A still from footage taken at the anti-fees demo appears to show a mounted police officer pulling Christopher Hilliard’s hair

Two more student protesters, brothers Christopher and Andrew Hilliard, have been acquitted of charges of violent disorder relating to the anti-fees demo of 9 December 2010. The unanimous verdicts, which the jury took only two hours to reach, came hot on the heels of similar not-guilty verdicts for three other defendants. This brings the total to 11 acquittals in violent disorder cases relating to that one demo. This high rate of acquittals together with the disproportionate number of hung juries resulting from the protest cases demonstrate that the CPS is failing to prove that students engaged in unlawful violence at the 2010 protests.

Instead, courts are being treated to abundant footage of police violence and intimidation, involving containment, the indiscriminate use of batons and horses charging peaceful, static, kettled demonstrators with nowhere to run.

The Hilliard brothers were accused of pulling a mounted police officer off his horse at the demo. In 2009, Christopher Hilliard had visited parliament as part of an NUS delegation and secured the pledges of many MPs not to increase tuition fees. Much about the Hilliards' case exemplifies the politicised nature of the prosecutions of the student protesters. David Cameron himself risked influencing the outcome of the legal process when he publicly drew attention to the case, insisting that police had been "dragged off horses and beaten". The reality is that young people have not only been denied access to education and jobs through the abolition of the education maintenance allowance and the rise in tuition fees, but they are also being injured, demonised and criminalised when they protest about it.

Much of the Hilliards' defence benefited from a vast amount of footage located by the defendants themselves. The court was shown footage of a mounted officer pulling Christopher Hilliard's hair so hard that Hilliard is forced on to the tips of his toes in the moments before the officer comes off his horse. The defence argued that it was this, along with the officer's failure to follow the normal procedure of tightening the girth on his horse, that led to his unseating. Despite eight police officers alleging they witnessed the four or five seconds during which the officer became unseated, all said they happened to be looking away in the moments leading up to this. The disparity between the mounted officer's version of events and what the footage showed prompted Andrew Hilliard's barrister to tell the jury, he "must think you don't have eyes in your head".

The Hilliards are now investigating the possibility of having criminal proceedings initiated against the police.

What have we learned from the trial? That public order policing today is in a state of deep crisis, from the death of a bystander at the G20 protest in 2009, the serious head injury suffered by a student at the 9 December 2010 demo, to the numerous protesters wrongly charged with violent disorder.

The Hilliard brothers' victory is a victory not only for the acquitted protesters, but also for all those fighting to defend the right to protest. There's no greater feat in court than successfully disputing the word of a police officer, but the student protest cases, along with the recent, but by no means exceptional, spate of allegations of racism and corruption in the Met, are steadily undermining the perception in much of the public's mind that the police are necessarily a trustworthy, peaceful force for good.

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