 70 or even 80—under orders they did not believe in.
"I was told to help in the arrest of a disabled person for holding up the sign stating they opposed genocide and supported Palestine Action, which I did," they said. "I did it knowing it had nothing to do with upholding justice or our professional values, just to protect my job and livelihood."
"My father was an officer, and the reason I came into the police," Officer A continued. "I know he would be ashamed and turning in his grave if he saw what I did."
"I was at the protests and stood there with people shouting in my face calling me a pig and other names. I don't blame the public at all," Officer A confided. "In my silence, they didn't realize I agreed with everything they were saying but stating that openly would mean the end of my job."
The officer added that "my managers don't support what we have to do either, but they don't make the law and just have to follow what the ministers decide."
Another Met officer—identified as "Officer B"—told Williamson that "many officers are stuck between what everyone is witnessing in terms of genocide" and their orders to arrest supporters of Palestine Action.
"It causes a moral and ethical dilemma," said the officer, who is Muslim, as well as considerable "guilt for not being able to have a say on genocide."
More than 700 people have been arrested for showing support for Palestine Action ever since the group's recent ban under the Terrorism Act of 2000.
A spokesperson for the Police Federation of England and Wales told Novara Media that there aren't enough officers to police Palestine Action protests.
"Officers are emotionally and physically exhausted," the spokesperson said. "The demand is relentless. And it's not sustainable."
All told, at least 73 people have been charged with showing support for the banned group. They could face up to 14 years behind bars if fully convicted.
The Palestine Action ban resulted from Labour Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's introduction of parliamentary legislation after members of the direct action group broke into a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire and sprayed two planes with red paint.
Defend Our Juries—an advocacy group that staunchly supports Palestine Action—said it is expecting more than 1,000 demonstrators to turn out for a Saturday rally near Parliament at which participants are set to hold signs reading, "I Oppose Genocide" and "I Support Palestine Action," an action that could result in a record number of arrests.
🚨 BREAKING: September 6th Action to go ahead as 1,000+ pledge to hold signs in defiance of Labour’s authoritarian banJoin the 1000+ by signing up at wedonotcomply.orgThis announcement comes after counter-terrorism police arrested five spokespeople in dawn raids today.
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— Defend Our Juries (@defendourjuries.bsky.social) September 2, 2025 at 5:55 AM
On Thursday, seven members of Defend Our Juries who were recently arrested and charged with terrorism offenses for encouraging support for Palestine Action pleaded not guilty in Westminster Magistrates' Court in London.
Former government attorney Timothy Crosland, 55; gardener Dawn Manners, 61; David Nixon, 39; student Patrick Friend, 26; Gwen Harrison, 48; and Melanie Griffith, 62 allegedly arranged public protests and managed a series of 13 recent Zoom meetings in support of Palestine Action. Anthony Harvey, a 59-year-old man from the Oban area of Scotland, was also charged under the anti-terrorism law and released on bail after appearing in a Scottish court.
The seven activists were set to hold a Tuesday press conference to promote Saturday's demonstration; however, they were preemptively arrested. Journalist and author George Monbiot, who was also set to speak at Tuesday's event, called the arrests "classic police state stuff."
"We all have a stake in this because we're seeing a slippage from a nominally broadly democratic nation into one with very strong, authoritarian characteristics, and this is something I feel we all have a duty to resist," Monbiot told Middle East Eye on Wednesday.
The Defend Our Juries spokesperson asserted Thursday that "the mass defiance of the ban cannot be stopped and is growing all the time."
"It will only stop when the UK government abandons this grossly unjust proscription and ends its complicity in Israel's horrific atrocities," they added.
This isn't the first time that Met Police have reportedly voiced frustration at having to persecute Palestine Action supporters. According to Williamson, climate writer Donnachadh McCarthy "described multiple interactions" with officers "who said they were unhappy with the Palestine Action ban."
