Operation National Party - The 'usual hard core'?

To police officers, children marching for better schools are the 'usual hard core'.

On the 21st of July some 300 students and teachers marched on the National Party's conference at SkyCity to protest National's cuts to postgraduate education, early childhood education and charter schools. Anyone watching the protest would have seen a lot of students, union flags from the various education unions and an unusual amount of children for a demonstration.

The last post looked at the most interesting aspect of police operational orders released under the Official Information Act concerning a recent student protest. Another set of orders, that concerning the protests around the National Party conference has also been released - Operation National Party Conference. 

Part of the summary for officers reads - 'Protest groups will be the usual hard core groups who have already made their feelings felt recently in Auckland city. However it can be expected that some members of the general public not aligned to any protest group could be well motivated to also lend their weight to these protests.'

This statement reveals the police's perspective - protest groups like unions, student groups or the Quality Public Education Coalition are 'the usual hard core' whose possible scenarios (blacked out) need to be dealt with.

The media tells us that the 'police exist to protect everyone equally and keep us safe from crime. In reality their role is to protect the ruling class—by any means necessary.'

In reality police officers are conditioned by their commanders at each and every protest to view dissidents - striking teachers or protesting students - and mass political action as a threat to law and order. In the minds of the police, the teachers, students and children protesting on July 21 were 'hard core' elements one step away from disrupting John Key and his cronies celebrating their renewed beneficiary bashing.

This is why the police are not our friends, this is why we cannot win them over to our side - 'In periods of relative social peace, police violence is limited and the illusion that they are above the class struggle can be maintained. But in periods of crisis and heightened class conflict the real role of the police becomes clearer to millions of people. The only solution is to abolish the police entirely—and the only way to do that is to fight for a socialist society.'

-Socialist Aotearoa

An excerpt from police operational orders.