Paramilitary policing against the people: Colonial continuities and the challenge from below – endorsements from Statewatch, Omega Research Foundation, Advocacy Officer European Legal Support Centre, Black Lives Matter UK and Alfie Meadows:
Chris Jones, Executive Director, Statewatch
With European governments enthusiastically signing up for a new international arms race, this important study looks inwards: at the crucial issue of police militarisation. It explains how the police are quietly acquiring an increasing array of deadly weapons, how they are using them, and the brutal effects.
This is already well-known to those at the sharp end of police brutality: migrants and refugees seeking safety and opportunity; racialised and marginalised communities; and those standing in solidarity with Palestine, against ecological destruction, and demanding an end to racism. The report makes clear that all of us that care about rights, liberties and justice urgently need to find collective means of challenging and changing a violent and repressive political and social system.
Omega Research Foundation
Paramilitary Policing presents an important perspective on entrenched practices of policing of racialsed communities. At a time when the right to protest is increasingly being curtailed, this report asks searching questions about disproportionate use of force and police use of specialised weapons and equipment. IRR’s findings should form a vital part in holding states to account.
Tasnima Uddin, Advocacy Officer European Legal Support Centre
The IRR report exposes a chilling reality: across Europe, Palestine solidarity movements are systematically targeted through hyper-militarised policing, protest zoning, and state-sanctioned stigmatization. From violent crackdowns on student encampments in Amsterdam and Berlin to the lethal use of tear gas against demonstrators in France, these tactics are not isolated incidents but part of a deliberate strategy to silence dissent and shield complicity in Israel’s crimes.
By framing Palestinian rights advocacy as a ‘threat to public order,’ complicit governments have weaponised the rhetoric of crisis to legitimise repression, while the media continue to demonise and ‘other’ protesters as ‘extremists’ or ‘terrorists.’ This is political policing at its most insidious, a war on social movements that undermines democracy itself. At the ELSC, we stand with those resisting this repression, documenting these abuses, and fighting to reclaim the right to protest as a cornerstone of justice for Palestine.
Kojo Kyerewaa, National Organiser Black Lives Matter UK (BLMUK) said:
This report shows that policing in Britain is structurally racist. For the past six years, plastic bullets — weapons that killed 17 people, including eight children, in Northern Ireland — were authorised exclusively against Black-led movements: the Notting Hill Carnival, a celebration of Black joy, and the 2020 BLM protests demanding justice for police murders. Only racism can explain the British state’s fear of Black people on the streets.
The Met’s 5,900 plastic bullets and 700 officers trained to fire them are not “public safety” tools. They are instruments of racial terror. When we flooded the streets to denounce police brutality, the Home Office aimed those very weapons at us — weapons proven to blind, maim, and kill. This is not an oversight. This is their vicious racist designs against us. This report along with the 2023 Casey Review confirmed it: the Met is institutionally racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. Yet rather than dismantle this violence, Britain militarises it. Plastic bullets symbolise a broader truth — Black lives are disposable to the state.
Alfie Meadows
Across Europe it has become normal for police to be armed to the teeth, with rubber bullets, tear gas, batons and tasers which are regularly deployed against people at borders, racialised communities and those protesting austerity, climate destruction and genocide. As Liz Fekete shows, this hypermilitarisation of the police has been allowed to develop with little to no democratic oversight, and no accountability for the harms they cause. Fekete assembles many stories from across Europe to show how the police use so-called less lethal weapons to kill, injure and traumatise people exercising basic rights to movement and protest.
I’ve experienced the violence of paramilitary policing first hand, when I was almost killed after being hit on the head with a police baton while protesting against tuition fees and austerity measures in 2010. But as Liz shows, there are steps we can take to end paramilitary policing: share these stories, defend the right to protest, and join those at the sharp end of police violence in demanding accountability and change.