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An epic 12-year journey into the brutal and secretive world of Irish Traveler bare-knuckle fighting. This film follows a history of violent feuding between rival clans. An epic 12-year journey into the brutal and secretive world of Irish Traveler bare-knuckle fighting. This film follows a history of violent feuding between rival clans. An epic 12-year journey into the brutal and secretive world of Irish Traveler bare-knuckle fighting. This film follows a history of violent feuding between rival clans.

• James Quinn McDonagh
• Paddy Quinn McDonagh
• Michael Quinn McDonagh
• 15 User reviews
• 36 Critic reviews
• 65 Metascore
• 1 win & 4 nominations

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• john-penfold
• Aug 20, 2011
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• December 9, 2011 (United States)
• United Kingdom
• Official site
• King of the Travellers
• BBC Storyville
• Bord Scannán na hÉireann / The Irish Film Board
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• Dec 11, 2011

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• Runtime 1 hour 37 minutes

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Capturing a Tradition, Blow by Blow

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By Corey Kilgannon

• Nov. 25, 2011

THE big, bald man at the end of the bar extended a huge hand and introduced himself as the filmmaker Ian Palmer and his slighter, gentler-looking companion as the bruising bare-knuckle boxer James Quinn McDonagh.

It was a traveler’s trick, of course. The bald joker was himself the Mighty Quinn, king of the gypsy bare-knucklers in the documentary “Knuckle,” a rib-cracking look at the brutal fistfights long used to settle feuds between clans of Irish travelers — nomadic families that go back centuries in Ireland.

“This is always how the families have sorted things out and stopped larger violence,” said Mr. Quinn McDonagh, 44, who heads a clan of about 200 people, mostly in the Dublin area. “Other people use guns and knives to settle things — we do it through our fists.”

He had cut loose the publicist who coordinated the interview and ordered up pints of beer, so that a proper discussion could be conducted here in this Irish bar in Hell’s Kitchen.

Next to him, Mr. Palmer, who made “Knuckle,” looked as if he knew the drill. After all, he had hung around with Mr. Quinn McDonagh for 12 years to make the film, which opens in select theaters in New York City and Los Angeles on Dec. 9 after an impressive run at festivals, including Sundance, Hot Docs in Toronto, and Irish Film New York (where it was named best film last month). HBO has even aquired the rights to make a series based on the film.

This is hardly the first star turn for traveler culture. The 2007 cable series “The Riches” featured Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver as the leaders of a con-artist traveler family in the United States. “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding,” a British reality series that began last year, chronicles over-the-top nuptials there. And who can forget Mickey O’Neil, the Irish traveler bare-knuckle boxer played by Brad Pitt in Guy Ritchie’s 2000 film “Snatch”?

“Knuckle” is fueled by the personality of this big man, who is undefeated in fighting for his family name against the Joyce and Nevin clans.

Never mind that the three clans themselves are interrelated with, as the film puts it, “brothers and cousins fighting brothers and cousins.” One family member in “Knuckle” points to the absurdity of the self-perpetuating feuds and fights: “At least wars are about something.”

The feud in the film was supposedly started by a torched tinker’s cart at a horse fair, and renewed in 1992 by a deadly fight outside a pub, for which Mr. Quinn McDonagh’s brother Patty served prison time for manslaughter.

In the film, Mr. Quinn McDonagh is derided as Baldy James by rival clan members who send taunting videotaped challenges, a modern wrinkle on this centuries-old tradition.

“The fights help settle a score, but then the next tape arrives and everyone gets stirred up again,” Mr. Quinn McDonagh said in the interview.

As a referee scolds two boxers in the film, “It’s what you say on the videos that keeps the fights going.”

As it happened, videotape helped open the door for Mr. Palmer. In 1997, he videotaped a Quinn McDonagh wedding and the family then invited him to shoot Mr. Quinn McDonagh fighting a Joyce. Mr. Palmer followed a triumphant Mr. Quinn McDonagh, 20,000 Irish pounds in his bloody hand from side wagers, rushing back to “a giant fan gathering” at a pub in Dundalk, Mr. Palmer recalled.

