How to introduce ‘keeping each other safe’ at meetings

For all the advice you receive on minimising risks to your group and its members, eventually you have to find a way to put this into practice. Many campaigners are understandably worried that talking about police surveillance will frighten new people way from active participation, so how do you introduce the topic?

Public events

Any gathering that includes people you don’t personally know or are meeting for the first time, even if they are friends-of-friends, should be treated as a public space. For a general gathering, including a training event, you might want to begin with some of the following suggestions rather than launching into dire warnings about the risks of police surveillance.

• Remind everyone that movements for change depend on trust, which takes time to build. Ask people to be mindful of what they share and what they say, and remember this is a public space. The general rule is that if you are in public, do not to say anything you would not want read back to you in court!

• Talk through any agreements your group has reached on managing risks of surveillance to keep each other safe, and remind everyone these are intended to ensure anyone can feel confident about speaking and so increase participation.

• Share any ground rules everyone is expected to respect, including avoiding contributions that might incriminate yourself or others or any topics or decisions that are off limits. Any agreements or plans to break the law should never be shared in public spaces, as they can put you at risk of conspiracy charges (see “What are conspiracy charges?”).

• It is a legal requirement for plain clothes police officers to identify themselves when asked to, and some groups will ask any police officers in the space to identify themselves and leave at the start of a meeting. However, be wary of this as undercover officers (as the spycops scandal has exposed) do not comply and it can lead to a false sense of security for the group.

• You might want to ask if there are any journalists present and for them to identify themselves (and to leave if you do not want them to stay). As with police, this does not guarantee undercover journalists will comply.

Whoever is running a meeting may need to actively intervene to remind people of the ground rules. If speakers are putting others at risk by, for example, making provocative statements about illegality or violence (something that infiltrators have been prone to encourage), restating the reasons why you have these rules in place can help.

Organising meetings

For organising meetings, which are ostensibly private, remind everyone that your group has a plan in place to minimise risks and that this is a collective agreement: if some people ignore risks, they become risks themselves and undermine the trust that are essential for working together.

Whoever is facilitating the meeting may want to start off by reminding people of your group agreements on security (e.g. you may have decided that details will not be written down, or that you will not text or email details of these discussions, and that no information will be shared outside of this group).

If you have gathered to plan protests involving direct action or civil disobedience, you should already have followed the advice to assess potential risks and divide up responsibilities.

You can use this to remind everyone to stick to the focus of the meeting, and not to talk about discussions in other teams or organising spaces. This is also an opportunity to check who is present, and make sure that only the people who need to know about these plans and are involved in the discussion.