Climate camp policing 'still over-the-top'
08 August 2008
Matt Wootton, a Green Party activist, was searched and then arrested at the entrance to the Climate Camp near Kingsnorth in Kent on Friday Aug 8, for alleged 'possession of a controlled substance'.
He was handcuffed and taken away by the police to Medway Police Station in Gillingham, where he was put into a windowless cell without proper drinking water or toilet facilities for the next five hours. His fingerprints and thumbprints were taken, and a DNA swab from his mouth, thus putting him onto the national police database.
Only after nearly five hours was the substance in question actually tested by the police and found to be, as Mr Wootton had explained from the start, vitamin C.
Dr Derek Wall, Green Principal Speaker, was at the camp this weekend and said: "This is another example of how over-the-top the policing of this event has been. This shows that the priority of the police is not to protect the public but to suppress legitimate protest."
Mr Wootton said, "It is crystal clear that ordinary people such as myself are being targeted for harassment by the police. Senior officers in the police have evidently decided that, if they make the lives of concerned citizens a misery each time that we try to protest against the damage done to our collective life-support system by the greenhouse gases being burnt into the atmosphere at places like Kingsnorth, then we will give up and go home.
"I am not so easily put off. But I am concerned about the state of our democracy and our civil liberties, when the police are wasting their time throwing people like me into the cells on a false pretext - when what they ought to be doing is getting out there to catch criminals. I suppose it is easier to harass a climate protester than it is to catch actual criminals."
Mr Wootton was also denied his legal right (under section 5.6 of Code of Practice C set out in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984) to a telephone call during his five hours in police confinement. The police said that they were 'too busy' to allow him time to make such a call.
Matt Wootton was released by the police without charge. He was searched again on his arrival back at the scene of his arrest, and was finally reunited with his girlfriend at the camp at one in the morning.
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