“It was like a medieval knight coming back from a tournament,” Mr. Palmer said. “An amazing, huge world had just opened up to me, the most amazing thing I’ve ever had the chance to film. I remember calling a friend and saying, ‘I really have to find a way to make a film about this.’ ”

He did find it, by hanging around the feuding families for the next decade. It started as a bit of a tradeoff, he said, with the Quinn McDonaghs giving him access to the fights and Mr. Palmer giving them some footage. The travelers had already been taping their own fights and either selling the footage in streets and pubs, or editing it into “threat tapes.” “In a way, they were already documenting themselves,” the director said.

Mr. Palmer grew up middle class and well educated in the Dublin suburbs and like many Irish “settled” people, he knew travelers from seeing them solicit work at the door, women asking for old clothes to mend and sell, and men offering their tinsmithing skills to fix garden tools and sharpen knives.

During his first few years on the project, Mr. Palmer, who had tried a screenwriting career in Los Angeles with little success, also shot two shorter, nonboxing documentaries for Irish national television, on the Quinn McDonaghs and traveler activity. But since the bare-knuckle fights were sporadic, it became clear that a fight film would take years to complete.

Each time the call would come, Mr. Palmer would pile in a crowded car and head to a remote country lane, the precise location a secret to prevent the authorities from showing up. Often there were a series of fights, lasting hours. There were no clocks, no rounds, and of course, no gloves — just shirtless men pummeling each other until one gives up.

“I was following something completely unpredictable,” said Mr. Palmer, who shot roughly 200 hours of footage and changed video formats six times to keep up with changing technology. He held a day job in the family business running trade shows, but always stored a camera in his desk.

“If the fights were more frequent, I could have finished more quickly, but I would not have captured them changing over time,” he said.

Through the years, Mr. Quinn McDonagh repeatedly declares he’s retiring, only to begin training again after the next taunting tape arrives. Then there is his brother Michael, who broods over a lost fight for a decade.

Will “Knuckle” affect the feuds? “I don’t expect the film to change what is hundreds of years of tradition,” Mr. Palmer said.

To Mr. Quinn McDonagh, the film had had a calming effect — for now. “These feuds change like the weather,” he said. “Anything can trigger anything.”

Anyway, calm never lasts in a traveler’s life, Mr. Quinn McDonagh said, finishing his pint. He recently moved his family to Wales after their home in Dublin was burned down by gangsters seeking one of his relatives. He said that his younger son, Huey, 19, is taken with bare-knuckle fighting, and that he has reluctantly agreed to train him.

“I don’t approve, but I can’t stop him,” Mr. Quinn McDonagh said. “It’s in the blood. It’s in the heart. I hope he doesn’t do it, but if he does, I want him to be prepared.”

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‘Knuckle’ is a documentary about bare-knuckle gypsy fights

Knuckle is a documentary about bare-knuckle gypsy fights. For many of you, the people like myself, everything I write after this sentence will be unnecessary and at best, skimmed. I understand.  The short version is, I think I lost a tooth and grew a third ball.  Now for the actual review. Come for the gratuitous Snatch references, stay for the reasoned analysis.

Who knew Snatch was so historically accurate?  In fact, if anything, it under sold how much da Poikeys loike boxing each ovvas in makeshift rings wid a loose grasp of rules.  In Knuckle , documentary filmmaker Ian Palmer spent 12 years following members of The Travellers, a nomadic ethnic group in England and Ireland organized into prideful clans (all distant cousins, of course) who frequently challenge each other to clan-vs.-clan backyard brawls through taunting videos in impenetrable gaelic patois (helpfully subtitled), and bet big money on the outcomes.  Farbeit from me to dislike a film about fat gypsies knocking each others’ teeth out in parking lots, but it could’ve been better.

Palmer’s central character is James (right), a dead ringer for Snatch ‘s Gorgeous George and pride of a Traveller clan called the Quinn McDonaghs.  A thoughtful ex-Dublin city boxing champ, James is often called upon to fight the best of his distant cousins, the Joyces, with whom the Quinn McDonaghs have been feuding for the past 20 or 50 years, depending on who you ask.  Seeing James beat the tar out of a lumpy, ginger Joyce everyone calls “Lurch” in a match held in the middle of a dirty country road, combined with the audible gasps of the middle-aged ladies in the audience around me as they watched Lurch dig an entire finger inside his bloody mess of an eye socket within the first 15 minutes of the movie was probably the highlight. If someone takes a film called “things that make old ladies puke” to Sundance, I’ll buy the first ticket.

