Very timely!

One of my managerial chain of bosses, ex-bizzy Jim Waddington, has landed some funding for a serious and timely piece of research:

Professor Jim Waddington from SLS has been granted £94,000 by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for his research project entitled “Evaluating police behaviour- using video-clips to examine evaluations of police conduct.” The research will aim to advance academic understanding of how the public perceive and assess the conduct of police. It will investigate different types of police–public encounters and identify those features of which the public approves or disapproves. The project will try and establish what it is about such experiences that leave people with an unflattering impression and equally, what the good practice is of which they approve.

I'd hope that batoning people to death (G20), telling the press a pack of porkie pies (G20), falsely imprisoning peaceful demonstrators ('this is not a riot', chanted seated demonstrators as cops waded violently in - G20), filming and identifying said legal demonstrators (G20), building a database of innocent civilians (ongoing), harassing journalists (Kingsnorth) while ensuring that friendly TV crews are on scene for dramatic armed arrests of 'terrorists' who are then released without charge, making up spurious injury lists (Kingsnorth) removing identity numbers (forever), suborning Plane Stupid protestors, and telling the press and Facebook that violence is relished ('we're up for it' / 'bash some hippies') might get a mention, though some of this doesn't take place on video unless the activists catch it.