"One officer told me, 'This is not the work I came into the police to be doing. I would far prefer to be doing my proper job catching real thieves,'" McCarthy recalled, adding that his arresting officer "paused as he was about to close the [cell] door on me and said, 'This is mad. I can understand them arresting Hamas members, but for people holding a placard, this doesn't make any sense to me.'"
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Crime and Punishment US Style: an Interview with David Garland
The author and NYU professor explains why America’s modern regime of policing and punishment is altogether extraordinary when measured against the practices of other developed nations.
Aug 28, 2025
The United States is a global outlier in several significant areas, not least of which is its extraordinary penal state with its penchant for extreme punitiveness.
Indeed, as Professor David Garland, one of the world’s most influential criminologists, argues in the interview that follows, for historical parallels with the penal state in the US one must look to the case of the Gulag system during Joseph Stalin’s reign as dictator of the Soviet Union. Moreover, Professor Garland contents that behind the harshness and cruelty of the US criminal legal system lies the nation’s racialized political economy, and that transforming the latter is a prerequisite for restructuring the former.
David Garland is the Arthur T. Vanderbilt professor of law and professor of sociology at New York University and an honorary professor at Edinburgh University. He is author of the newly published book Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment.
C. J. Polychroniou: The United States has long portrayed itself as the greatest and freest country in the world, a model democracy for other countries across the globe. The reality, however, is that the US is the most economically unequal society in the developed world and one of the worst countries for racial equality. In addition, its weak and fragile liberal-democratic institutions have been exposed in recent times for all to see, while its penal system is what may easily be described as a national disgrace and an international embarrassment. Indeed, as you argue in your recently published book Law and Order Leviathan, the US is also an outlier among modern democracies in its policing and punishment practices, and this is indeed by no means a new phenomenon. How should we understand the country’s long-standing obsession with law and order?
David Garland: Yes, people think of America as Alexis de Tocqueville’s civil society when in fact it’s often closer to Thomas Hobbes’ authoritarian state. We see these repressive characteristics today in the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, but for the last 40 years the leading example has been the massive deployment of penal power by America’s criminal legal system—a deployment that has occurred at every level of government with broad bipartisan support.
The fundamental cause that has shaped America’s penal state is the nation’s racialized political economy and the material conditions created by its economic and political structures.
America’s modern regime of policing and punishment is altogether extraordinary when measured against the practices of other developed nations. American police kill civilians at a much higher rate; American courts impose longer and more frequent prison sentences; American prisons house massively more individuals, particularly Blacks and Latinos; and Americans with felony convictions are subject to many more controls and constraints after they serve their sentence. No other democracy exercises penal power to this extent. To find historical parallels, we have to look to the Soviet gulags or Mao’s political prison system.
There are many causes that converged to bring about America’s penal Leviathan—fear of crime, racism, neoliberalism, the appeal of law and order politics, a culture of cruelty and indifference—but the fundamental cause that has shaped America’s penal state is the nation’s racialized political economy and the material conditions created by its economic and political structures.
C. J. Polychroniou: The US has a weak welfare system and a distinct political economy in general compared to many European countries. Is there a direct link between weak welfare structures and the employment of aggressive policing and harsh punishment?
David Garland: Yes, and the book shows in detail what these linkages are and how they operate. Like its penal state, America’s political economy is an international outlier, with characteristics that set it apart from the economic arrangements of other high-income nations. This is especially true of its labor market—which provides fewer protections for working people, and more low-paid, precarious employment, making for a level of insecurity and instability that is unknown elsewhere in the developed world. On top of this, America’s welfare state provides less support for poor people and for those in need.
Material conditions for working people grew worse after the 1960s when the economic dislocations of deindustrialization were exacerbated by the collapse of the New Deal order, the decline of trade unions, and federal government’s abandonment of the inner cities. In the 1980s and 1990s, America exhibited social-problem levels markedly higher than other developed nations, the most striking of which was a rate of lethal violence—mostly gun homicides—that was off-the-charts high compared to other affluent countries.