The clans send each other taunting video tapes like pro-wrestlers, promising that a Jaice will never beat a Quinn McDonagh in a fair foight, on account of they’re all tick loomps a shite dat’ll never amount to bollocks.  Most entertaining of the bunch is Big Joe Joyce (pictured above), a mulleted, flat-nosed psychopath of about 50 or 60 years old who claims to soak his knuckles in gasoline for 20 minutes a day to harden them up.  We see Big Joe fight only once, against another grossly overweight grandfather in the middle of a forest, a fight which Big Joe goes on to lose via disqualification for biting.  It isn’t the only fight that ends this way.  Afterwards, they smoke cigarettes and argue about which clan challenged whom, like always.  It might be dangerous, but being a gypsy looks entertaining as sh_t.

Grateful as you have to be to Palmer for giving us a glimpse into this world that revolves around the results of the latest bare-chested, hairy-backed, sloppy brawl, the focus is off.  The synopsis is a clue: “An outsider in a secretive world, Palmer waited years before he began to learn the reasons for the animosity between the rival clans. Disturbingly raw, yet compulsively engaging, KNUCKLE offers candid access to a rarely seen, brutal world where a cycle of bloody violence seems destined to continue unabated.”

Palmer seems preoccupied with this “cycle of violence”, why the clans fight each other, and trying to find roots for their grudges, which almost always seem to stem from someone being too drunk at a wedding and taking an “unfair” beating from rival clan members.  My Italian uncles were always feuding too, but the reasons were always byzantine and ultimately pointless.  Family feuds are like that.  It’s also a bit ponderous, since the answer to why they fight seems fairly obvious.  The fights might have started as legitimate grudge matches, but have clearly become more about the allure of the fights themselves.  The exhilaration of victory, the glory and fame that go to the winner, simple boredom — all are applicable reasons for why it feels cathartic for guys to kick the sh_t out of each other, and are well covered in Fight Club .  By the end, Palmer even admits to feeling guilty when he realizes he’s making his film as much for the thrill he gets watching the fights as for honest exploration of the phenomenon.

He shouldn’t feel so conflicted.  The question of why one clan/team/participant feels compelled to prove himself “better” than another drives every sport, doesn’t it?  Might as well search for the root of the cycle of violence in the NFL.  The participants enjoy doing it and the spectators enjoy watching it.  The question isn’t why they fight, but why they can’t just hug each other afterward, instead of trying to maintain the grudge match charade.  It’s a strange phenomenon, but watching the Travellers talk themselves in circles doesn’t make it any clearer.  One thing I wish they’d knocked out was a little editing.

Meanwhile, I’m left with a million other questions about The Travellers.  For instance, where they hell are they getting the 20 to 60 thousand pounds they’re betting on these fights?  The only job they show James doing is removing a wooden post, which he spends about 30 seconds on before backing into it with his car and going off to smoke cigarettes with the other guys.  How often do they change camps, and why?  Does being nomadic just mean moving to a new trailer park every couple of years?  And most importantly, D’YA LOIKE DAGS?

Bottom line: worth watching, but should’ve been better.

10 great films about Gypsies and Travellers

Jonas Carpignano’s The Ciambra, about a young boy growing up in an Italian Romani community, is one of the rare films about the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community that avoids stereotypes of criminality or mysticism. Here are 10 other films and TV shows that honestly show the vibrant culture of the GRT community.

12 June 2018

By  Christina Newland

Jonas Carpignano ’s new film  The Ciambra  is a neorealist fable about a young boy growing up in the Italian region of Calabria, part of a secluded neighbourhood of Romani people. In a nation where highly publicised hate crimes against Gypsies and Travellers have been relatively recent, The Ciambra looks at the mistrust with which the GRT (Gypsy, Roma and Traveller) community regards the rest of society. As the young protagonist Pio’s grandfather tells him: “It’s us against the world.”

When it comes to depictions of the GRT community in cinema, the feeling can be pretty similar. Travellers frequently find themselves stuck between invisibility or ridicule, and as in real life, misunderstandings about them abound. Romani people are stateless, but have been living for generations in Europe and Great Britain; Irish Travellers are Celtic (‘Pavee’) in origin – all suffer endemic poverty, social exclusion and open discrimination.

