WSM.ie: Making policing history: studies of garda violence and resources for police reform + I still remember my first time

These texts are written and edited by the Garda Research Institute which is composed of 
residents, community workers and educators who have both personally experienced Garda 
violence and have heard countless negative stories about the garda?. They came together 
to examine the role of the garda? and in particular to spark debate and discussion about 
who gets targeted by the police and why. ---- The text is structured in the following way. 
Following the introduction and a piece on the making of the garda?, the pamphlet is 
divided into three sections, the first of which looks at the experience of the policed. 
The next section looks at the policing of protest by the garda?. The final section looks 
at responses to policing and examines how grassroots activists and movements have 
attempted to make the police more accountable.

For ease of reading you can download a PDF of the entire text in A4 format
http://www.wsm.ie/sites/default/files/PolicingA4.pdf
or fold over A5 format.http://www.wsm.ie/sites/default/files/PolicingPamphletA5.pdf

(Links at: http://www.wsm.ie/c/police-history-studies-garda-violence-reform)
Introductory:

Why we put this pamphlet together: secrets, lies and unaccountable policing
How the garda? were made

On the receiving end: experiences of being policed:

Working-class experiences of the Garda?
Terence Wheelock: looking for justice
The prisoner who disappeared? for a while

Political policing: the garda? and democracy:

I still remember my first time
Reclaim the Streets 2002: a police riot and the aftermath
Resisting Shell in Mayo and the experience of policing in Erris: an eyewitness account
Policing the anti-war movement
When do the police get away with violence, and why?
From force to fencing: political policing in the Republic of Ireland

Responding to abusive policing: practical resources:

Challenging the garda?: a personal experience
The Prisoners? Rights Organisation: a historical case study in grassroots organising, 
?history from below? and police accountability
Challenging targeted policing: my experience in the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty
Making policing history: different ways of resisting

Appendix:

Policing Ireland: some useful resources

Reders experiences & comments:

Add your experiences or comments to this text

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I still remember my first time

I still remember my first time. It was a fine sunny morning on the Easter bank holiday 
weekend in 1991. I had just dropped my girlfriend off at an inter-city coach and was 
walking back past the bank on College Green when a voice behind me said ?Stop, I want to 
talk to you for a minute?. Presuming it was someone trying to sell me something, I waved 
them off, but then the guy in the badly fitting suit walked around in front of me, held 
out some sort of ID card and announced he was Special Branch.

At the time I wasn?t used to the routine but it goes a little bit like this. They demand 
your name and address. You try and avoid giving it to them by asking what this is in 
connection with. They tell you ?it's terrorism? (or sometimes drugs) and if you won?t 
hand over the details they will arrest you. Of course most of the time they already know 
who you are; this is just how the game is played out. This morning, the next step for 
this secret policeman was to tell me he had been looking at a photograph of me at an 
anti-war demonstration speaking to a known IRA member and he wanted to know who that 
person was. Years later I have to admire that particular question, both for the 
wonderfully open-ended nature of the enquiry and for the absurdity of asking me about 
someone who had just been described to me as ?known to them?. I told him I didn?t have a 
clue what he was on about and the conversation spun around in those sort of circles before 
I walked off. Today I?d know not to get drawn in, but as I say this was my first time.

When I got out of sight my imagination was in overdrive; I feared this was the first step 
of a massive crackdown on the anarchist movement and so rang the five or so members of 
that movement to warn them what was in progress. Needless to say, no one got raided later 
in the day, although a couple of people did get questioned on the street in a similar 
fashion over the next couple of months.

A recent encounter in April 2010 happened after I left a Dublin Shell to Sea meeting and 
was followed down a narrow city laneway by a carload of burly men. They didn?t bother 
stopping, just pulled past me and then went around the block and passed me again as I 
strolled along, just in case I?d missed them the first time. Two months later in June I 
was actually stopped, this time five minutes after cycling away from another Shell to Sea 
event, this time a picket of Mountjoy prison. That amounted to no more than a conversation 
where they demanded my date of birth (needed for the PULSE computer system) which I 
refused to give to them.

