Police brutality in Leeds

[badga tek]

Went to a house party on friday night and about 3am the police turned up to shut it down. There are always tons of parties every friday and saturday around the student area of Hyde Park. And nowadays most of them get shut down about that sort of time.

But most times the police will come in, tell people to turn the music down and then fuck off. At worst, they'll get the music turned off and tell the owners that if the music starts again they'll confiscate all the sound system equipment.

But on friday, they basically came in and cleared everyone out the two houses (they were opposite one another and led on to a back street, not a main road) and then proceeded to beat everyone back for at least a kilometre. There was no reasoned discourse or even a walking-pace moving back of the crowd. They were used riot police tactics, standing in a line and sprinting at the crowd of students. One of my mates fell over during one of the charges and got stampeded over. There must have been at least 50 policemen and a few attack dogs.

At one point I slipped into somebody's garden while the police went on a charge and then walked out and stood and watched. A police car was near me and one of the guys told me just to go home. I said I was alright and then he said if I didn't move he'd lock me up for breach of the peace.
At the time, I found it all a bit ridiculous and a completely disproportionate reaction but little else. But since then I've heard plenty of accounts of people being taken to hospital for dog bites on the crotch, people being beaten with batons (one guy had his arm broken) and just general police nastiness. Of course, there may be an element of chinese whispers but the number of the accounts suggests some bad shit went down. I think the details will become clearer in the next week or so.

Its hard to sum up just how disproportionate the police response was. Nothing like this has ever come close to happening before and as I said a lot of house parties go on in the Hyde Park area. I had a party a few months ago and things got a bit nasty inside with loads of dickheads bottling each other and fighting in our kitchen. We rang the police ourselves and they came in, cleared everyone out and then let us go back in. One of the officers even apologised for being a "party poop". And then you get what happened on Friday.

It was jointly hosted by Ben UFO and Kev Pangaea at Hessle Terrace but it was far away from a rowdy party. There were probably too many ppl there and closing it down wasn't the worst thing but the way it was done was despicable.

If anyone's on facebook, there's a group with accounts from the night and believe me, it was bad. http://leedsac.facebook.com/group.php?g ... 566&ref=mf
And there are a few shaky mobile phone videos on You Tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUZRvdLtULo is probably the clearest one at the moment. The media are being informed and everyone involved is going to be taking their complaints to the local councillor and the independent police commission.

I don't think I've explained it all that well but I thought I'd try and let some ppl know.

[-blade-]

F T P

[Jennifer]

they taking a tip from the ol usa?

[kins83]

Yeah man that was fucked up from what I heard. A friend of mine was there with a few mates (all female) and one got bitten by a police dog, another one got whacked on the leg with a baton and had a bloody great bruise. Loads of people were talking about it at Subdub last night. Some heads should roll, methinks, as it sounds like the whole thing was done terribly.

[felis]

Filth !!!!

[skunkrock]

that is dark man. as if parties are what need that sort of police attention in that area

hope u and your crew is all good

[badga tek]

that is dark man. as if parties are what need that sort of police attention in that area

hope u and your crew is all good

Cheers man, everyone i know's all good. But some others obviously aren't. Seen pictures now of people with nasty gashes on their head and big bites marks from those dogs.
Ben UFO and a couple of others got interviewed by BBC Leeds today. Should be on the news from tomorrow

[RubiconMan]

police losing any touch of reality they ever had.
up round the hessle's regular, mad to see charges in front of zulfis.
i hope those who were injured or present make a big feckin noise bout it.
it just aint propper

[badga tek]

i hope those who were injured or present make a big feckin noise bout it.

Oh trust me, we/they are. As I said should be on the news by tomorrow, locally at least. And a joint complaint will be made to the independent police commission. We're making sure that the local MP and councillor take it seriously.

[djshiva]

so sorry to hear about this, but not all that surprised. i guess i am somewhat used to the police here in the US and their riotous tactics.

hope everyone is all right, and i hope you nail the bastards.

[__________]

F T P

indeed.

i was not impressed with a pigwoman the other day when she was making fun of my mate's name after he tried to kill himself in the traffic outside his house. i was in the car behind the one that hit him, and i was not seeing the funny side of it as she took a statement from my friend who was driving. we could have killed our mate and she had the nerve to laugh at him when he was there on the floor behind her!

hope you and your mates recover from that police brutality and organise some more parties to piss them off

[ufo over easy]

yeah as you can imagine I'm pretty fucked off about this. completely unprecedented for us in terms of handling peaceful house parties. it wasn't even that loud, we only had a little system in.

few stories - one girl was being repeatedly punched by a cop just because she couldn't move fast enough down the street; her boyfriend got in the way and had his arm broken by a police baton. one guy was dragged down my stairs by a policeman and was bitten in the balls by a dog waiting at the bottom. I was personally forced out of my own home without even having time to put my shoes on, whilst police threatened to break down locked doors. They didn't have a search warrant.

dog handlers weren't wearing their badges, so they were completely unaccountable. as far as I know, that's totally illegal. one of my friends who lives in the other house with whom we did the party was taken to see the guy who organised the raid, and when he asked him questions, all he got for his trouble was two punches in the face and a "fuck off". Police were seen giving each other high fives after the operation was finished.