The outlier status of America’s penal state will persist unless and until the nation’s political economy is transformed.
Drawing on urban studies and the sociology of violence, I show how pressures produced by America’s political economy—unemployment, disinvestment, deteriorating housing, limited social services, and so on—destabilize poor neighborhoods, undermining community life and family functioning, especially in racially segregated areas with concentrated poverty and population turnover. The result is that the vital processes of socialization, social integration, and informal social control normally carried out by families, schools, neighbors, and employers grow weak and fail, leading to social problems, social disorder, and criminal violence. These problems are deepened by the widespread availability of guns—another exceptional feature of the American landscape.
When homicides and armed robbery rates rose, and cities became disorderly and unsafe, voters demanded that something be done to improve public safety and protect their businesses and property values. But the same political economy that disorganized communities and triggered criminogenic processes also limited the governmental responses to these problems. In America’s racialized ultra-liberal political economy, redistributive policies are generally unpopular. And because responsibility for public safety is, in the US, a local function, few municipalities had the resources needed to respond to crime using the social policies and economic investments that are common in social democratic nations. Instead, they defaulted to the cheap policy instruments that were within their toolkit, namely police and punishment.
Moreover, American-style policing and punishment turns out to be remarkably aggressive. Why? Because of public indifference to the fate of those caught up in the carceral net; because the courts refuse to hold police and prisons to account; but mainly because penal state agents operate against a social background that is more disorganized, more dangerous, and more gun-laden than that of any other developed nation.
C. J. Polychroniou: As you point out in your book, public sentiments about police brutality, mass incarceration, and the penal state experienced a major shift away from punitive measures following the police murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Indeed, as street protests ensued, the tenets of police and prison abolition gained currency, although alternatives still needed to be worked out. Be that as it may, the politics of law and order have since returned with a vengeance, as evidenced by the reelection of US President Donald Trump, who ran a campaign based on fear and anxiety. How do we explain this reversal?
David Garland: The plague year of 2020 was an extraordinary time, during which public anxiety and hopes for radical change often coexisted. (During the pandemic, the US created a pop-up European-style welfare state, with stimulus checks for every household; enhanced unemployment, housing, and child-allowance benefits; and massively extended healthcare coverage—only to dismantle it once the crisis had passed.) In retrospect, we can see that the massive street demonstrations that followed the police killing of George Floyd were possible because so many people were no longer at work or in school, making them available to join in the protests. Of course, many Americans were genuinely shocked by the brazen violence and racist disregard for human life that Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin displayed. But it is worth remembering, that by 2020, homicide levels and crime rates in general had been falling for more than a decade, relaxing public demands for tough-on-crime policies and enabling activists, such as the Black Lives Matter movement and local groups of abolitionists, to draw public attention to the pathologies of police violence, mass incarceration, and racialized criminal justice.
Democrats need to take the crime problem seriously and offer their own strategies and solutions—not just watered down versions of right-wing bromides.
In general, though, the American public is very conservative on matters of crime control and public safety, and demands for the “abolition” or “defunding” of police and prisons were never liable to have much traction beyond the world of activists, advocates, and academics—even when the liberal media briefly introduced these ideas into the mainstream. And while the life chances of middle-class white people are not normally affected by police violence or harsh prison sentences—in sharp contrast to poor communities of color—they are affected by crime and violence. So when, in the fall of 2020, there were reports of an uptick in shootings and homicides, public support drained away from Black Lives Matter and voters reverted to their long-standing preference for law-and-order candidates—as we saw in the election of Eric Adams to NYC Mayor, in the deselection of several progressive prosecutors, and eventually in the victory of Donald Trump. So the reversal was a political regression to the mean following an extraordinary historic moment.