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In some ways, it might be easier to write a list of films wholly ignorant of the travelling communities they portray – in the UK , for example, the obnoxious ‘reality television’ series and films that turn travellers into punchlines or employ racial epithets. Still, some films and filmmakers have sought to counter the popular narratives of their people as criminals or mystics. Their work has run the gamut from abstract fiction to harrowing documentary; they have depicted Eastern European slums and modern travellers’ camps in Essex.

Some of the filmmakers showcased below offer honest and diverse portrayals of their own Gypsy communities; all of them attempt to purge centuries of collective myth-making that obscure a vibrant culture.

Sky West and Crooked (1966)

Director: John Mills

Sir John Mills ’ pastoral drama  Sky West and Crooked  is an open-minded portrayal of the travelling community in rural Britain. Its central focus is an oddball romance between Brydie ( Hayley Mills ), a troubled West Country teenager, and Roibin ( Ian McShane ), a broodingly handsome young man from a nearby travellers’ site.

Examining small-town prejudice and siding firmly with its two outsiders, Mills’ film intelligently portrays the mistrust between the settled community and the travellers and underlines how foundational fear of the unknown is when it comes to racism. Kids under the age of 10 parrot that they’re “scared of gyppos”, clearly never having interacted with anyone outside their country village. With poignant empathy and a smattering of real Romani words, Mills’ film attempts to bridge the gap between communities in a heartening way. Considering this was made in the 1960s, it’s shocking how few British films since have come with such a progressive perspective.

I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967)

Director: Aleksandar Petrovic

Aleksandar Petrovic’s  I Even Met Happy Gypsies  has the distinction of being one of the earliest internationally released features to be made in the Romani language. Because of the tendency of nomadic people to pass down culture orally, it’s a language that has long struggled to be recognised and written into the annals of linguistic history.

Soundtracked by genuine Gypsy melodies and unafraid of depicting the shocking poverty of isolated traveller sites around what was then Yugoslavia,  Petrovic ’s story is one of small-time dramas and family machinations, filmed with a heightened black and white realism that gives it a stylised documentary feel. The subject matter, too, is ultimately fitting – ritualised courtship, elopements, domestic strife and a girl seeking to escape the cruelty of a domineering stepfather – all feel deeply relevant to the close-knit, family-oriented Traveller community.

Where Do We Go from Here? (1969)

Director: Philip Donnellan

This  short documentary  comes in at just around the 60-minute mark, but its activist intentions are as vital today as they were almost a half-century ago when they were filmed. This BBC doc attempts to shed light on the enigmatic lifestyles of British Travellers, particularly at a time when more traditional nomadic habits were being displaced by an increasingly industrialised nation and pressure to find a fixed abode.

Director  Philip Donnellan  was a documentary filmmaker for the BBC for decades, making dozens of films on the struggles of the working class and with a particular interest in GRT issues. He allows generous time in his film for insightful interviews with his subjects, many of whom still maintain prominent family names in contemporary English Traveller society. At a moment in the 20th century when questions about alternative ways of living were becoming increasingly germane, this film turns a fresh eye to the ethnically nomadic people who had been populating Britain for hundreds of years.

Angelo My Love (1983)

Director: Robert Duvall

Robert Duvall ’s overlooked  feature  stars a young New Yorker that the director had a chance encounter with on the street. The boy’s street-smart manner belied his age, and Duvall was intrigued to learn that the kid – Angelo Evans – came from a cloistered enclave of Romani people.

The loose narrative of the film focuses on a stolen family heirloom, but this is a thin premise for a vérité romp through the chaos of the real Angelo’s life, featuring actual friends and family along the way. His rough-and-tumble and often comical interactions – not to mention his light hustling – are captured with a pseudo-documentary style. Swirling around old-fashioned values of the community – family pride, masculine honour and the like – Duvall makes a surprisingly ethnographic character study out of his collection of on screen incidents.

Time of the Gypsies (1988)

Director: Emir Kusturica

As Serbia’s arthouse director du jour,  Emir Kusturica  has dealt glancingly with the Romani community in Eastern Europe for many years. Often, this is in the mode of magical realism, which presents certain questions about the superstition around Gypsy people, and the claptrap associations with the mystical attributed to them.