As I understand it, there were three police vans, 12 police cars, two surveillance vehicles and two road closures, and this was to combat a noise complaint at a student party, which was itself fairly mild compared to some.

Here's a few photos of before the raid -







As you can see, there were a lot of people, but that's not the issue. We all understood that the party might need to be broken up at some point, but they was no discourse with the police at all. They just waded through hundreds of people in a police car, and then launched themselves at us with dogs.

Here's pictures of what happened next -







there are pictures in the facebook group of people's injuries, but I won't post them up here for obvious reasons.. they're a bit grim.

I've never seen anything like this happen before - we're trying to do as much as we can to complain. Word seems to have gotten out very quickly, and the police seem to be doing all they can to disassociate themselves from the incident. The account on BBC News is completely misrepresentative, so a few of us have been interviewed for bbc radio leeds and we're sending out a pack of photos, videos and a copy of the official complaint we're making to various local papers...

[RubiconMan]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west ... 628109.stm

Police dog handlers were called out to help officers quell a disturbance in the Hyde Park area of Leeds in the early hours of Saturday.


As i understand it, the police turning up caused the disturbance...no trouble before they turned up? what a bunch of twats

[ufo over easy]

Yeah that's correct man. It was wicked till they turned up, really good vibes

The woman who wrote that was the person interviewing us today - she got that information from the police basically, who just told her it was a standard noise complaint that they dealt with as usual.

She saw footage on youtube and thought something else was going on so we got the interview to put our side of the story out there. Hopefully that story will be updated sometime soon.

[kins83]

The truth will out!!

[seen]

living on the other side of the street i saw most of the events unfold.
there were definatly a lot of undercover police there as well coming up to you asking for drugs and the such like.
sound problem?? that system was minor compared to quite alot of the others used for partys..maybe it was the amount of ppl.
when the po started appearing i went back to my house and was just about to sort the genarator to have a next soundsystem, i got persuaded against this and went to pass flyers around in the crowd. by that time it had reall kicked off so i just tried to leave.
it all seemed calm and pretty standard, but the police just whipped it into a frenzy. hyped ppl up so they started running down all the back streets pushing the bins over - which would not have happend otherwise.
far too heavy handed imho.

[ufo over easy]

innit Seen - we never wanted it to turn into a rave as such, it was more just people socialising.

interesting what you're saying about the undercover cops - for the half hour before the police arrived I was actually upstairs in my house with my mates; we watched the whole thing unfurl from the top until the police started battering doors and stormed my room..

[-blade-]

Linton Kwesi Johnson Street 66

The room was dark
Dusk howling softly 6 o'clock
Charcoal light
The fine sight
Was moving black
The sound was music mellow steady flow
And man son mind just mystic red, green, red, green
Your scene
No man would dance but leap and shake
That sharp through feeling right
Shape that sound
Tumbling down
Making movement, ruff enuff
Cos when the music met I-taps
I felt the sting, knew the shock, yeah, had to do and ride the rock
Outta dis rock shall come a greener riddim
Even more dread than what the breeze of glory bred
Vibrating violence is how wi move
Rocking with green rhythm
The drought and dry root out
The mighty poet I Roy was on the wire
Weston did a skank and each man laugh and feeling irie, dread I
Street 66, the said man said
Any policeman come here will get some righteous, raas klaat licks
Yeah mon, whole heap a kicks
Hours beat, the scene moving right
When all on a sudden
Bam, bam, bam, a knocking pon the door
Who is dat?, aksed Weston, feeling right
Open up, it's the police, come on, open up
What address do you want?
Number 66, come on, open up
Weston, feeling high, replied, Yes, this is Street 66, step right in and
take some licks.

[hopper]

sounds completely disgusting. hope some kind of justice comes out of this.

[pangaea]

Yeah, it got nasty. Police stormed our house, threatened to kick in my locked door and get tear gas out if we didn't get down the stairs faster. As man like UFO say, one bloke was dragged down the stairs with a truncheon round his neck and a dog bit him on the way out. Lots of other people needlessly hit and physically/verbally abused as they tried to make their way from the party, several hospitalisations. Some poor bugger had his arm broken and underwent an operation on it today. Seriously, some of those police were testosterone-fuelled thugs, plain and simple.

A small collective of us are trying to gather info, pictures, video etc together to hand to the IPCC, our MP, local councillor and the media. I'm not sure what will come of it but what they did needs to be highlighted in the hope they'll approach things differently in the future.