However, I believe the protests of 2020, and the radical critique of the penal state that accompanied them, have changed the public discourse in important ways, introducing new ideas and radicalizing many young people who form part of the Democratic Party base. My hope is that this new level of concern about penal state repression will be joined with realistic, progressive proposals for dealing with crime and disorder. Democrats need to take the crime problem seriously and offer their own strategies and solutions—not just watered down versions of right-wing bromides. The emphasis should be on non-penal crime-control measures such as situational crime prevention; designing public spaces to make them safer; improving police training and effectiveness; relieving police of tasks for which they are not suited; enabling communities and not-for-profits to launch crime-reduction initiatives; supporting victims to reduce the likelihood of revictimization; and so on. Crime and disorder are real problems for working people; and the victims of homicide and assaults are most often poor and Black. Sustainable reform of the penal state must go hand in hand with effective crime control.
C. J. Polychroniou: What realistic possibilities are available to us for bringing about penal change if we do not first succeed in restructuring the political economy of the United States?
David Garland: To be clear, the outlier status of America’s penal state will persist unless and until the nation’s political economy is transformed. It is that peculiar political economy that makes American violence, policing, and punishment so extreme compared to other affluent nations. However, there is a range—I call it a “bandwidth”—of possible variation within which American crime, policing, and punishment can be changed: a structurally determined floor and ceiling between which lies the possibility of significant reform. That bandwidth of variation is a key part of the theoretical analysis set out in the book, and an empirical fact confirmed by recent developments.
Criminogenic processes and crime control policies are loosely coupled with political economy, not mechanically and directly determined by it. Crime-control policies can be altered, criminogenic processes interrupted, community work activated without any alternation in larger socioeconomic arrangements. For those hoping to bring about penal change, the existence of this relative autonomy is vitally important. It means that even if Nordic or Western European levels remain out of reach, there is nevertheless the real possibility of life-altering improvements in policing, punishment, and public safety.
There is a bandwidth of possibility within which variations in violence levels and penal state policies can occur even in the absence of larger structural change.
We know this because the last few decades have witnessed many instances of significant change. Over the last 20 years, the nation’s imprisonment rates declined from a high point of 765 per 100,000 to a new level closer to 600 per 100,000. Between 1995 and 2020 the nation’s annual homicide rate declined from around 10 murders for every 100,000 people to 5 per 100,000. Shootings of civilians by the New York Police Department (NYPD) dropped dramatically—from an average of 62 people shot and killed each year in the early 1970s to an average of nine per year between 2015 and 2021—after new forms of training, guidelines, and accountability were introduced. The NYPD also reduced its deployment of stop and frisk from over 680,000 per year in 2011 to 11,000 in 2018—the result of a court ruling not a social transformation. Between 1997 and 2023, 2 million formerly incarcerated people regained the right to vote, thanks to campaigns against felon disfranchisement. And since 2000, the imprisonment rate for Black men has fallen by almost half, thanks in large part to the scaling back the war on drugs.
Each of these changes was significant, even radical, affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of people. Together, they amount to an empirical demonstration of the book’s theoretical claim that there is a bandwidth of possibility within which variations in violence levels and penal state policies can occur even in the absence of larger structural change.
Nevertheless, the gravitational force exerted by structural arrangements—and the powerful interests that support them—is, in the final analysis, ineluctable. America’s political economy sets definite limits to what can be achieved and imposes upper bounds on what is possible. Until its structures are transformed, America’s penal state will continue to impose a level of punishment and control that has no equivalent in the developed world.
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The Federal Policing of DC Has Made Us Less Safe
DC is a dangerous place today, and it is because of DC’s occupation by federal law enforcement and troops.
Aug 26, 2025
In my 50-some years of community and political ministry, and organizing that resisted Boston's test with "stop and frisk" after the hoax of Charles Stuart murdering his wife and blaming it on a Black man, I thought I had seen it all. Then when Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old former Department of Government Efficiency worker and software engineer known online as "Big Balls," was assaulted in Dupont Circle in reportedly a carjacking incident it was deja vu of Boston and the neighborhood where I lived, Roxbury, being turned upside down again.
