UK Border Force is in impact below navy command, record says

The UK Border Force is in impact below navy command, reflecting a much broader building up of “hyper-militarisation” in policing, in step with a brand new record on global regulation enforcement.

A record by way of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), timed to coincide with the 5th anniversary of George Floyd’s dying, says the 21st century has observed the emergence of paramilitary and “political” policing throughout Europe, hired at borders, right through civil unrest and towards public protest.

It cites the Home Office’s 2020 request for Ministry of Defence (MoD) reinforce and the introduction throughout the Border Force of a brand new put up of clandestine Channel risk commander as proof of the Channel changing into “hyper-militarised”.

Liz Fekete, the director of the IRR and the record’s creator, mentioned: “What they have begun at the border does not end at the border.

“First, the government portrays asylum seekers arriving in small boats in an already militarised Channel as a national security threat. The plan to allow French police to push back boats in the Channel can only lead to more injuries, more deaths.

“Second, we know that plastic bullets (still used in Northern Ireland) have already been authorised for use at the Notting Hill carnival and BLM (Black Lives Matter) protests of 2020 and that, since then, BLM protests have been subjected to baton charges, horse charges and pepper spray, and that student occupations for Palestine have been violently suppressed.

“Third, we know that discrete firearms units have been created within crime fighting units (recall the deaths of Mark Duggan and Chris Kaba) and that Jean Charles de Menezes died as a result of the ‘shoot to kill’ approach of Operation Kratos.

“This is why we are saying to the government today that ‘it’s time to take stock’. For this is demonstrably not policing by consent.”

The record says the MoD’s oversight for policing small-boat crossings within the Channel has “effectively [put] elements of the UK Border Force under military command”. In reinforce of this research, it additionally highlights Keir Starmer’s announcement final 12 months that he used to be giving Border Security Command counter-terrorism powers to care for people-smuggling, and Drone Watch UK’s written proof to the House of Commons defence committee through which it mentioned that the Channel were militarised via the usage of military-grade drones.

Another theme of the record, titled Paramilitary Policing Against the People, is the “creeping” enlargement of “less-lethal weaponry”, which will nonetheless motive life-changing accidents, comparable to Tasers, which have been presented to policing in England and Wales in 2003, Northern Ireland in 2008 and Scotland in 2018.

The record discusses 69 deaths of migrants, refugees and different racialised humans throughout Europe via the usage of such weaponry, most commonly asylum seekers from sub-Saharan Africa on the Spanish-Moroccan border. The weaponry is frequently utilized in public order eventualities, it says.

Kojo Kyerewaa, a countrywide organiser for Black Lives Matter UK, mentioned: “Only racism can explain the British state’s fear of Black people on the streets.

“The Met’s 5,900 plastic bullets and 700 officers trained to fire them are not ‘public safety’ tools. They are instruments of racial terror. When we flooded the streets to denounce police brutality, the Home Office aimed those very weapons at us – weapons proven to blind, maim and kill. This is not an oversight. This is their vicious racist designs against us.”

The Met prior to now mentioned it used to be “inaccurate and irresponsible to imply the ethnicity of those likely to be involved in an event or protest influences the tactics considered”.

A Home Office spokesperson mentioned: “Britain has a long tradition of operational independence for the police who keep our streets safe. Any use of their powers is an operational decision.”