They are also asking ministers to strike out protest clauses in the Crime and Policing Bill currently making its way through parliament.
Greenpeace used Freedom of Information requests to find out how many people were arrested between 2012 and March 2025 on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance – an offence under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 that is frequently used by the police to clear protesters from the streets.
Custody
Raj Chada, a partner at the law firm Hodge Jones & Allen, told The Guardian: “There was a massive growth in arrests for public nuisance in the latter days of XR … which were previously arrested for obstruction of the highway, and the vast majority of those cases never went anywhere.”
The offence previously existed only under common law but new legislation gave police powers to arrest and detain protesters and take DNA, fingerprints and photos.
Chada added: “It was a way for police control for demonstrations, because you could put bail conditions more easily on people to prevent them coming into central London.
“You could potentially put people into custody. You would put them on bail for several months, wait until the XR action was over, and then either no-further-action it or charge them with a more minor offence like obstruction of the highway.”
Placards
Tim Crosland, the director of the environmental litigation charity Plan B, said: “The Greenpeace research confirms what we’ve witnessed directly these last few years. Part of the crackdown on civil society is the deliberate inflation of grounds of arrest.
“This is both an intimidation tactic in itself and also unlocks powers of search and seizure under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, enabling the police to seize phones and laptops and to conduct dawn raids on those exercising their democratic rights.”
The findings come as four leading environmental and human rights groups – Amnesty International UK, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Liberty – launch a nationwide advertising campaign to stand up for the right to protest.
The campaign features videos of real protesters on a range of issues holding placards that say ‘I’m protesting in here to avoid arrest out there’.
Suspicion
The protesters appear on digital billboards clustered in popular shopping areas in London, Birmingham and Manchester, given free to the campaign as the prize in Ocean Outdoor’s annual Digital Creative Competition.
Digital special effects by creative agency ‘elvis’ make the protesters appear to be present on the street, like a virtual protest march. They each represent a different cause including disability rights, Gaza, climate change, anti-black racism, plastic pollution and the campaign to keep the NHS public.
Researchers at Greenpeace asked the Metropolitan Police to provide data on arrests and charges for public nuisance offences between 2012 and March 2025.
They found there had been 67 arrests and eight charges for conspiring to cause a public nuisance between 2012 and the end of 2018, compared with 638 arrests and 18 charges since 2019, equating to an almost tenfold increase in arrests. The rate of arrests resulting in charges also dropped from around 12 per cent to below three per cent.
A spokesperson for the Metropolitan police said: “The threshold for arrest is reasonable suspicion that an offence has occurred. The threshold to charge someone is significantly higher.”
These Authors
Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Greenpeace with additional reporting and editing from The Ecologist.