Law and Disorder

I’ve just read with dismay an article concerning the policing arrangements for a forthcoming football match between local rivals Portsmouth and Southampton. Just read that again. It’s a football match. Nothing more significant than that. Yet you would think the police were planning a peace keeping mission in downtown Tripoli.

Obviously it is a bit more significant than just a football match, especially to the supporters of both teams. Apart from south coast bragging rights being at stake, there is a long and, at times, unsavoury history between followers of the two clubs separated by 20 miles of the M27.

The last time the two teams met in Portsmouth in 2005, there was violent disorder and five, yes FIVE, people were arrested. Five out of 20,210 at the match. That’s 0.02% of the attendance.

This, it seems, is justification for the Hampshire Constabulary to designate December’s encounter a so-called “bubble match”. This means if you are unfortunate enough to follow the red and white striped lot, you will only be able to attend the match if you board a coach at one of three designated stops in the wrong half of Hampshire and travel to Fratton Park in convoy, under police escort, being allowed off the coach only to go straight into the stadium. You will not be at liberty to visit any of the local hostelries or food outlets, or indeed do anything other than watch the match. If you don’t live in Southampton, you’ll still have to go there first to catch the coach. So, for example, if you live east of Portsmouth, you’d have to travel 20 miles past the ground and then come back again. And if this restriction of your civil liberties isn’t bad enough, the traffic conditions in and around Portsmouth will ensure that the convoy of coaches become sitting ducks for the unsavoury elements which unfortunately do exist in our island paradise.

Road closures and restrictions on pub opening will also impact the home fans. And don’t forget the inconvenience already imposed by moving the game to 1pm on a Sunday.

And all this to prevent the possibility of a repeat of the violence that led to FIVE arrests last time out.

"Superintendent Rick Burrows is leading the planning for the policing operation on December 18. He said: ‘The most important objective of the day is to ensure that it is a safe environment for everybody coming to the football.’"

Surely the most important objective of the day is to provide an appropriate response to the level of threat perceived to be presented by a small minority, whilst preserving the basic human rights of the vast majority of law abiding citizens planning to attend the match?

Still, football fans are an easy target. We always have been. That is why, for as long as I can remember, we have been assumed to be guilty until proven innocent. Treated like cattle. Treated as a mob, so that the police can assume all of us are guilty and just arrest the nearest person in any disorder, even if they’re an innocent bystander, because it’s easier.  In the week the release of papers relating to the Hillsborough disaster was debated in parliament, it would be nice to think that police (and society’s) attitudes had altered in the last 22 years.  The police’s contempt for the Liverpool supporters on that fateful day in April 1989 contributed significantly to the deaths of 96 of them.

Sadly, in 2011, nothing much seems to have changed.