UKC

Little bit of deja-vu here...

https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/sarah_everard_vigil+met_police-...

This thread is archived now.  I don't think it's been mentioned on here yet, so for the benefit of anyone who might be interested and didn't spot it, I'll just leave this here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-60707646

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/11/met-police-breached-rights-...

I see rather than accepting the rilong tbe Met are "considering " appealing.  Clearly lots of work for the new Commissior to do with attitude and culture. 

The Met assistant commissioner Louisa Rolfe said: “The Met is mindful that this judgment has potential implications in other circumstances for how a proportionality assessment is to be carried out when considering enforcement action. This may apply beyond policing the pandemic. Even in the context of the regulations that kept us safe during the pandemic, this may have important consequences.

The Met unreservedly endorses the principle that fundamental freedoms, such as those exercised by the claimants in this case, may only be restricted where it is necessary and proportionate for a lawful purpose. Consideration of an appeal is in no way indicative that the Met do not consider such protections to be of the utmost importance. It is, however, incumbent on the Met to ensure that this judgment does not unduly inhibit its ability, and that of police forces across the country, to effectively balance competing rights in a way that is operationally deliverable.”

But yes, appalling attitude and culture, how very dare they appeal. Or something.

'Assistant Commissioner Louisa Rolfe said the Met was "considering the judgment very carefully before deciding whether to appeal".'  (From the BBC report.)

To be fair, I think if a journalist asked immediately after the case whether they would appeal, I suppose that is pretty much the only thing she could have said unless she was already prepared to rule out the possibility completely.  In response to a question it just seems like a euphemism for "don't know yet", which wouldn't strike me as particularly outrageous before she'd had a chance to discuss it with colleagues and the lawyers.

E2A:
It certainly does strike me as ironic though, that they were acting unlawfully when they shot themselves in the foot by forcing the original organisers to walk away and leave the event to go ahead 'spontaneously' without anyone organising it that they could negotiate with.

How do you seriously expect anyone to believe that

Judge them by their illegal deeds not their mealy mouthed press releases.

They have been found to act unlawfully, again. A criminal association if they did not wear uniform.

CB

Err. Bollocks. The police are not the courts or judges. They were in the wrong. Again. You might admit this for once.

Your constant snide sarcasm does you no favours. 

That's a joke presumably? Do none of you actually bother to read what these cases are about before your rush to criticise?

This is a disagreement by the judges on the requirement for the police in  their assessment of permitting protest to take place. It's a judgement which takes place in the backdrop of other landmark changes in public order policing such as the Ziegler judgement and in the context of the far from straightforward and rapid changes to the Coronavirus legislation and its impact on the legality of gatherings.

It's a judgement moreover that disagrees with the previous assessment of the niceties that was conducted at court in the original case between the Met and Reclaim the Streets organisers, so hardly a "shoot from the hip" easily assessed legal position.

"A criminal association if only they didn't wear uniform". Literally laughable.

If you'd given even a hint that you actually had some concept of this issues I might give you some credit but you've objected to the Met even daring to appeal a judgement.

I feel as if I've stepped into satire, but then I remember it's UKC.

Yes. Far better I engage seriously with someone who is suggesting that considering appealing a fairly complex, far reaching and landmark shift in the policing of protest is indicative of an "an appalling attitude and culture".

Not a joke. Dead serious. Not for me so much, as a white adult man, but I would not want to be a woman or black man or political protester of any kind having to deal with a met officer. Hired goons getting off on violence against weaker people.

CB

Can't white adult men be political protestors?

You are aware that those "hired goons" you complain about are the same cops that work neighbourhood, response and other aspects of frontline policing? 

You do know this judgement had nothing to do with the actual "on the ground" policing of the protest, don't you?

Noticeae also the poloce were threatening £10000 fines for the organisers.  Notice any difference here with any other policing of covid?

I assume they have their own legal counsel, rather than letting Constable Savage of the SPG handle all that legal stuff and shit.

Like it or not, that's how the legal system works. Judges make a decision, someone with infinitely more legal nous than you or I think there's grounds to appeal in case unintended consequences could arise from that decision.

Of course I attend political protests, I just have less to fear!

CB

Not really, maybe you have to remind me of an occasion where the f*ckers were choosing a lighter touch...

People like off duty clearly underestimate how the actions of the police fatally undermine the respect their profession once had in society. For the generation of my children, they are largely the enemy, hired goons of the fossil fuel industry (from their POV as environmental protesters), and I can't fault them for their judgement. off duty will not believe me, but I really would like a police that I could trust to protect my rights.

CB

FFS. This legal case is literally about the difficulties of balancing the right to protest against a number of other competing legislative requirements placed on the police. As unbelievable as it may seem every single public order plan to police a protest is based on the balance of protecting the protestors right to protest against the rights of others to go about their lawful business, amongst other competing demands (imposed by legislation directly and indirectly).

But yeah "goons" and "enemy".

FWIW I have a good friend whose job it is to independently investigate the most horrific events - child murder and abuse, killing of partners, that sort of thing. He deals with the police every day, in the most fraught of circumstances - from the PC who discovered the corpse to the chief. If you had ears to hear, his considered and independent opinion of a number of different police services would surprise you. 

Clearly.  But....if you are a police force performing appallingly, with a chief just effectively sacked, appealling something becuase it might be inconvenient for dealing with the pesky public in future really doesnt suggest much organisational awareness or willingness to.change.

FTFY.

If your considered reading of the judgement and conclusion about the reason for the appeals is "it might be inconvenient for dealing with the pesky public" - then I would love to see your rationale for that.

Perhaps you could reference the Zeigler judgement, or maybe discuss the implications of asking police officers to make a proportionality assessment with a judgment regarding, amongst other things, public health risks. Perhaps you could also explain how you would deal with the implications when the police are sued post event for having wrongly assessed a risk they are unqualified to assess. 