Time of the Gypsies  doesn’t help much on that front: its main character, the bespectacled Perhan, is telekinetic. But what Kusturica lacks in cliché-busting he makes up for in other ways: he is masterful in his tragi-comic sensory overload-style depiction of Traveller life. Squawking chickens, muddy-faced children and noisy encampments seem to overwhelm the characters within, and their response to that impoverishment is what one might expect: denigration, crime and outright begging on the street. The magical powers might be a foolhardy touch, but the rest of the picture is unfortunately accurate.

Latcho Drom (1993)

Director: Tony Gatlif

Tony Gatlif – a prolific European Romani filmmaker who almost exclusively makes films in the Romani language – perfectly married form and content in this  French film . Its title means ‘safe journey’, referring to the fabled ancient migration of Romani people from India into the nations of Europe. The film is a quasi-historical documentary that meets with the far-flung Romani diaspora in various countries and examines their cultural practices and differences.

Brilliantly,  Gatlif  employs no voiceover or interviews for his non-fiction film, using traditional music and dance to evoke the moods and impressions of the people on screen. “Why does your mouth spit on us?” croons a female Gitano singer sorrowfully, bringing back the centuries of discrimination, enforced sterilisation and holocaust brought upon her people. It’s a moment that speaks for itself in reverberative, literal terms.

Pavee Lackeen (2005)

Director: Perry Ogden

Perry Ogden’s gentle  fiction film  is about a real Irish Traveller girl and her family, as they stop on an unfriendly roadside outside Dublin. Ogden underlines the stark contrast between the Maughan family’s trailer and the lights and colours of contemporary urban life in Ireland. Since the governments of both the UK and Ireland regularly fail to allocate legal sites for Travellers to stay in, they are often forced to camp illegally on roadsides and lay-bys.

There’s no judgement in  Ogden ’s gaze, and he charts the frequent misunderstandings between the travelling and settled communities with real sensitivity. The community officers and various bureaucracies may want the family to integrate, but there’s a refusal to see that it may mean the Maughan family would be subsuming their ethnic identity as a result. Yet the safety and continued education of the children in the family is of concern, and so Pavee Lackeen offers a measured look at both sides.

Knuckle (2011)

Director: Ian Palmer

Ian Palmer’s  documentary  was over a decade in the making as he gained intimate access to two Irish Traveller families locked in a series of violent feuds.  James Quinn McDonagh  is the central protagonist of the tale – a bare-knuckle Gypsy champion with a shaved head and solemn features. A rival clan, the Joyces, have a long-held hatred of the McDonaghs over an old brawl that landed one family member in prison and another dead.

Knuckle may not do much to quell stereotypes of Irish Travellers as belonging to a violent, honour-driven society deeply in thrall to old-style masculinity, but Palmer, trusty with a handheld camera, does present the reality of what he sees: engaging, brutal and sometimes bizarrely funny. There’s a real failure to more pressingly get to the heart of what drives these bare-knuckle fights – or to truly understand the families of the men who go through this primitive, trying behaviour repeatedly. As bitter a pill as it is for some to swallow, the iron-clad tradition of bare-knuckle boxing in the Traveller community is unlikely to go away anytime soon.

An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker (2013)

Director: Danis Tanović

A Bosnian festival favourite and winner of the Berlinale Grand Jury Prize,  Danis Tanović ’s upsetting  drama  is played out by a non-professional cast who genuinely experienced the events of the film.

Filmed in an unobtrusive style, the title describes Nazif and his wife Senada, who have two children and live on Nazif’s scrap-dealing income. Because of their ethnicity, the two are refused admittance to their local hospital after Senada suffers a miscarriage. They are then forced to undertake a painfully long journey while Senada grows increasingly desperate and in need of medical care. The shocking endemic racism recalls the cruellest days of America’s Jim Crow era, where the Travellers are turned away by the institutions that they are most in need of.

Peaky Blinders (2013-)

Creator: Steven Knight

Although it took a few seasons to fine tune, this historical gangster drama about a gang of vicious British criminals is one of the most accomplished televisual depictions of Traveller history. With its colourful and nuanced set of central characters born of English Traveller blood, it offers something new – anti-heroic, dashing and complicated protagonists from Gypsy stock.