I thought I had already seen the worst of white reaction to Blackness, but again I was wrong. US President Donald Trump and the MAGA-white supremacist chorus used the Coristine incident as justification for a city gone wild that needed to be brought under control. I listened and heard all of the political hyperbole on the airwaves and in social media that I had heard before. It was another version, I thought, of Raymond Flynn, Mayor of Boston during the Charles Stuart hoax, declaring that it was a terrible night in Boston and turning loose the police on the Black community and advancing tactics like "stop and frisk." I listened and heard once again words and statements that would justify the Trump-MAGA-authoritarian regime's initiatives to demonstrate to its white base that at all cost white life will be protected, and the Black culprits brought into line. It seems that everyone has conveniently forgotten the feigned genesis that was used to justify this attack upon our city, on our democracy, home rule in DC, and civilian government.
I watched and listened at the legal battle that unfolded between the Trump administration and the DC attorney general about who would be in charge of this new municipal-federal police force. The DC attorney general took the matter to court, and it was determined that the DC chief of police would remain in charge—for now, but in compromise the DC government bowed to the anti-sanctuary sentiments dictated by the Trump regime. Trump talked about how dangerous DC was, and said it is plagued with crime, that visitors are in danger for their lives, that the parks need to be cleaned up from homeless encampments, Confederate statues needed to be replaced, and the cracked marble on monuments need to be repaired.
Trump stressed the dangers and disrepair of Washington, DC. Challenged the Mayor, Muriel Bowser, in her management of the city, and recently has threatened to erase home rule all together and completely "federalize" the city. Mayor Bowser first attempted to appease the Trump-MAGA-White Supremacist regime as it came to power. She dismantled "Black Lives Matter Plaza" that was dedicated on 16th Street NW leading up to the White House, created after the murder of George Floyd and Trump's upside-down Bible photo op in front of the Episcopal church sitting on the edge of Lafayette Square. But there would be no appeasement, and the mayor proved how out of step she was in this historical moment by citing crime statistics and the facts about crime rates being down. The Trump-MAGA-white supremacist regime could care less about crime statistics, but offered what happened to "Big Balls" as an example of a threat to all white people. Trump cited how mismanaged the city was and how dangerous it is to live here.
If you walk or drive around the streets of DC, you will feel it and see it—this is martial law without the declaration.
I am someone who can admit to the dangers of DC today, but not in the terms presented by Trump and his band of parrots. DC is a dangerous place today, and it is because of DC's occupation by federal law enforcement and troops. What I have seen and experienced over the last week has been marked and unmarked cars with masked and unmasked personnel. I have seen their awkwardness and discomfort interacting with the people of DC. What I have seen and experienced during this brief time has been many different kinds of law enforcement agencies stopping people for all kinds of concocted offenses.
While driving with a friend a few nights ago, we drove past at least 10 police cars from various agencies including Secret Service with a Black man held and handcuffed standing behind a car. He was surrounded by different kinds of cops. I turned the car around, parked it, got out, and went over to question the police on what they were doing. A DC cop who seemed to decide that he was going to be my liaison explained that the man was stopped for driving with tinted windows. The handcuffed man explained and appealed to me that his grandmother who was seated in the passenger side of the car needed to get home safely. He continued, saying that he had taken her to dinner and she needed to get home if he was being arrested. The incident drew more than 10 cops. The man eventually was arrested for driving with tinted windows. The DC lieutenant who interfaced with me assured me that he would get the man's grandmother home.
Another incident that I witnessed took place a few days later on a Saturday. Many of us have been running a picket line supporting the boycott of Target in conjunction with the national campaign. Where the Target store is located is an area with a concentration of immigrants. It is the Columbia Heights-Adams Morgan neighborhood in the city. We have been on the picket line for months, and on 14th Street NW, the street has always been busy with shoppers of diverse populations.
