After a 4 week break the felling of mostly healthy Sheffield street trees is to resume on Monday 26th Feb from about 7am, as streets such as Meersbrook Park Road and Chatsworth Road will be flooded with police and SIA security personnel tasked with ejecting any peaceful protestors from the cordoned off zones around trees ear marked for destruction. Therefore as was the case a few weeks ago, the protestors are likely to be even more far outnumbered by SIA security and police then in January.
Having attended tree protest sites such as at Meersbrook Park Road over a number of days this year, there definitely was a growing bad atmosphere brewing as the Arb's increasingly were becoming emboldened by the heavy police presence to become abusive towards protestors and bystanders alike such as swearing, threatening, pushing and shuving and even reports of spitting in the face of protestors.
The full spectrum of establishment propaganda involves mainstream broadcast local media repeating reports of a 'phantom' broken wrists of an SIA security without providing any details. Whilst the only evidence of violence on the day in question is as the above video shows a protestor being punched at least 5 times, including an upper cut to the head. Maybe that is the origins of the 'phantom' broken wrist reporting?
Continuing with threats are a string of council headed legal correspondence sent to prominent campaigners warning of costly court actions against named protestors though without accompanying evidence that matches the allegations made, and the police issuing a statement warning of taking a heavy handed attitude towards protestors in support of SIA security personnel in their use of force against protestors.
A message that has been iterated across local media including the BBC's Toby Foster radio show which featured Assistant Chief Constable David Hartley "Our role here is to be really really independent. So when we look at what is the evidence coming from the scene, we make a judgement and we take all legal advice around that, what is reasonable force, there's an injunction in place. SIA trained security, we work with those routinely. As you will well know in the nighttime economy you have SIA trained staff. They have to be fit and proper and they're trained around their role so we look at that and we make an assessment around is what they're doing reasonable, is it reasonable force within the bounds of the injunction"
Sheffield's peaceful tree protestors are definitely going to have it rough starting Monday 26th of Feb as the establishment has decided that the tree protests will be brought to an abrupt end through use of force. All this whilst the cities Weston Park Museum celebrates 200 years of protests in Sheffield.