Looking Back

19 June 2008

He says he walked two hours to the station and that the strange thing is he didn’t see anything. I mean normally you see something – a building, or people, or a street, or something interesting to remark on. But that morning he did not see anything. Only later, thinking back on it did he remember that the people there seemed to put many little things in their windows – pictures of family members in plastic frames, small trinkets and souvenirs, or flowers, or dolls or statues, or those little plastic cats that look back at you.

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“It winds me up. I can’t go nowhere without them following me,” said Michael, 18, after what he said was his fourth stop. “I got back from work and as soon as I got out the van they were just taking photos of me straight away zooming in on all the patterns I’ve got in my hair.”

Strange scenes in this link Ant sent me a while back to a piece on police surveillance-as-systematic harassment in Essex.