Normally the street is lined with grassroots vendors selling all kinds of wares and goods. The immigrant community has shopped there, immigrant vendors sell there, and the street has always been crowded with tents and tables laden with whatever people were selling. Over the course of our time picketing Target, and in the last few weeks, we have watched the vendors disappear. We have seen the street get quieter, and the shoppers diminish.
But on this particular Saturday, as the Target picket line was disbanding, the DC police stopped a Latino motorcyclist supposedly for having the tags on his motorcycle turned upward and illegally parking. It so happened that I knew one of the DC cops and went over to talk to him. He assured me that he was not going to check the immigrant status of the individual. I thanked him for that but admonished the DC police for harassing the man in the first place. The cop I knew responded to me that he was under strict orders to stop people for what they would not ordinarily stop people for. I told him that this was a sad state of affairs, and he agreed.
Just then Homeland Security showed up with other agencies wearing brown uniforms as if they were patrolling in Iraq or Afghanistan. It was then, when those federal law enforcement entities showed up, that the crowd that had been watching the encounter became more vocal, agitated, and were unified in their demands. With cellphone cameras in hand, people began to yell, "Get the fuck out of here," "Nobody wants you here," "Leave hardworking people alone," and "Get the fuck out of DC!"
The crowd of onlookers quickly swelled from 10-20 to more than 100 people. They were white, Black, Latino, male, female, young, and old. It was everybody. And what I realized, as I caught the image of a federal agent in a brown stormtrooper uniform staring threateningly at the crowd with his hand on his hip near his gun, his facial expression declaring, "I dare you," was the real threat to residents of DC. As I looked at this anonymous agent with his blue eyes and hostile stare and presence, I realized that he was hoping for and wanting something to "hop off" so that the military presence might be thoroughly justified.
I also saw something that is rare, and that is how the jeering crowd yelling at the occupiers, demanding that they get out of DC and hurling "F" bombs, was unified in their anger, defiance, and solidarity with one another and those being victimized. I saw in the mixture of law enforcement responding to minor and nonexistent incidents in DC and the unity of the anger from the community toward these occupiers that there is going to be some kind of response in the form of an uprising. This is not something that I am advocating, but I have seen that the defiance and outrage over the presence of federal law enforcement agencies roaming the streets of DC will precipitate a situation that will quickly get out of hand.
We are witnessing cop stops that would usually entail one or two police cars currently demanding five and 10 cars for nonexistent and questionable legal violations. I have seen agents with no identification on them (some of them masked) and National Guard units from states where there is a lack of people of color in the population making those National Guard details whiter. I have seen the overconcentration of law enforcement harassing people for no legitimate reasons. I have also seen a unity of anger not seen before from the people of Washington, DC, and that along with the discomfort of many of these law enforcement occupiers among a racially and culturally diverse population is like striking matches to gasoline.
We all know that an uprising is precisely what the Trump-MAGA-white supremacist regime wants to see. They want an uprising so that they can call up more troops and take over more cities. We need to be aware of the racial fuse being lit that traces back to accusations of Black men raping white women or beating white men. It reaches back to the Charles Stuart hoax that I witnessed and lived through in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
The indignity that "Big Balls" experienced has been referenced and represents the global threat of violence to whiteness. The fuse is being lit in cities where there are Black mayors and where cities are perceived as largely Black and non-white. They are trying to light the fuse, and the outrage that people are feeling is making every incident a terribly dangerous one. But the danger is not from the residents of DC but from the occupiers, some in uniform and some not, but the occupation is inflaming and will instigate an incident. This is what I hope doesn't happen, but at the same time I hope that the sense of defiance and the anger that I have seen will remain intact, vigilant, and unified.
And finally, I want to be very clear: This occupation is not an attempt to make our cities safer, but this is a step toward martial law. If you walk or drive around the streets of DC, you will feel it and see it—this is martial law without the declaration. Whether it is declared or not the feelings and appearance are the same. We must continue our defiance and resistance, or we will find that the entire country will be changed and made into a dangerous hostile white plantation once again but for all of us.
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