"The policewoman attacked by a sledgehammer" has been the constant refrain of the government against Palestine Action. A couple of days before the judicial review of the proscription in England, and despite fierce reporting restrictions on the trial, the prosecution released to the media highly edited video footage from the current trial in Woolwich Crown Court of six activists accused of the attack inside Elbit Systems' Filton factory on August 6 2024.
While that video has fueled tens of thousands of zionist troll posts on social media, the remarkable thing is that it is almost impossible to establish what it shows.
In fact, had it been put out without the prosecution narrative, nobody would have discerned that is what they were looking at. It shows chaotic fast moving footage from bodycams.
The first sledghammer seen is plainly in the hands of a security guard - as testimony in the trial, ignored by the MSM, has explained.
Here are some key facts: * Every single prosecution witness who gave evidence about the melee was obliged to change their statement when confronted by the defence with video evidence which contradicted it. This included much more video than was released by the prosecution.
* The prosecution produced a misleading account of the number and location of CCTV cameras in the factory. They were obliged to present a new map showing more cameras.
* The video evidence was left in or given into the hands of Elbit. A search of Elbit's premises in November 2025 found the USB sticks of video in their Metropolitan Police evidence bags in Elbit's safe.
The last fact is simply astonishing. The evidence collected and apparently correctly bagged by the police had simply been handed over to Elbit, apparently for over a year. This is only a part of a much wider collusion between Elbit and the UK state, including the police.
One of the key demands of the Palestine Action hunger strikers in other cases - of whom I will write further shortly - is the full release of correspondence between UK authorities including the counter terrorism police, which has been partially released and in very heavily redacted format.
Judge Johnson has directed the jury that the events in the Filton trial predated the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist action and they must not allow that subsequent development to influence them in any way.
There are six defendants in the current Woolwich trial, allegedly members of the "overt group" or "red group" who entered inside the facility to do damage, while a second "black" or "covert group" allegedly carried out a noisy distractive action.
Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio, Fatema Zainab Rajwani, Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin are charged with aggravated burglary, criminal damage and violent disorder.
In addition Samuel Corner is charged with grevious bodily harm with intent, an offence potentially resulting in life imprisonment.
I must at this stage congratulate Real Media, who have been doing a wonderful job of reporting the key events in the trial. As is to be expected, the mainstream media has published nothing except what has been served up to them on behalf of the prosecution and the state.
I am going to publish some key extracts that give you an idea of what has been going on:
Re: great work by Murray..what an asset to the cause of justice he is.nm
nmThe last working-class hero in England. Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ??? - 4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ???-4 December 2025
Thx, somehow unsurprising that the bodycam footage didn't tell the full story... (nm)
was a classic piece of copaganda. The pigs wanted them for ages because it would let them get lots of evidence to prosecute small time drug offences, etc. but the cost was prohibitive and was an obstacle. Then somehow the idea that this was a rein on police power and would make them more accountable was promoted and suddenly they were being showered in money to pay for it.
The book "Copaganda" goes into detail on it.The corporate media are complicit in the Gaza genocide. Never forget what they did. Never forgive them for it.
Indeed worth pointing out, thx. Wasn't aware of that history, must've passed me by... cheers, I (nm)
The framing of the police body camera as a means of “reform” is one of the most significant achievements of copaganda in contemporary history.33 In the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, punishment bureaucrats and the news media widely called for body cameras as a solution to police violence that would make police more “accountable” and “transparent.”
What many people don’t know is that internal documents, public statements, and industry materials reveal that police officials and for-profit manufacturers of body cameras and related software had been clamoring for the technology for years. However, prior to Michael Brown’s murder, police and prosecutors had been unable to get local governments to spend the billions of dollars needed to outfit every cop with a mobile surveillance camera that the cops themselves control and that prosecutors would use almost exclusively against marginalized people accused of minor crimes. Several large companies—who were eyeing body cameras as a multi-billion-dollar industry—had unsuccessfully lobbied for years for government funding to help police procure the money needed to integrate body-camera data into cloud-based computing systems and artificial intelligence algorithms that operationalize facial and voice-recognition. In the absence of government funding, they had even turned to the vast world of private police foundations, raising millions in donations from people like Stephen Spielberg to privately fund body cameras because police wanted them so badly.34
After police shot Michael Brown in 2014, the cops, prosecutors, and companies seized their opportunity, taking advantage of public outrage and a willing news media to convince local government officials to pay for the most expensive expansion of police surveillance technology in modern history. They reframed cameras as a “reform” to control police violence, almost always excluding from media coverage the views of experts, social movement leaders, and directly affected people who were warning that the technology, in the hands of the police and prosecutors, would not only fail to stop police violence, but usher in a new era of state surveillance and big data–fueled repression.
