We are living at a time of unprecedented police repression.

Armoured vehicles rolling through parks, issuing five figure penalties to some bathing

teenagers, while officers on horseback trample young black women unconscious.

Protests, dutifully coordinated with the police, only to be banned with hours to go.

Princesses laying reeds on bandstands where hours later women will be brutalised by colleagues

of the man who murdered the woman they're grieving.

Except that none of this is unprecedented at all.

I'm Rivka Brown, commissioning editor and reporter for Navara Media.

You're listening to Navara FM, where today we're looking at the decades-long war on political

protest waged by the police.

It's a history that may be unfamiliar to a younger generation of leftists, but one

remembered in shocking detail in a new book by documentary maker Morag Livingston and

criminal defence solicitor Matt Foote.

Charged how the police try to suppress protest takes us on a 40-year journey from the

Worrington Messenger printer strike of 1983 all the way up to the present day.

As the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill threatens to officially empower the police

to do what they always have.

Our betrayerly deny the left, our right to protest.

On the way, we see how the police, government, media and judiciary conspire often literally

to terrorise protestors and protect officers.

We see the police lie compulsively and the media power it their lies.

We see labour in opposition do nothing, then empower do everything to expand the police

...