We are human.

We are far from perfect.

We have rights.

You here about the negative but never the life we saved the evil caged or the selfless good deed.

Our pay and conditions are at the mercy of the government we cannot strike but is that not our basic right?

We are never free always we have that duty to watch and protect.

We loose our health, our sight, our limbs our life in the line of service.

If we make errors we pay a heavy price.

We are not a uniform we are people like you we are flesh and blood we are not better we are not different we just choose to serve in what is a difficult role.

We are far from perfect

We are human

We are the Police.

Of course the police should have just stood there and taken bricks and bottles and asked the scum nicely if they minded awfully to stop doing nasty things.
PS where were all the male residents during the protests and fighting? Hiding their faces? I wonder why?

I agree that the Police have to be accountable. However, I think there is already enough scrutiny by media etc and anymore is just demoralising and counter productive. I note you are a lawyer. Will you be profiteering from more complaints/scrutiny?
As regards to the use of Tasers, people forget what they are for. Would you rather the Police grapple violently with protestors and potentially injure them or use a Taser, which although very painful at the time, does not cause any lasting injury?

They were throwing bricks at the Police - don't they have a right to defend themselves? The protesters were breaking the law!

"they deal with something which has not been said"

To quickly look at two things you did say:

"Our society not only tolerates the sort of people who want to wear uniforms and want to use weapons against civilians, it actually employs them to do so."

1. What's wrong with people wanting to wear uniforms?
2. Do you have anything to back up your assertion that police officers want to use weapons against civilians? That they'd be doing it anyway if it wasn't their job to?

I do think the police should be held to account, but I think there's a difference between criticising the police as a force and insulting the individuals that work for it. In that sense your first paragraph doesn't seem to fit with the rest of what you're saying.

I take Alex White's points although I would point out that the Police themselves make individuals of anyone found to have done wrong doing very quickly. PC Harwood for instance.

There seem to be entirely too many 'isolated incidents' and 'rogue officers/individuals'

"To make things worse, it turns out that the police and bailiffs went in against the European advice that no-one should be evicted who had not alternative accommodation. Quite a few of the families had nowhere to go."

(European advice) Did the Italian, French or the Spanish take European advice when they had similar problems? Many of the travelling community at dale farm have very nice second homes in Ireland, and giving others 10 year's to find alternative accommodation was long enough. The police acted with restraint given the appalling provocation by some of the usual suspects intent of violence.

What is wrong with tasers? As opposed to batons or spray?

If reasonable force is used, why can't officers defend themselves when being attacked?

My father once said " remember, it is never too difficult to underestimate the IQ of a police officer". And in my experience that is not too far off the mark. I am no lover of the way the police behave at times, kettling protestors and murdering unarmed innocents on the tube and getting away with it, but i fail to see what is wrong with them using tasers against rioting people throwing blocks of concrete, bricks and urine at them. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

Here we go again. At present we have two stories emerging.

1, The one mostly detailed in the comments above that urine, rocks, bricks and alike was being thrown at them and they had to defend themselves from iron bar wielding thugs.

2. A journalist and witness states that the police were not being threatened by one of the tazered people, that stones were being thrown from well behind the individual, that they tazered as they shouted the first warning. Video also appears to show them behind the fence as they tazered (so therefore no immediate threat as such).

So in short, we have two believable but competing theories. So before jumping on one and either shouting "fascists" or "brave boys in blue" shouldn't we properly look into the matter first.

Lets not forget, tazers do kill people and if we turn a blind eye until there is an unfortunate fatality we are doing everyone including the police a disservice. I'm not saying they'e done anything wrong in this case, but blanket assumptions that they're always in the right lead to nasty outcomes which tarnish the police as a whole in the long run.

Well said Mr Green,of course the police are a bunch of unaccountable bully boys who like nothing better than hitting and tasering ''innocent'' civilians. Not so long ago the police were praised for thier role in the nationwide rioting until the government of the day took all the credit for quelling the disturbances.
We must not forget that the police are grossly overpaid and underworked and articles such as yours show the truth with nothing added or taken away...NOT.

Good..............

The Police are Government thugs and will happily puch, kick, baton strike, shoot and now Tazer innocent members of the public, think Mr Tomlinson and we are gatting a clear image of the UK Police. They are bullies and do not protect our rights, they protect their paymasters and their cronies and keep the wheels on the robbery machine from being stopped by honest people. They are called "filth" for a reason.

I think the police are doing a great job, and that tasers should be used more frequently in these kind of situations. If you commit a serious crime, act violently towards a police officer or show extreme hatred, you should be severely punished.

@Anthony - I absolutely agree and am just wondering what DAG's real reason is for writing this blog - perhaps he's repressing his own uniform wearing, weapon yielding inner policeman tendancies.

"not in any meaningful way a police state"... so what do YOU call it when thousands of people are in jail for fighting back against the regime, there is one CCTV for every 10 people, it's a crime to protest without jumping through a thousand hoops, and police murder and torture with impunity? Privacy International says Britain is an "endemic surveillance society". I've heard Chinese students complaining about how regulated Britain is compared to China. Please stop making excuses for this vile regime.