In my 2024 study of body cameras, Body Cameras: The Language of Our Dreams, I show how police and their allies used the news to dispense talking points that police lacked funding for crucial technology to hold themselves accountable. In reality, in addition to new surveillance technology useful in intelligence gathering at protests and to protect against civil liability for individual officers, police and prosecutors wanted body cameras because the technology gave them a powerful new form of evidence: an outward-looking camera that government agents control in terms of what it captures, from whose perspective, when video is publicly released, and how videos are edited. Body-camera videos are now routinely used in every courtroom in the U.S. to convict people of things like drug possession and trespassing and are almost never used against police. They help the punishment bureaucracy process more arrests because police, prosecutors, and judges use the videos to pressure people to plead guilty more quickly and to secure harsher punishment with that increased leverage. This is precisely the future police chiefs and corporate sales representatives envisioned over a decade earlier. The leading manufacturers of the cameras and purveyors of the software, like Axon (renamed from TASER), grew by billions in net worth, and many of the largest companies in the world—including Microsoft and Amazon—are making a lot of money from the perpetual surveillance technology contracts for software, databases, storage, and training.35
The news media collaborated every step of the way in this charade. In the nine years of media coverage I examined for my study, nearly every article characterized body cameras as a “reform” offered to promote police “accountability” and “transparency.” I demonstrate that the news used buzzwords and carefully chosen “experts” to disseminate police talking points with little critical perspective, and never mentioned the actual history about the long-standing desire that punishment bureaucrats and surveillance companies had for them or why. A common police refrain parroted by cherry-picked “experts” was that the cameras were a “win-win.” Even the growing number of detailed news investigations in recent years that accurately discuss the evidence from the government’s own studies concluding that body cameras do not make police less violent or more accountable nonetheless erase the true history that body cameras were not intended as a well-meaning police accountability measure. Copaganda manufactures both consensus for dangerous policies and powerful mythologies about the intentions of the punishment bureaucracy.
Provided with the illusion that body cameras could protect marginalized people from police violence—the opposite of why they were created and how they were marketed to police and prosecutors internally—it is no wonder that huge percentages of people supported the technology despite knowing very little about it. Meanwhile, the news’s focus on individual police body-camera videos after each new incident of police violence steered conversations away from deeper systemic questions about the purpose and function of policing, why police violence was still increasing, and the nature of policing reform.
In the wake of the 2023 murder of Tyre Nichols, New York City mayor Eric Adams went on national television to explain his decision to resurrect a controversial police unit similar to the SCORPION Unit that killed Nichols in Memphis. He argued that the NYC squad would be trained to “keep your body cameras on,” and he used Nichols’s murder to celebrate body cameras (even though they had neither prevented the murder nor provided the definitive footage of it).36 The mere existence of the body-camera technology was now used as an excuse to engage in the practices that had been protested. The dots had all been connected, the circle completed.
The police, prosecutors, courts, prisons, and probation and parole officers, along with the multi-billion-dollar industries that evolve in symbiosis with them, use their own violence, waste, and ineffectiveness to justify securing ever more power in a perpetual cycle of “reform.” Each failure becomes a reason to hoard more money doing the same things.37The corporate media are complicit in the Gaza genocide. Never forget what they did. Never forgive them for it.
From the same author - The Body Camera: The Language of our Dreams
Thanks again, sounds like another shameful episode from corporate media hacks. Who could have predicted that cops might only turn the cameras on for things it would be in their interest to record, or that footage showing them in a bad light would mysteriously disappear, or even find its way into the safe of corporation in the middle of a legal battle? FFS... they really take us for mugs, it's so depressing...
on December 7, 2025, 8:53 pm