Police in London attack critical mass

"Sniper8052" wrote in message
.. .
I fail to see why other road users, including
pedestrians, should have to suffer their bullish behavior because 'they'
choose to behave like louts once a month.

Can we take it you'd have the same view as regards the same and worse
behaviour of thousands of motorists doing same on a daily basis?

Cheers, helen s

wafflycat wrote:

"Sniper8052" wrote in message
.. .
I fail to see why other road users, including
pedestrians, should have to suffer their bullish behavior because 'they'
choose to behave like louts once a month.

Can we take it you'd have the same view as regards the same and worse
behaviour of thousands of motorists doing same on a daily basis?


That's different. That's Critical Mess.

--
Tony

"I did make a mistake once - I thought I'd made a mistake but I hadn't"
Anon

Sniper8052 wrote:
On 6 Oct 2005 13:08:52 -0700, Peter Headland wrote:

This is why I hate CM. It takes people who are neutral or even pro-bike
and makes them actively anti-bike.

The fact is that the group, self styled Critical Mass, wishes to evade it's
collective responsibility to behave properly and often behaves very badly
by all accounts. I fail to see why other road users, including
pedestrians, should have to suffer their bullish behavior because 'they'
choose to behave like louts once a month.

Who are this they? It is an aggregation of individuals with no
organisation but a common desire. Bit like the rush hour on the M25
really.

If people turh up an hand out leaflets, that doesn't mean they are an
organiser, any more than the people who give me flyers in Dundee city
centre are organisers of 'Shopping Mass', they are just effectively
targetting an audience they feel may be sympathetic.

If CM want to ride around London, fine, obey the rules... all of them. If
CM voluntary workers
Who are they? CM is an emergent property, not an organisation. Just
liek a traffic jam. The difference being that with CM, people want to
be there.

think they are above or beyond the law and hope to
evade the responsibility they are taking on themselves in 'not' organizing
the ride, but publicly promoting it, they may find they are in fact
'responsible' in the 'eyes of the law'.

No more than a business is responsible for causing traffic jams by
insisting its workers start their shifts at the same time, or schools
for that matter.

This requirement is a notice to all that public anarchy once a month will
no longer be tolerated. A notice which is long overdue in my opinion.

I agree entirely that those who find themselves in a CM should behave
according to the law. This includes deviating from the normal rules of
the road when instructed by a police officer.

It is however understandable if some soddenly overreact to no longer
being terrorised by motor vehicles and go a bit OTT. They should be
reprimanded. Where their conduct is dangerous they should be dealt with
appropriately. Where their conduct is merely deliberately
inconveniencing others (not including any inconvenience caused by just
being there as a part of traffic - if we did that then all London would
be locked up every rush hour.) then they should be dealt with
appropriately.

Part of the problem the police have with phenomena like a CM is that
they do not it into standard moulds. There is no destination so it is
not like football crowds. Cycle trafic is extremely fluid and mobile,
so it cannot be dealt wiht in the same way normal motor traffic
congestion is dealt with. A CM is an anomaly with a shoal or flock
mentality that is hard to pin down. This is in some way frightening
for authoritarian personalities (like many politicians and police) as
there is no handle with which to deal with it. There is no head to
sever, no limb to trap.

CM is a phenomenon that will happen irrespective of what a police man
says. It is starting to happen in micro form already, as groups of ten
or twenty cyclists form and disperse during commutes. See the posts re
Hyde Park corner (or were they in another place). If this continues,
the incentive for CM to emerge on a friday night will disappear, the
whole of London will be a miasma of CM.

By all means ticket the law breakers. There is no excuse to break the
law in a blatent way. But punish them appropriately. Which is worse.
Standing in the road for a few seconds, or speeding in a built up area?


...d

Sniper8052 wrote:
The fact is that the group, self styled Critical Mass, wishes to evade it's
collective responsibility to behave properly and often behaves very badly
by all accounts.

It does not have a "collective responsibility". Any more than a crush of
pedestrians travelling the same footpath have a collective responsibility.

