Policing and the Right to Protest
Conference believes:
● That the Tories’ Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts legislation is an appalling attack on human rights. Labour must campaign and pledge to repeal it in its entirety.
● That restrictions on the right to protest from the 1986 Public Order Act and 1994 Criminal Justice Act also need abolishing.
Conference further believes:
● That heavy policing and punitive criminal justice are not solutions to society’s problems. We must attack poverty and inequality, restore and expand social provision, and narrow the spheres in which criminal justice operates. We must push back hard against the Tory agenda for society, towards a society based on provision for people’s needs, not profit-making.
● Labour must advocate:
○ Urgent moves to tackle police violence and abuse, including replacing the so-called Independent Office for Police Conduct with a more independent and democratic body;
○ Full accountability of police to elected local authorities;
○ Curbing police powers, including in terms of use of force, stop and search and presence in schools. General demilitarisation and disarming;
○ Addressing drug-related problems through public-health policies instead of criminalisation;
○ Provision of services so that mental-health crises are dealt with by trained civilian workers, not police;
○ A major prisoner release programme and sharply curtailing use of prison.
Conference resolves:
● That Labour will campaign for and pledge to implement such policies.
Submitted to Momentum Policy Primary by: Southwark Momentum