 Last year’s Undie 500 ended worse than ever before; not only were there smashed bottles left lying on Castle St but blood as well.
What started as a traditional weekend party, which has been happening for years, and will likely continue despite the DCC’s and the Uni, turned into a bitter fight between the police and the students.
The police are meant to be a public force to ensure security, even an example to society. When they turned up on Castle street in full anti-riot gear, waving their battons and throwing teargas and pepper spray they set an example of confrontation that students were quick to copy. Every year the police are given new, improved gear to control demonstrations and the public 'disorder'. Much of this equipment comes from research conducted in military laboratories where they develop solutions to stain skin and 'non-lethal' chemical weapons. A recent product of the police-military research labs is the taser gun. This 'non-lethal' weapon has proven unsafe in practice. Amnesty reported 160 deaths between 2000 and 2006 in the US. In Dunedin, police will be armed with tasers from March as part of a national arms upgrade, which will see 700 tasers distributed to police. Tasers fire harpoon-like barbed projectiles, which stick in the victim's flesh and deliver a 50,000 volt electric shock.
Another weapon being developed by the US military is the ADS (Active Denial Systems), which directs high-frequency microwave radiation and “causes a burning sensation on the subject's skin”.
These weapons, as well as the more usual, and equally unsafe, rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, are designed to allow the police or military to disperse unarmed crowds. Where once, arms spending focused on lethal force, up to and including the power to destroy the entire planet, since the end of the Cold War there have been fewer wars on the scale of Vietnam but more so-called humanitarian interventions - like the abortive US invasion of Somalia - where relatively small numbers of well-armed western troops face not armies but unarmed civilians.
New Zealand is not Somalia and the police are not the US marines but the problem of disproportionate numbers remains. The area around the University of Otago now houses tens of thousands of young people crammed into century-old damp cold flats and treated as cash cows by the University bosses, the DCC and the slumlords. They are blamed for having no sense of responsibility but are given no sense of ownership over their living conditions or work - apart from the fake choice between one scummy flat and another or between one overcrowded class and another.
This unacceptable situation is the status quo - normality - and the status quo is what the police are sworn to protect. The authorities give police license to actively attack people in demonstrations, campaigns and public gatherings with the excuse of protection or control. Now if the police are meant to protect the public, why are they allowed to research how military weapons can be put into use against unarmed crowds?
The solution is simple. Though they may be meant to protect our interests, they in fact protect the interests of goverment, the university bosses, the DCC and the slumlords. An example is the behaviour of the DCC and the Otago University in regard to the Undie 500. Even though there have been attempts to organize it through concerts thus making it a legal event, the DCC instead issued a liquor ban comprising half the city with continuous and strict police controls. What is worse, the University’s authorities backed up this plan, going against the interests of the students. Truck-loads of riot police is the best the authorities can come up with for a rational response to the problems faced by students. The students' solution? Fight back against the invading force.
Daniel B |
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