from the centre of a crime scene

news watchers will, by now, have gathered that a wpc was shot in nottingham last night, just a few hundred yards from where i live. i was completely oblivious to the fact until i woke up this morning thinking "it's very quiet today" and found our flat behind lines of crime scene tape with radford boulevard and the surrounding area cordoned off. police evidence gathering teams in their puffy white suits have been up and down the street out the back of the house all day, and i have to ask police permission to get in and out of my street whilst taking ridiculously long roundabout journeys to uni. news teams with huge white vans with satellite dishes are parked at the end of lenton boulevard, and adverts for local papers scream "WPC SHOT IN CITY".

having read the few facts that seem to be available at the moment it seems like a burglar was interrupted by police who were then shot at as he did a runner. they're saying lenton boulevard although a bigger area has been cordoned off up at the radford boulevard end. perhaps the gunman ran off in this direction. what is interesting to me about all this is the difference in response when a policewoman gets shot compared to previous shootings in this area.

nottingham has a bit of reputation within the uk for violent crime which even makes it into the summary of the city on wikipedia. radford, the area i live in, has a particularly bad rep, although in my view this is largely a racist thing. the area is predominantly populated by afrocarribeans and asians. nonetheless, there was a shooting round here a few years ago, of a local person. i don't remember seeing anything in the news about that. large areas of the city were not shut down and a massive police evidence gathering operation was not initiated. after an initial crime scene investigation centring on one small residential street there were more police on the beat for a while, and that was it. this morning local people were getting quite pissed off with the police not letting them into their own streets. it's hard not to see local people's treatment as discriminatory.

does it matter that the victim was a police officer? i would say not. the same treatment, by both the police and the media, should be given to any shooting. does it matter that she was a young woman? once again, the same comment. a potential murder is a horrific crime and it doesn't matter who's on the end of the bullet. why do poor black people getting shot not make the news in the same way as a young female police officer, who has essentially given consent to be placed in potentially life-threatening situations? it seems we only care about certain kinds of victims. it's just not newsworthy when working-class afrocarribeans are the victims of crime.

will doubtless blog more about this event as more info emerges.

the joy of sects

some of you in nottingham will be aware of this statement, recently circulated amongst anti-war activists in an attempt to build solidarity with iraqi and iranian workers. the initiative was started by a local member of the alliance for workers' liberty (awl), a small trotskyist group, as was clear to me from both knowledge of who the sender was, and the other people who'd signed it. i had a look and it seemed reasonable enough. i put my name to it, hoping that it might bring together some of the disparate elements of the anti-war movement in nottingham.

ho ho ho. you can't overcome the left's myopic sectarianism that easily! today i received this email from someone who i will only describe as nottingham's only maoist (i hope):-

People should be aware that this statement originates from the Alliance for Wokers' Liberty, a small Trotskyite sect. Most of the local signatories are AWL members or fellow travellers. They claim to call for an "end to the occupation" (of Iraq) but in fact the AWL supports the American and British imperialist occupation of Iraq. They are in fact opposed to the withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq at present.
Also they condemn the armed struggle being waged by various sections of the Iraqi resistance. Don't sign it.

the line appears to be "it doesn't matter how reasonable the statement is, the people who wrote it are from the wrong place, so don't sign it". i'm not an ardent leftist sect watcher, so i have to admit, i'm not that up on the latest line from awl hq on "what to think about the occupation". however, from having read one of their pamphlets on iraq, they seem to have a reasonable guiding principle of: occupation = bad, islamic fundamentalists = bad, no matter who they're fighting. they argue for support for democratic secularists, which doesn't seem like such a bad idea. i'm sure this becomes problematic when they come down to defining who those democratic secularists are, but that doesn't come into the statement. there is nothing in the statement to suggest that it is in favour of keeping occupying troops in iraq.

not being one to be told what to think i felt it necessary to reply:-

Dear [Nottingham's Only Maoist],

I am unable to see any pro-occupation sentiment in the statement. I'm aware of the AWL's rather muddled position, however, I would be equally suspicious of those giving uncritical support to the resistance. Certain sections of this resistance are religious fundamentalists who would crush any genuine egalitarian democracy as readily as the occupiers. This is surely insupportable.

I signed the statement as an individual on the basis of what was written within it, at the request of another individual. I am not, nor will I ever be, a member of the AWL. I would advise others who have received the statement to sign or not sign on a similar basis, not on the basis of sectarian politics.

Sincerely,

[Dan R, who is Not a Maoist]

moral of the story - stay independent, and use your common sense not the party line (especially if you don't belong to any party!)

offensive behaviour

apparently it's now illegal to give security cameras the finger. do we really want to be giving the "security" enforcers any more powers than they already have? where are the politicians standing up and saying they'll take their goons' authority away?

students against war

imagine my surprise and delight - i went to an anti-war meeting and came away feeling uplifted and inspired! actually, it does happen more than i'm making out. what am i going on about? a new initiative in nottingham by students from the university of nottingham (nottingham student peace movement), nottingham trent university (peace & liberty forum, people & planet), new college, south notts college, and possibly places i haven't even heard of, to gather students opposed to the iraq war based in nottingham into a collective force. i had no idea there were so many others out there.

we filled the upstairs room of the peacock pub on mansfield road, with over 20 people in attendence. depsite the flinging around of plenty of industrial metaphors ('building' this that and the other, i felt like i was in a soviet propaganda movie), the meeting was good at generating a genuine coalition of students against war. email lists, message boards, etc. seem to be in the pipeline, and people were keen to get involved in the peace conference and ceasefire. we also discussed ways that we as a large student group could try to radicalise the existing anti-war movement further, and planned actions against the erosion of civil liberties.

knowing there's a whole bunch of people out there ready to get involved in stuff makes this activism thing a whole lot more pleasant. long may it last.