Set in the Black Country of Birmingham in the early 1920s,  Steven Knight ’s series focuses on the Shelby family, a bunch of strapping Romani-born lads who come up out of nothing to build an organised crime empire. Chief among them is the charismatic and coldly feline Tommy Shelby ( Cillian Murphy , whose angular face and cutting blue eyes are put to excellent use here), a shell-shocked First World War veteran who returns to his decrepit hometown with a desire for more.

Featuring Romani language from the second season onward and input – even supporting roles – for actors and writers from this background, Peaky Blinders has an implicit importance that goes far beyond the machinations of its often extravagant criminal plot twists. When someone speaks disdainfully of Tommy’s background, he sarcastically drawls, “I sell pegs and tell fortunes.” This isn’t your romanticised view of Gypsies. If anything, it’s a reminder that English Travellers have been around for a long time, and even back then they were sick of your stereotypes.

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Travellers 'assumed by police to be criminals rather than victims'

Biased approach to Travellers, Gypsies and Roma may breach equality laws, says report

Police forces routinely presume Traveller communities are more likely to be the perpetrators of crime than its victims, a report by a community campaign group has found.

In a new report based on freedom of information requests and a survey of 43 police forces, the Traveller Movement says police forces may be in breach of the law by employing traveller community liaison officers whose job descriptions focus on enforcement and detection of crime rather than being points of contact for Gypsy, Romany and Irish Traveller people needing the police’s help.

The group called for an investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission after finding what it said was evidence that the police role of Gypsy, Traveller Liaison Officer (GTLOs) may contravene equality laws.

Out of 20 job descriptions for the roles at various forces, 12 mentioned enforcement against unauthorised encampments or place Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities alongside thematic issues such as anti-social behaviour, gangs and youth violence.

Among the job descriptions, which were collected via FoI requests, one for Kent Police stated the liaison officer was: “To act as the single point of contact within the Gypsy Liaison Team ensuring effective liaison with Serious Crime Directorate (SCD) for the policing of organised criminal gangs … collating data, keeping packages up to date and building intelligence profiles on individuals until dissemination as required, in order to support the SCD in building central records on gang criminality.”

The findings, contained in a report titled ‘ Policing by consent: understanding and improving relations between Gypsies, Roma and Irish Travellers ’, are being presented on Friday by the Traveller Movement at a joint event with the National Police Chiefs Council.

Drawing on interviews with 17 police officers and 13 members of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community, it asserts the police are failing to have due regard for their public sector equality duty. Three-quarters of the police officers surveyed identified unconscious bias and/or racist behaviour towards Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (GRT) within their forces.

It quoted one constable as saying: “Somebody made a comment very quietly … ‘dead Gypsy, good Gypsy’… I complained to the sergeant and he [said] … ‘they are not racist, they are just very frustrated’.”

A GTLO was quoted as saying: “That’s something you find a lot of, people using words and phrases which are highly offensive to Travellers … You get that from police officers as well, they’ll use derogatory comments.”

Lord Ouseley, a council member of the Institute for Race Relations, said in the report’s foreword: “Based on the lived experiences presented in this report it is not difficult to see why there is a lack of trust.

“Police officers have reported derogatory and racist language used by colleagues against GRT people being insufficiently dealt with by internal police procedures … It is not right that some people have a more negative experience of public institutions such as the police simply because they belong to a particular ethnic group – this has to change.”

Yvonne MacNamara, the CEO of the Traveller Movement, said the report identified concerning police practice across Britain’s 45 police forces.

“For example, it appears that increased numbers of police officers are deployed to incidents involving Gypsy, Roma and Irish Traveller people compared to other communities,” she said. “This suggests a bias based purely on ethnicity and a differential policing practice. As the primary agents of community cohesion the police have a responsibility to ensure an equitable police service for all.”

Jim Davies, the co-founder of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Police Association (GRTPA), said: “Historically, the relationship between the police and Britain’s Gypsy and Traveller population has been one of enforcer versus criminal with little recognition of Gypsy Traveller ethnicity and little thought given to Gypsies and Travellers as service users. Whilst things are improving, this is still the case in many situations; it’s no surprise that mistrust runs deeply. For everyone’s benefit, this has to change.”

Chief superintendent Claire Nix of Kent police said: “Kent police actively engage with Gypsy and Traveller communities through the work of the Gypsy Liaison Team. Their role is to develop an improved knowledge and understanding of the cultural differences and needs of different communities, to treat people with fairness, dignity and respect, and protect the public from harm.”

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