Sticks, Stones and Statistics

Reports emerged yesterday that a heavily bleeding woman was prevented from leaving April’s G20 protests after being violently pushed back by police officers with shields. It is the latest in a string of reports of serious police misconduct and brutality on the demonstration which saw newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson die after he was struck by a police baton and pushed to the ground. The next day, at a memorial held for Tomlinson, an officer with his number concealed was filmed slapping Nicola Fisher across the face and then beating her with his baton. Whilst it is by no means the case that all examples of police brutality point to deliberate state repression, the police have long been used to constrain democracy. Not by threatening protesters with their monopoly of violence, but by eliminating thousands of them entirely.

A few years ago, at the height of the protests against the ongoing war in Afghanistan and the impending invasion of Iraq when I was in London every month, marching from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square, a police officer came to speak at my school. I asked him why, when most independent sources had estimated that 50,000 people had been on a demonstration, the police would declare that there were only 4,000. Even on the largest political demonstration in British history, when two million people marched on Hyde Park, the police deftly managed to shave off well over a million people in their estimate. The officer – not the sharpest pig in the pen, who staunchly supported invading Iraq because he was afraid Saddam Hussein might kill his daughter with chemical weapons – declared my question irrelevant. He recognised that the police consistently lied about the numbers on demonstrations, but could not see how it mattered. People, after all, were not being denied their democratic right to protest.

It’s a shocking argument to be faced with. Not least because police estimates are so widely quoted in the mainstream media. Imagine an election is called and opinion polls are taken. 50,000 people declare their intention to vote Labour. The police don’t like it, so they alter the poll to say that only 4,000 people are going to vote Labour and this figure is quoted by all the major media outlets. Of course, they cannot stop anyone from actually turning out to support their chosen party, but it is a well observed social and psychological phenomenon that people weigh majority opinion before forming their own. In her book, The Spiral of Silence, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann makes the case that whilst the majority of the population do not expect power to result from backing the winner, they nevertheless wish to avoid isolating themselves. Where polls have become prevalent in the media to such an extent that people realise when they are in a minority, they are disinclined to publicly contradict the dominant opinion for fear of isolation. “To run with the pack is a relatively happy state of affairs,” she argues, “but if you can’t, because you won’t share publicly in what seems to be a universally acclaimed conviction, you can at least remain silent, as a second choice, so that others can put up with you.” People are not sheep, but for all but the most ardent individuals, an unwinnable cause in which one is very clearly identified as the minority, is a disincentive to speak out.

Demonstrations are like opinion polls. They are far from wholly representative, but they gauge popular feeling and are every bit as intrinsic to a healthy democracy as elections. If the police lie to say that 4,000 people turned out to voice their opinions on a demonstration, when really there were 50,000, they have, in effect, silenced 46,000 people without ever cracking a skull. And it is through eliminating these people in their calculation, thus downplaying the popular opposition to an unpopular policy, that they stifle wider dissent.

Incidents of police using unreasonable force against peaceful protesters are widely reported on in this day and age. Even where mainstream sources might fail to immediately pick up on them, the widespread availability and use of mobile phones and digital cameras has allowed citizens and small media outlets to police the police. Where violence does occur in its most startling forms, as with the G20 protests, it is more often the result of overzealous officers whose uniforms and whose notion of collective responsibility (like the guards of the infamous Stanford prison experiment) strip them of restraint, than the kind of systemic repression of democracy splashed across our television screens from Iran. But whilst we in Britain should celebrate our democratic freedoms and our right to peaceful protest with relatively little fear of state violence, we should not ignore the silent violence that denies thousands their voice. The violence of disinformation. Because sticks and stones and police batons may break a few bones. But statistics have a power all their own.