Your story rightly highlights the troubling state harassment of peaceful protesters, but the focus on the appropriateness of policing misses a deeper problem: the law itself (Why did 30 Met officers kick the door down at a teenage tea and biscuits meeting in a Quaker house?, 10 May).
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 defines public nuisance as recklessly or intentionally causing serious harm to the public, but redefines “serious harm” to include “serious annoyance or inconvenience”. This linguistic nonsense effectively renders all protest unlawful, for the point of protests is typically to draw attention by causing annoyance or inconvenience.
If serious harm includes serious annoyance, presumably serious annoyance could include serious indifference, which could include serious amusement? While we’re at it, let’s redefine “serious wounding” to include “serious tickling”.
The story quotes a young woman involved who describes the meeting as “six young women in a room, in a place that we hired, that we publicly advertised … I don’t really see any conspiracy in that.” Yet despite the word’s ordinary connotations, “conspiracy” in law just means two or more people agreeing to carry out a crime, whether secretly or not.
These young women seem understandably shocked that the law could define what they were suspected of doing as a serious crime, but the sad fact is that the police could have had grounds for suspicion, simply because the offence of conspiracy to cause public nuisance is so broad. Policing aside, we’ve allowed the criminal law itself to spread its tentacles over almost all conceivable protest-related activity – redefining sincere, democratically engaged citizens as dangerous enemies of society who belong behind bars. This is serious.
Dr Craig Reeves
Birkbeck, University of London
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