Police vs Fans - or Police Vs Hooligans?

Guardian

Grudge match: fans v police
Football fans say they are herded and harassed by police. Officers say they are fighting hooliganism in what is becoming a bitter face-off

Francis Beckett The Guardian, Friday 22 October 2010

On Saturday 5 January 2008, Cliff Augur went to watch Chelsea play football, as he has done most Saturdays for 40 years. He had with him his two teenage sons and two of their friends.

After the match, one of his sons' friends, Charlie, went into a pub to use the toilet. Waiting outside, Augur heard shouting. Suddenly the area was full of police with dogs, who formed a cordon round the pub. Augur phoned Charlie, who said the police would not let him out. Augur politely appealed to them. "I told them that he was a 15-year-old boy for whom I was responsible," says Augur, but he was curtly rebuffed, and the police started pushing people. "I was knocked into my younger son, John. The dog handler allowed the dog sufficient rein so that it could get at my other son, James. I saw the dog sink his teeth into James's lower leg. It was obvious he was in pain. I shouted to the police: 'That's my son, let him go.'"

Augur kicked out at the dog. The animal released James and turned on him, sinking its teeth into his leg. He fell to the floor. "I saw the dog in my face. I was horrified and frightened."

The dog was pulled away, and two or three policemen seized him. "I was on the floor with them holding me down. I felt a tremendous kick to my right side underneath my armpit. I was gasping for breath. I really thought I was going to die. A few seconds later I felt someone standing on my back, holding me down with their foot.

"I managed to look to my right and I saw two policemen holding James on the floor. He was shouting: 'Help me, Dad, help me.' A policeman punched him in the face while he was being held down on the floor. That will live with me for ever. It really upset me that I could not help my son."

Augur was in dreadful pain throughout the long period he spent in the police station, but was given no treatment apart from a painkiller. When fingerprints, photographs and other formalities had been completed, he and his son were taken to hospital, where he was found to have four broken ribs and a punctured lung.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission initiated an investigation, and passed its file to the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS did not prosecute the police officer named by Augur because, according to IPCC commissioner Nicholas Long, "the investigation could not identify conclusively the officer concerned".

Is this an unfortunate one-off incident in the long police battle against football hooliganism? Not according to the director of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti: "I have come to be horrified at some of the treatment that law-abiding fans have experienced. We are in danger of demonising anyone who goes to football matches." Long agrees: "I am surprised that we see as few complaints and referrals as we do from policing of football matches. The police should not imagine that the majority of people attending football matches are bent on violence."

Liberty became involved after the Football Supporters' Federation approached Chakrabarti in November 2008, on behalf of 78 Stoke City fans.

"We were going to watch Stoke play in Manchester," says Lyndon Edwards. "Last time we'd been there, we'd been herded about like cattle at Manchester Piccadilly station. So we decided to meet in a pub in Irlam [to the south-west of the city]."

There was no trouble. Nonetheless, police with dogs swooped on the pub and ordered the supporters on to a coach back to Stoke. Section 27 of the Violent Crime and Disorder Act 2006 allows police to move people out of an area. "They gave me a form to sign and they'd filled it in for me and it said I was involved in alcohol-related violent disorder. I wouldn't sign it because it wasn't true," says Edwards. "They said, 'Either sign it or you'll go in the cells.' So I signed it but I wrote on it that I didn't agree with it."

It took two hours to process everyone, and probably another hour to drive to Stoke. Edwards and the other supporters were not allowed to get off the coach, even after pleading to use a lavatory. By the time the coach got to Stoke, it was swimming in urine.

This summer, nearly two years later, Greater Manchester police paid out £184,000 in compensation – more than £2,000 each – to the 78 supporters. Its deputy director of legal services, Sian Williams, says: "At the time the use of the powers was new and we have since taken steps to improve our understanding of the legislation to try to prevent this from happening again."

But if lessons have been learned, it is not obvious to Malcolm Clarke, chair of the FSF. "There's a culture developing among parts of the police force that you can do what you like to football supporters because, unlike protesters, they won't complain," he says.

James McKenna, 23, is both a Liverpool fan and a protester – he's one of the leaders of Spirit of Shankly, which campaigned against the club's ownership by the Americans Tom Hicks and George Gillett. On 13 December last year, he shouted "Yanks out" at a limousine entering the Anfield Road gates, which he believed was carrying the owners. "There was a peaceful crowd doing everything the police asked," he says. "But the moment I shouted, they threw me against the wall and said they were arresting me – for racism."

He was placed in a cell for five hours, then charged with a public order offence. An officer claimed McKenna had shouted: "F***ing Yankee bastards out." McKenna continues to deny this. He was eventually released and told that one of his bail conditions would be that he could not go to Liverpool matches or into the city centre. His arrest was reported in the Liverpool Post, and he feared he might lose his job – he is a civil servant. In the end, the FSF found him a barrister and all the charges were dropped.

Under the Football Spectators Act 1989, police can ask magistrates for an order banning a supporter from football matches for three to 10 years. Anthony MacManus, 40, was waiting at Durham airport to fly to the World Cup this summer when two special branch officers approached and told him that two police officers from Middlesbrough had said he was a threat. They held him for six hours in a cell then took him before a magistrate, but the mysterious Middlesbrough officers were still not there. The magistrate confiscated his passport and deferred the hearing. Four more followed, all adjourned because the officers failed to appear. At last, on 24 August, the police withdrew their application for a banning order. MacManus has lost the £715.60 he paid for his ticket to Johannesburg, and has spent more than he can afford on solicitors' fees. A ceiling fixer, he was lucky not to lose his job when his name appeared in the papers – he kept it only because his boss goes to football with him and knows he has never been involved in violence. "I've followed England all over the world and never been involved in any trouble," says MacManus.

A spokesperson for Durham constabulary says: "Acting on initial information received, a decision was taken to prevent him from travelling and he was detained. Having made further inquiries, a decision was taken to apply for a football banning order. The police subsequently requested that the application be withdrawn, following a review of the case."

Football supporters everywhere come up with endless stories like these. Chakrabarti says: "They have grown used to being herded en masse. If you want people to behave well, treat them with respect."

Andy Holt, assistant chief constable for South Yorkshire, who heads the UK Football Policing Unit, says the tactic works: "It is hard-hitting, but it is proportionate – and it works. There are occasions when mistakes are made." Football violence has declined, he says, and banning orders are a key to that.

Clarke thinks the reasons for the decline have as much to do with changes in society and general football culture. The FSF supports the police in dealing with violence, but, "If the police say, 'Here are 10 banning orders, six of which are justified and four that are not,' they are likely to regard it as a job well done because they have banned half-a-dozen hooligans. We say that the fundamental principles of British justice have been denied to the other four supporters."

www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/oct/22/football-hooliganism-policing-innocent-victims