I fail to see why other road users, including
pedestrians, should have to suffer their bullish behavior because 'they'
choose to behave like louts once a month.

Some do, some don't. There are some bad ones but the way to deal with
them is to rally the rest of the group by supporting the action, not by
attempting to alienate all participants. As others have asked, how do
you (As a vocal supporter of the police action) propose to distinguish
between CMers and other cyclists who just happened to be going the same
way? Or would such "participants" be guilty by association in your book.

If CM want to ride around London, fine, obey the rules... all of them. If
CM voluntary workers think they are above or beyond the law and hope to
evade the responsibility they are taking on themselves in 'not' organizing
the ride, but publicly promoting it, they may find they are in fact
'responsible' in the 'eyes of the law'.

The best way to deal with the idiots (From my experience of a few,
admittedly smaller, CMs) here is to enter the group as a member and
speak to them privately. No threats needed. Just a gentle, "You're not
really proving anything by swearing at that driver now are you?". This
would be far more likely to gain you the support of the rest of the group.

This requirement is a notice to all that public anarchy once a month will
no longer be tolerated. A notice which is long overdue in my opinion.

Any individual who breaks the law can and should be treated accordingly.
This goes for the drivers who take it upon themselves to break the mass
as well as those inside it who think they are vigilantes. But the moment
you label all members of the group the same regardless of their actions
you are entering dangerous territory. If your neighbour robs a house,
you are not considered guilty by proximity. Why should the same not
apply to CM?

Fundamentally, you cannot stop CM from happening. Without much effort I
can think of many ways of avoiding any attempts at control. Bring in the
riot police and the cyclists will bring in the press... and you may not
have noticed, but the police are not really doing well in the PR stakes
at the minute.

Jon

Also a one-time supporter of CM

On Thu, 06 Oct 2005 22:24:40 +0100 someone who may be Tony Raven
wrote this:-

David Hansen wrote:
I am surprised not to have noticed anything here on the police
attack on Critical Mass outlined in various places,

You didn't notice http://snipurl.com/i7uz then.

A thread entitled "first Critical Mass" was of no interest to me.


--
David Hansen, Edinburgh | PGP email preferred-key number F566DA0E
I will always explain revoked keys, unless the UK government
prevents me by using the RIP Act 2000.

David Hansen wrote:
On Thu, 06 Oct 2005 22:24:40 +0100 someone who may be Tony Raven
wrote this:-

David Hansen wrote:
I am surprised not to have noticed anything here on the police
attack on Critical Mass outlined in various places,
You didn't notice http://snipurl.com/i7uz then.

A thread entitled "first Critical Mass" was of no interest to me.


Well perhaps its no surprise you have not noticed anything here on a
Critical Mass if threads with Critical Mass in the subject line are of
no interest to you.


--
Tony

"I did make a mistake once - I thought I'd made a mistake but I hadn't"
Anon

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005 19:01:29 +0100 someone who may be "wafflycat"
waffles*$*A**T*v21net$*££*D*O*T*co*D£$£*O*T*uk wrote this:-

Should have added... not all police seem to have the flair for the
headline-grabbing stupidity that the current head of the Met does.

Of course.

I think what gets me about Mr Blair is his arrogance. He takes part
in a conspiracy to murder, a conspiracy which some of the
conspirators act on in Stockwell. He then writes a letter in which
he arrogantly suggests that he, in essence a council official,
should be able to set aside the law when it is convenient for him to
cover up the conspiracy. He, or those working for him, also stops
the "Independent" Police Complaints Commission from getting on site
for ISTR five days, during which time all sorts of things probably
happened that mean the conspiracy will not be investigated properly.
The sound of the whitewash being mixed is rather loud.


--
David Hansen, Edinburgh | PGP email preferred-key number F566DA0E
I will always explain revoked keys, unless the UK government
prevents me by using the RIP Act 2000.

