In October 2022, Jonathan Sriranganathan was arrested while standing on a footpath on publicly owned land outside the Land Forces Weapons Expo at the Convention Centre in South Brisbane. It was a lawful, peaceful protest.
This is the second time Jonno has been arrested at a protest without lawful justification, only for the police to later drop the case.
Here’s Jonno’s post and the link to the article is in the comments.
In October 2022, I was arrested while standing on a footpath on publicly owned land outside the Land Forces Weapons Expo at the Convention Centre in South Brisbane.
(Land Forces is a massive for-profit, government-sponsored event where weapons of war are advertised, bought and sold. Events like Land Forces contribute directly to bloodshed in other parts of the world, and to the mass displacement of refugees due to armed conflict. For two years, Land Forces was the target of significant public protest. The organisers have now stated that they won’t be holding any further weapons expos in Brisbane in future.)
On the morning of Tuesday, 4 October, I was participating in a lawful peaceful protest (notices of intention had been lodged with the police and city council) and was not blocking roads or access to the building. I assume the event organisers decided that having protesters on the public footpath outside the building was a bad look for their business, so based on complaints from the organisers/the Convention Centre management, police violently arrested me using excessive force, dragged me off to the Roma St watchhouse and charged me with trespass and obstructing police.
They also imposed onerous bail conditions that prevented me from going within 500 metres of the Convention Centre in order to prevent my participation in further protests.
As you can imagine, being excluded from such a big chunk of South Brisbane was incredibly inconvenient and a major infringement on my civil liberties. We got the bail conditions lifted at the first court mention, but this is an increasingly common tactic that police are using against many activists to suppress participation in peaceful protest even when the law SUPPOSEDLY protects our right to peaceful assembly.
It was very unusual that I was charged with trespass even though I never made any attempt to enter the building. But of course, if they had charged me with failing to obey a police direction to move on, that would also have been unlawful, because when you are participating in a peaceful assembly on public land, police can’t legally direct you to move on unless you are a threat to public safety, causing serious public disorder or unreasonably infringing upon the rights/freedoms of others. I wasn’t endangering others or blocking anyone else from using the footpath, so there were no grounds to give me a move on order. There certainly weren’t any grounds to arrest me and charge me with trespass.
The trial date was set for Monday, 24 April. My lawyers repeatedly wrote to the QPS asking that they drop the charges, as there was no evidence that I had engaged in trespass, but the police insisted on proceeding to trial. (Note that by dragging it out from October until April, this cost the government a lot more money because there were multiple court appearance dates, pre-trial correspondence etc.)
Then, just last week, QPS FINALLY confirmed they’re dropping both charges against me, after my lawyers had already spent many hours preparing my defense.
So it’s essentially a win, in that I haven’t been found guilty of anything.
But it doesn’t really FEEL like a win, because I still suffered significant pain from having my arms and shoulders twisted during the arrest, I was still dragged through the watchhouse and deprived of my liberty for several hours, and I had the inconvenience of onerous bail conditions and lost time due to multiple court dates.
I’d like to offer my sincere thanks to Fuller and White Solicitors for representing me and advising me on this matter. They’re a lovely bunch of people.
But I shouldn’t have had to go through any of this to begin with.
What we’re seeing here is an example of how Queensland Police intentionally use their powers to suppress and inconvenience protesters, so that the stress and hassle of standing up for our rights deters us from engaging in further activism. Cops know we are legally allowed to protest, but they still don’t like it (it’s almost like most police officers feel that we’re doing something ‘wrong,’ even though protesting against bad government decisions is part of our democratic responsibility as citizens), so they look for any excuse to make our lives more difficult.
They don’t mind when our protests are small and comparatively ineffective – they’ll happily escort us around the CBD on a Saturday morning as long as we follow their prescribed march route. But as soon as we start causing a headache for people in power, they crack down hard.
This is the second time I’ve been arrested at a protest without lawful justification, only for the police to later drop the case. The first occasion was in 2020 when I was arrested in Kangaroo Point, again while standing on a public footpath and participating in a lawful peaceful assembly.
And on a separate occasion in January 2021, I was stopped and fined for running a yellow light on my pushbike while riding home from an Invasion Day rally. Again, Queensland Police had to drop the charge after we pointed out that the officer responsible had been harassing me on social media for almost two years and was clearly prejudiced against me.
Oh and we had the revelations last year that police at the Roma St Watchhouse were recorded calling me “a piece of crap and a halfwit.”
I’m seeing a pattern to all this.
On both occasions in my life when I’ve been arrested, police have been rude and physically violent towards me, imposing harsh bail conditions only to later drop the charges later. Other elected representatives who attend peaceful protests are left alone, but police repeatedly hassle me and threaten to arrest me. On numerous other occasions, police officers have shoved me, threatened me with violence and verbally harassed me.
It’s hard to say for sure, but I think the police’s heavy-handed treatment of me compared to other white politicians who attend protests is partly a result of racism.
If anyone has another logical explanation, I’m all ears. But the reality is that on both occasions when I was arrested, there was no evidence that I’d broken any laws, so why was I targeted while other politicians who attended the same protests were not?
Reflecting on it all, I reckon I would have lasted longer in my role as an elected city councillor if not for the regular police harassment and abuses of power.
So all this makes me wonder:
How can anyone trust the police when they repeatedly arrest people without evidence or justification, but then refuse to even acknowledge their mistakes?
Police have demonstrated a consistent pattern of unlawfully arresting me and targeting me, which reflects a broader trend of police abusing their powers to suppress peaceful protest and criminalise activists. So the Police Minister needs to ask himself: If protesters are routinely being arrested when they aren’t breaking any laws, why should protesters bother trying to follow the law at all? If the police are going to arrest them even when they’re doing nothing wrong, why shouldn’t activists go further?
I was charged with trespass just for standing on a footpath. Looking back on it now, maybe I SHOULD have snuck into the building and climbed on top of a display tank, cos I would have copped the same charge and a similar amount of hassle either way.
By the way, we STILL don’t know what disciplinary action was taken against the police officer who was trolling me on social media for several years and then gave me a bogus traffic fine.
And to anyone asking why I haven’t made ‘official’ complaints about all this poor police behaviour – we’ve tried that many times. But in Queensland, complaints about police abusing their powers are investigated by – you guessed it – OTHER POLICE. So there’s not much point. Police Minister Mark Ryan hasn’t even returned my emails other than the odd template response.
Importantly, we need to understand all this as police doing what police are created to do. Police exist primarily to suppress dissent and protect the interests of big business e.g. weapons manufacturers. They might also do some other stuff on the side – like fining people for speeding or returning stolen bicycles – but their main function in society is to defend the hoarded wealth of the mega-rich, and control the masses to stop us rising up against injustice.
Anyway thank you for reading my long post. For anyone who has trouble understanding why I don’t trust police officers, this is a big part of the explanation… Police have repeatedly arrested me and treated me like shit even when I hadn’t done anything wrong.
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