Watching the police: Attack on the G20 Climate Camp (part 2)

So, having looked for (and found) likely candidates for the locations mentioned by oimelnikov, I turned back to the footage of the police attack on Climate Camp in Bishopsgate to see if they were also correct about the units involved.

To the bottom of the screen for the most part is a large bloc of police officers in full blue boilersuit & visored helmet riot duty get up. In addition they mostly seem to be armed with see-through riot shields:

As we can see from the pictures above, this ‘blue bloc’ seems mostly to be a mix of officers wearing helmets marked either “MP TW” or “MP U55”. This would appear to indicate that they are Metropolitan Police divisional officers from the Twickenham sector and members of serial 5 of Territorial Support Group 5.

Towards the top of the screen are mostly officers wearing high visibility jackets over their uniforms, with black riot shields instead of transparent ones:

As the pictures show, their helmets are marked with the “KB” prefix. In addition, some officers wear tabards which also bear the “KB” prefix. This indicates that they are divisional officers from the Barking sector of Barking & Dagenham policing borough. [ETA: After initially identifying ‘KB’ as Barking sector of Barking & Dagenham borough, I subsequently lost the reference for this, so queried the identification. However, I have since found a list of ‘Met Police Subdivision’ identifying codes on the National Archive website, which would seem to be a fairly authoritative source.]

It is also interesting to see in amongst the Barking contingent (from whence, judging by the video footage, some of the most savage baton beatings were given out) a police cameraman and minder (identified by “EG” for ‘Evidence Gathering’ on the dark blue tabard to the right of the picture below):

Whether the video footage shot by EG7 finds its way – unedited – into the public domain, or whether it gets ‘lost’, or else accidentally stored next to a really, really powerful magnet, is a question which only time will answer.

One final thing of note: the video captures what looks like a tactical conflab between senior officer on the ground before they order their troops to attack the Climate Camp:

The officer to the right of that group, wearing the red epaulettes on his shoulders, can apparently later be seen in the video to the rear of the TSG 5 contingent, flanked by three officers each wearing white epaulettes:

Could this be Inspector Giel, commander of TSG 5’s serial 5 (as identified on this TSG command structure diagram, found online here), along with his three sergeants?

So, to wrap up, per the YouTube comments by oimelnikov, there are clearly TSG 5 officers – or certainly those wearing TSG 5’s helmets – on duty at the attack on the Climate Camp. There is a police station with a seemingly large garaging capacity in Clapham at an address near to two roads with ‘Larkhall’ in their name, and a park called Larkhall. So far I have not been able to positively identify any officers bearing TSG 4 insignia, but the address in Catford does lead us to a large police vehicle compound. In addition officers bearing the identifying mark “KB” which denotes that they are based in Twickenham and Barking are clearly visible all from the same policing borough.

ETA:

Someone has forwarded me a link to a photoset on Flickr which shows the KB police contingent (the ones in the hi-vis jackets to the top of the picture) getting stuck in to the hippies. From these photos one can clearly make out some of their warrant numbers: