IN his monthly column, Durham’s Chief Constable Mike Barton discusses the policing of protests, and what members of the public expect from officers of the law

MY assistant chief, Dave Orford has spent the last few weeks planning for the policing of environmental protests at the Bradley Open Cast site at Dipton. Banks Group have plans to extract 500,000 tons of coal from the site. The policing of these events is never straight forward.

It is legitimate for a company to employ people and contribute to the economy; equally it is legitimate for people with concerns about the manner in which the earth’s resources are being depleted to make their peaceful protest.

Albeit Durham has been free from these kind of disputes for some time now, we have ensured our staff are match fit for dealing with these operations by contributing to the policing efforts in other counties, whether that’s the policing of fracking disputes or the dreadful aftermath of the bomb in Manchester.

I entertained the new chief constable of Cleveland this week. I made him pasta with chicken, sun dried tomatoes and tarragon. He was quite impressed, I suspect he thought I could only run to a poached egg and some beans on toast.

Our conversation included my preparation for this column and he reflected that he joined Avon & Somerset Police in 1984. His first impression was that many officers were travelling to police the Miners’ Strike in other parts of the UK and there were sometimes very few police officers left to police Bristol.

This set me reflecting on my own experience. I was a uniformed officer in Blackpool at the start of the Miners’ Strike and worked one tour of duty at Glasson Dock, a small port at the estuary of the River Lune.

Ships were unloading coke imported from a country I never established at the time. As it happened there were no pickets or protests, we were there as a precaution. An expensive precaution.

I had passed my exams to become a detective and join the CID shortly before all this and was delighted to be transferred to Blackpool South CID. Some of my colleagues suggested I keep my uniform pressed and at the ready to be deployed on Miners’ Strike operations outside the county.

I declined this offer and didn’t work any more on the policing of the Miners’ Strike. I’m both glad and relieved I didn’t.

It was a toxic time for police public relations, none more so than in the North-East.

WHEN the last tanker drivers’ fuel dispute happened I was in charge of the logistics of ensuring that emergency services and essential workers could get access to fuel for their vehicles.

There was a senior civil servant in the command room who, at one point, asked me to order tanker drivers to drive through picket lines. I pointed out to him that tanker drivers were invariably owner operators of their wagons and if they chose to drive through or not drive through, it was entirely a matter for them.

Obviously if pickets were breaking the criminal law then we would have dealt with that; but they weren’t.

Many pundits suggest that wars of the future will be fought over scarcer natural resources. There may be new crimes related to such staples as air, water or access to land.

Police officers in handling these issues which understandably excite high emotion have to remain calm and as impartial as they can be.

Many police officers in Durham Constabulary who policed the Miners’ Strike in the 1980s came from families who had been miners for many generations.

Recent research shows that the public will support the police in what they do, provided they think that the police are operating fairly.

Mike Veale and I, mid-spaghetti, came to the same conclusion.