Almost 20 years on, I?ve had encounters of some sort with Branch men (and in one case a 
woman) and their equivalents in Italy, Spain, Czech Republic, Mexico and Britain. In 
North America, where they do things a little differently, I?ve evidence of being on a 
watch list in the USA and I may even have a file in Canada. In Ireland I?ve lost track of 
the times I?ve been stopped, followed or had a car outside my door. I?d quite like to get 
the file that must exist, as it surely contains much I?ve forgotten. This list makes it 
sound like I should be an international arms dealer but the funny thing is that really 
I?ve done little to deserve such loving attention: a couple of hundred articles, 
organising the odd protest and perhaps a hundred or so speaking engagements. And all this 
in public, indeed every one of those articles is online in my own name.

Sometime, a little over 150 years ago, the French proto-anarchist Pierre Proudhon wrote that

To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, 
regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, 
ordered about, by men who have neither the right nor the knowledge nor the virtue.

He would never have had the experience of walking down a busy city street to observe every 
single garda? CCTV camera on every intersection swivel to follow him, but clearly he 
understood the concept.

Of course we don?t live in a military dictatorship. Our secret police force does not 
bundle people into the back of vans with their torture marked bodies appearing a week 
later on the town rubbish dump. From time to time they have bundled people into vans all 
right, and they have certainly beaten people, but that tends to be the exception rather 
than the rule. Most often their role is simply to discourage and disrupt, to raise the 
cost of being active and to reduce its effectiveness.

I figure it's largely about fear and paranoia. That is the purpose of all the time spent 
watching: it is not for the most part intelligence gathering at all, but instead all about 
getting you to look over your shoulder and worry about being watched and the repercussions 
of being watched. As was the case with me back in ?91, they target fresh faces with the 
obvious intention of trying to scare people off. My experience wasn?t a big deal because 
they were obviously not taking the then 5 strong anarchist movement all that seriously! 
But with the organisations they have gone after hard (eg Sinn F?in in the 1980s) a more 
extreme version of the same thing had major impact, scaring large numbers of new members 
away. In some parts of the country SF found it necessary to put new members though a 
mock interrogation so they were prepared for the inevitable encounter with the branch, and 
new members stayed in the organisation in much greater numbers as a result.

Apart from intimidating us, this also means that we sometimes needlessly distrust each 
other. Occasionally, I have had the experience when a new guy, and I say guy deliberately 
as it's nearly always men that provoke suspicion, who isn?t from an existing social scene 
arrives at a meeting and a string of people tell me they are sure he is a cop. This is 
liable to happen in particular if you're a little older or more ?normally? dressed than 
the average anti-capitalist activist. It?s even happened to me: I remember visiting an 
anarchist meet-up point during the anti-capitalist protest against the EU in Seville in 
2002 only to be confronted by some younger punky types who reckoned I had to be either a 
cop or a journalist as I was not wearing their ?uniform?.

The secret state, ever-present at our activities, makes us wary of each other. The impact 
of the secret police can be surprisingly disruptive. It encourages an inward-looking 
culture that is suspicious of strangers. Someone asking questions becomes someone to 
suspect rather than someone to welcome. Even under quite mild surveillance, the pressure 
wears away at the bonds of human solidarity that unite and motivate us in the first place.

How can we resist? Mostly we can understand what it is they are trying to achieve and be 
careful not to play the game they are trying to push us into. We can refuse to become 
paranoid and inward-looking. We can refuse to impose a cultural uniform on ourselves under 
the illusion this will enable us to tell friend from foe. We can expect a certain level of 
harassment, and although it may quicken our pulses (mine still does when that unmarked car 
cruises up behind me on a dark city street) we cannot let that affect our activity. We 
can support friends who are feeling the pressure and we can reach out to strangers who are 
in danger of being isolated. We can build a movement that is bigger than them.