Are Those Lawyers I Hear?!

After the smoke, noise and fury of the Olympic opening ceremony had cleared it emerged that London's Metropolitan police arrested 150 people at last night's (27/7/12) Critical Mass bike ride. All the arrests were for public nuisance which is a common law offence and therefore not strictly defined by a specific statute.

I should start by clarifying what I said about the matter yesterday. While extensive, lenghty and expensive High Court battles have ruled that Critical Mass is a traditional procession rather then a protest they are not exempt from all public order legislation. For example they don't suddenly have a license to kill. However they are exempt from legislation such as Sections 14-16 of the 1986 Public Order Act which amongst other things allows the police to impose conditions such as an all out ban on protests. While obviously the exact details of each individual arrest need to be considered I think it is extremely unlikely that any of the arrests will even go to court let alone end in conviction. That's because it's already been established that by going about their lawful business Critical Mass riders will cause a degree of nuisance to passers-by. Provided there is no malice or intent on the part of the riders the passers-by just need to accept this minor disruption as part of living in a civilised society. Today's (28/8/12) Olympic men's cycle road race between Box Hill and The Mall in central London is an almost too perfect example of this.

I along with the police, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and anyone who has been involved in Critical Mass know that these arrests are a joke and border on unlawful. Therefore what the police were trying to do in making them was to carry out another intelligence gathering exercise on the riders while putting the arguments surrounding public order policing and the suppression of demonstrations on the Olympic agenda. It was also an attempt to put the offence of public nuisance on the agenda. Seriously the only reason why police and councils across Britain have started using this offence again is because I explained to them how to during my arguments about number 50 Beechwood Avenue.


Edited to add:

I'm still not liking this obligatory time and date stamp: 13:15 on 28/7/12.

Edited again at around 16:30 on 28/7/12 to add: The finer points of English (it's different in Scotland) public order legislation are so complex that often even people with a working knowledge of the law i.e the police sometimes fail to understand them. However it now appears that the public nuisance arrests at Critical Mass were made after the cyclists failed to obey conditions (a set route) that the police had imposed on them under Section 12 of the 1986 Public Order Act. Section 12 gives the police the power to impose conditions on "processions" so the argument will be over whether or not this also applies to "traditional processions" such as critical mass. The police will try and argue that it does and therefore the cyclists were not going about their lawful business. In the meantime those arrested have been put on bail by the police who have imposed conditions such as the arrestees not being allowed to go within 100 metres of an Olympic venue or enter the Olympic borough of Newham whilst in possession of a bicycle. That last condition will especially hurt anyone who works as a cycle courier and regardless of what charging decisions are made I suspect these bail conditions are going to be kept in place until after the end of the para-Olympics. On the plus side Britain has since conceded that it's didn't even place in the bicycle/road race with a Vinokurov of Kazakhstan taking gold.