PS: the comments above are showing that not only is Britain a police state, but a large swathe of the population are extreme-right authoritarians. These people think it's OK for police to attack people using violence but scream in horror when anyone fights back. They are absolute hypocrites with no ethical principles and they should be in jail for inciting torture and murder by police.

No doubt it's a bit repetitious but didn't Paster Martin Niemoler in pre-war Germany say something about the Nazis to the effect - That first they came for the Communists and then various other social groupings who had displeased them.
We think the mentally disabled and then the Gypsies came before the communists on that Nazis list.
A word about the Irish down through the ages. We know Ireland and its people were the template upon which England's colonial methodology was hammered out. A perfect training ground for the forces of reaction. To facilitate crowd control on the MAINLAND, the English(British - ha, ha) authorities are now considering the use of rubber bullets and water canon..
At least tasers were not used on John Bull's Other Island.
Remember the 'cattle-prods' mentioned and demonstrated by Chill Wills as the hay-seed cop in 'The Heat of the NIght.'
It takes a little time but eventually they will get round to YOU.
History has a leaning curve all of its own. Even the Conservative MP for Dale Farm has a feudal moniker - Baron!
Ethnic cleansing - its a dirty business but somebody's got to do it.

Poll Taxes

What an odd article - a heading about tasers and Dale Farm, then the rest about the police in general, with no reference to the title, which is a pity.
Tasers were used at Dale Farm; tasers can be fatal. One hit a child.
To make things worse, it turns out that the police and bailiffs went in against the European advice that no-one should be evicted who had not alternative accommodation. Quite a few of the families had nowhere to go.

Were they not given every opportunity to leave? was it police creating flaming barricades, near to a caravan with the message that the person inside had breathing difficulties? It was not the police that cast the first stone (or was it a brick from a wall that the police supposedly demolished, even though they were not even in the site at this time). If you are a travelller, and expect travellers rights, then don't expect to take over a piece of land and stay put, basically exploiting the laws of the land that are there and meant to apply to all. They were legally found to be in breach, and have exhausted all rights to appeal. Accept it, and more with dignity

brook boysen wrote

"To make things worse, it turns out that the police and bailiffs went in against the European advice that no-one should be evicted who had not alternative accommodation. Quite a few of the families had nowhere to go."

So wrong, firstly most of the illegal residents had already left the site, and those that remained did have alternative accommodation, their VANS. They want the benefits of being considered travellers, with the security of a permanent residence... They went on and on about being travellers. also most of ,if not all the trouble and violence the police encountered was from non residents, so called supporters.

The most glaring fact here is that a fair percentage of the buildings were erected in accordance with the law, so there really is not excuse for the rest to be illegal or for that matter built in the first place, they knew the site had reached the maximum level of occupancy that the local planning would permit, but built regardless.

They brought this down upon them selves, that had sufficient time to make alternative arrangements.

'It is right that in a liberal and democratic society the State has a monopoly in the use of coercive force against citizens,'

The State shouldn't need to use any kind of coercive force at all in a democracy!

But we know that liberal societies require the use of force to maintain order and to protect the interests of citizens WITH property!

Its not a question of having a monopoly either as though the police are a company. That misreads the relationship of the police to the state and government.

According to BBC news the first event in the eviction was the police entering the land by demolishing a fence. If true I cannot see how this would be a lawful act. The police have no role in an eviction other than to make arrests after an offence is committed. Remember this is an eviction of people from their own land under planning laws, not a mass arrest, and is not in itself a police matter.

My problem with the police in general is frequently that they just side with whoever the see as their ally in a situation, rather than upholding the law.

This means (in order)
1. state security agencies
2. other state agencies
3. big companies
4. small comapnies
5. private security staff
6. individuals

If someone higher in that list is in dispute against someone lower, the police almost never take action even where a criminal offence is alleged ("it's a civil matter" whether it is nor not). This doesn't apply to things like murder of course, but to things like minor assaults or property offences, where the offence committed is related to the business of the agency or company. There might be the odd exception but it's my overwhelming experience.

When it's the other way round, then the police will find an excuse to take action by looking actively for a reason to become involved, as here. If this was a private landlord evicting a tenant they wouldn't be kicking in fences.

Harass staff in a bank over a dispute and the police will arrest you (rightly so).

If staff in your bank harass you over a debt, perhaps seriously over a period of months, guess what the police will do then?

"The more openly critical we can be of those who have the power to coerce us, the better"

I think I will do what you have stated and be critical of your article. Tasers being used when being hit with missiles in a legal removal of an illegal settlement is justifiable. Police batons have been used for many years without people saying it is excessive force.

'According to BBC News..' Why believe a word of it then?

See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-15376116 The use of tasers is utterly justified though regretable. Presented with he violence from protesters that they have been, it is remarkable that the police have shown such restraint. Be sure that the police in no other country would react with such minimal force.