With regard the police threats warning people not to cycle in London as
part of any CM event, this is taken from the Velorution site:

Many commentators with a minimum of knowledge in civil liberties have
pointed out that the text is a legal colander. For instance:

If the Met class CM as a 'procession'(which can be a motorcade or
funeral cortege - so by analogy, CM comes within this definition,
rather than a static assembly to which s.14 POA 1986 applies) then they
will try to use s.11(1) Public Order Act 1986 to impose conditions in
advance of the ride. However, there is a problem for the police, who
claim that a 'change of policy'has led to the threat to use the
POA. (e.g. a reluctance to pay for escorting officers on bikes, rather
than any serious concerns about disorder?).
It is that s.11(1)POA 1986 has no application under s.11(2) where the
procession is 'one commonly or customarily held in the police area/s
in which it is proposed'. It is arguable that CM's history of
regular rides every month at the same time for 11 years makes it a
'commonly...held [procession]'and thus the Met cannot use s.11(1).
If they do, as was used against the fuel protestors on the M4 recently,
(not a commonly held procession), then they are acting outside the
powers of the POA - ultra vires -and, in my view, the decision to
impose such conditions would be judicially reviewable on that ground
and possibly for breach of Article 10 and 11 of the ECHR. A prohibitory
injunction could be sought to prevent the use of s.11(1) if the police
announce they intend to use it.

P.s whatever the legality of the police's action I think anyone taking
part in CM this month need to be careful to avoid giving the police any
excuse to abuse their position further. One cannot help thinking that
the police are trying to engineer a confrontation in order to serve the
interests of their political masters,and we know from history (the
miner strike, the printers dispute etc.) etc. that the police are
experts at this.



By the way, anyone remember Don McPhee's iconic image of the row of
police officers at Orgreave with the miner wearing a toy policeman's
hat standing just in front of them? I didn't even see the significance
of this image until I read about it years later. The whole point is
that non of the police have their uniform numbers on. Apparently the
senior officer in charge had effectively given his officers carte
blanch to use any degree of violence they wanted and so ordered them to
take their numbers off so it would be even more difficult to bring any
of the officers to account later on. So if the police turn up at CM
less identifying badges, you will know what their game plan is...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/gall/0,8542,1384820,00.html

In case anyone is in any doubt as to where, politically, the sympathies
of the police lay, perhaps they should take time out to ponder the
'zero tolerance' campaigns against cyclists conducted by the City
police and so on, whilst often showing studied disinterest when drivers
break the law or injuer and even kill cyclists.

The House of Commons Transport Committee's report 'Traffic Law and its
Enforcement' (Sixteenth Report of Session 2003-04) said this of
police attitudes to vulnerable road users...

37. Much of the evidence given to us was concerned with the law
relating to those who caused death or injury on the roads. It would be
an understatement to say there was concern about the way in which the
law deals with such cases. All those who wrote to us on the subject,
and they were many, were impassioned about what they saw as a tendency
to downgrade road traffic crashes. We were told of a tendency to treat
serious incidents as "nobody's fault" or even to blame the
victim; a belief it was not appropriate for motorists to take as much
care when driving a motor vehicle as they would when undertaking other
activities which might endanger the public; a justice system which
frequently did not take into account the consequences of a crash; and a
disregard for the victims and their families.

....our witnesses had no confidence that the police would properly
investigate cases in which harm had been caused, particularly when
vulnerable road users had been injured.48 We were given instances of
cases in which it was alleged that the police had automatically assumed
that a cyclist or pedestrian, rather than a driver, was at fault; in
which evidence and witness statements were not promptly collected; and
in which police could not be persuaded to take an interest even though,
in some cases, serious injury had occurred.49

55. Such evidence as does exist suggests that a high proportion even of
fatal crashes do not result in court proceedings. For example, the
Metropolitan Police told us that of 18 fatalities in their area
involving cyclists last year, 2 had been classified as accidental
deaths and six were "NFA'd"; classed as "not for further
action". Similarly, 66 of the 125 deaths involving pedestrians were
either classed as accidental death or "NFA'd". Since 57 cases
were still on going, the proportion of cases in which no court action
was taken may be still higher.45

Scary thing is that the police themselves almost certainly believe that
they 'have their priorities right'...