Thursday, December 03, 2009

Sinn Féin accuse PSNI of ‘abusing powers’

Sinn Féin Councillor and chair of Strabane District Policing Partnership, Brian McMahon has accused the PSNI of abusing ‘stop and search’ powers for the purpose of petty political harassment.

His comments come after an incident on Friday night where two members of Ógra Shinn Féin were searched and threatened with CS gas and arrest after they where followed by the PSNI while removing a Sinn Féin sign in Strabane town centre.


At around 7:30pm on Friday evening (27th November) two Ógra Shinn Féin activists were removing a party sign from the wall of a building in Butcher Street when they noticed an unmarked police car circling the area paying particular attention to them. When returning home having completed their work the same police car pulled up beside them, the officers exited and proceeded to question them under section 44 of the ‘terrorism act.’

The two men cooperated and gave their details when one male officer, without stating his intention to conduct a search, placed his hand in the pocket of one of the men who objected at which point he was grabbed physically restrained and shoved against the wall.

At this point the other young man protested against this heavy handedness and was pushed away and threatened with CS gas which was pointed into his face. Four more PSNI members arrived on the scene and threatened to take the two men to Antrim for ‘questioning’.

At this stage a number of people had gathered to watch what was happening, and realising that their actions were seen by a number of members of the public, they quickly searched the two men and left the scene without explanation or issuing the necessary ‘stop and search’ documents.

“This is a clear abuse of stop and search powers and it is clear from other representations made to me that there are particular PSNI officers in Strabane who are continually engaged in such gung ho antics against young local nationalists”.
“Incidents such as this pose extremely legitimate and serious questions about the PSNI’s official justification for its extremely high use of stop and search powers in areas like Strabane and Derry compared to the virtually non-existent use of these powers in areas such as Larne”.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

political policing alive and well!

Anonymous said...

fucking scum. we really need to get on the ball here about political policing.