It's odd to see the police admit they got something wrong. But that's just what happened this week, when Her
Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary admitted that they'd overstepped the mark, and just plain got it wrong in a whole raft of protests over the last couple of years.

The report, called Adapting to Protest, is part of a whole series of changes and reforms kicked into existence by
the sad death of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests earlier this year. After a video surfaced of him being violently pushed to the ground by a copper minutes before he died, the police were forced to stop using their old fallback excuses "a few troublemakers", "we were provoked", etc etc, because that was clearly rubbish.

But what should they been doing instead? Part of the problem seems to be that activists these days come up with
new ways to tease the police all the time. Most officers are trained to deal with marches or football crowds which have started rioting. But that's not what they're actually dealing with these days (apart from the English Defence
League of course, ah the good old days with a bit of bottle and brick throwing). How do you police civil disobedience? How do you police direct action? How do you police protest which is illegal, but peaceful?

That is what this report looks at. The conclusions it draws are not always flattering to police - it frankly admits
that protests are sometimes policed by half-trained policemen, for example. It's not particularly happy with public order training. And it agrees that many police just don't understand the legal framework in which they're
operating, and are misusing stop and search all over the place.

It is really pleasing to read all this stuff. I particularly like the part when the report admitted that the police at Kingsnorth Climate Camp 2007 (who stopped and searched absolutely everyone going in and out of the camp) were operating from an "incorrect starting point". (They don't cover the G20 protests in such detail because they
already did a whole report into that a few months ago. You've never seen so many reports as there have been this year; it has snowed them.)

But it's even more pleasing to hear what the HMIC believes the police force should be; a force sticking to the
traditional British model who depend on the consent of the public and who "do not serve the state or any other interest group - they serve the people". That's a police force I could actually live with. Whether it's the force we've got... oh that's a whole different matter.

Words: Bibi van der Zee

Photo: Flickr users m.o.o.f, Andrew*