The Independent Police Conduct Authority released their report on the police response to the Parliament riot today, and its pretty much as expected: barring a few specific incidents, police use of force was generally reasonable and proportionate. The disturbing thing about it is the IPCA's call for a review of "mass public disorder" law. Digging into this, the core "problem" they want addressed is that almost all the charges laid after the first attempt to clear Parliament grounds (on February 10) were dismissed due to lack of evidence - the police process for arresting people meant that most of the arrests were unlawful, and often no evidence could be provided on what specific law was allegedly violated or how. The IPCA puts it like this:
There are significant evidential difficulties in proving that there has been a lawful arrest in a volatile mass arrest situation where individual arresting officers may be handing arrested persons over to others while they continue to manage the resisting crowd on the front line.Think for a moment about what "fixing" that actually means: removing the evidential requirements for a lawful arrest, effectively making it an arbitrary decision by police officers. But while that makes the arrests lawful on paper, it does so at the cost of massively increasing the scope for abuse of power by police, while increasing the chances of even greater waste of police and court (and arrestee) time on charges which cannot be sustained and will therefore be tossed the moment they are subjected to scrutiny.
The actual solution here is for the police to have better processes in these situations, so they can comply with the law - not to just throw the law out the window. And it is highly disturbing that the IPCA, an organisation established to oversee police and ensure that they comply with the law, should be taking a position that if they systematically break the law, it is the law which should change, not the police. I take the opposite view: the police should obey the law. And if the IPCA disagrees, then we should replace them with a body willing to actually do the job, rather than one intent on making excuses for criminal officials.