And then maybe you could expand on why you consider that the one body charged with the management and facilitation of peaceful protest is demonstrating a lack of organisational awareness and willingness to change, by considering an appeal based on its awareness and understanding of the consequences of this judgement on the management of protests in the future, not to nention the potential consequences of the judgement on the management of protests that have already occurred 

I won't hold my breath though 

I'd rather they made the correct decision, rather than basing everything on the 'optics' of the situation.

In the case of the Met unfortunately it seems to be abundantly clear that they are. 

"Goons" no doubt among many many good people, but the point of the proverb about "one bad apple" that often seems to be missed is that the one bad apple spoils the whole barrel full.

Indeed.  It stems from the futile and apparently unlawful effort to prevent the vigil from happening in the first place which forced the organisers to wash their hands of it and walk away, thereby severing the lines of communication between police and protestors ahead of it inevitably happening anyway and making the situation "on the ground" all the more unpredictable than it otherwise might have been.

Do tell.

Yep. Let's right off 40,000 cops. I particularly want to sack all the female ones. They are definitely misogynist goons.

That's a pretty facile view of what happened. The issue wouldn't have arisen without an ongoing fatal pandemic and legislation forbidding gatherings that was unclear around protest, due to that legislation's rapid and recent changes.

The police, as usual, were in the unenviable position of having to try and tread through a minefield of legislation and public protection obligations.

It's very easy to police with hindsight on what has happened, rather than what might happen.

I've known the guy for 40+ years; he is the antithesis of a politico, avoiding blame culture and is always trying to help organisations learn from experience and avoid future repetitions of mistakes.

In his experience, he found the police to be the most honest to deal with, the most upfront about their mistakes, and the keenest to research and learn. Social service depts are at the other end of the spectrum (and he's an ex social worker himself.)

FWIW when I briefly worked in an assessment centre for naughty boys (deeply troubled kids), the police who routinely had to bring them back after they bunked off were routinely tolerant and understanding. Even the kids acknowledged that, even if it didn't stop them swearing at them at the time.

It's pretty tragic really. I remember one lad in particular who ended up being arrested for pretty horrendous front page news offending, who used to be routinely in the custody block from the age of about 11.

It was clear even then that he liked coming there - we were always dead straight with him, he knew the custody staff and my feeling is that he appreciated the rules, boundaries and routines whilst he was with us, as the rest of his life was utter chaos. 

Edit to add - it's possible the unintended consequence of that was a combination of a motivation to offend as he appreciated his time in custody, as well as no fear of the consequences of his actions as it was almost a reward to end up back in police custody.

Yes, and when the protests are environmental or in any other way anti establishment the police balance them illegally (as determined by the court) against the rights of protesters, and when the protests happen anyway they readily resort to gratuitous violence.

Instead of accepting the judgement and changing their approach they keep looking for ways to continue it.

All of this has nothing to do with the valuable work the police do otherwise, from policing traffic offences to investigating crimes (even if the motivation here also seems highly selective, try getting a result if your bike has been stolen) or acting as social workers (which they should do, and with much increased funding!)

CB

That just makes it seem all the more baffling and tragic then, that the Met have allowed a small handful of proper wrong 'uns (and the rather larger handful of basically decent 'uns willing to turn a blind eye to their dodgy colleagues' behaviour) to so completely trash their reputation.

Would it be a fair statement to say that the Police forces need to find a better way of dealing with their political masters?

It seems to me that there is conflict between the political elements of senior Police management and the actual act/art of policing. This is having the effect of creating resentment to those who face the public on a daily basis.

The other side of the coin perhaps is that some Politicians need to educate themselves on how policing in this country works/ has been established.

That may be so - I know of the son of an Essex scaffolder (conjure up image of cliche here) who left the Met after being ostracised for remonstrating with a 'colleague' who was beating up a drug addict. But I don't see the Sarah Everard affair as anything like that.

In the context, I think it was grossly irresponsible; people (including police officers) could have died after contracting covid ...maybe some have. If they haven't, it's  more luck than judgement. If they have, how would the organisers  respond to facing well-deserved manslaughter charges?

That's pretty depressing.  There's your 'one bad apple' I guess, and a whole load of other apples happy to close ranks around the bad one. 

No parallel at all to the Sarah Everard case?  Not even if the 'colleague' got a bit carried away some other day and beat someone to death?  He'd be a murderer then, and a lot of his colleagues would have turned a blind eye to an actual previous violent crime, committed while on duty no less, and even forced someone out who wasn't prepared to do the same.

"Well deserved manslaughter charges" is pretty weak tea.

The organisers have nothing to do with it, the Met police (unlawfully, as we now know) forced them to wash their hands of the vigil they were organising and walk away beforehand.  They say they had plans to organise a lot of volunteer stewards and to run a somewhat different event to the one that actually happened. I believe them, obviously others won't and we'll never know the truth of that. 

It seems astonishingly naive if the Met thought their forcing the organisers to desist would mean no vigil/protest/whatever would take place.  All their bullying tactics achieved was to change the nature of the event from an organised vigil into much more chaotic and spontaneous event that everybody present knew they had tried and failed to suppress, and one that had no organisers that the Met could identify, communicate, negotiate or liaise with.

That and, y'know, the fact that Sarah Everard was kidnapped (well, 'arrested' actually) and subsequently raped and murdered by a serving Met Police officer probably contributed rather more to the debacle the whole thing descended into than anything the 'Reclaim These Streets' organisers did or didn't do.

Open air events are not grossly irresponsible. They are as close to guaranteed COVID safe as you are likely to get.

Single outdoor infections have been reported. Once. In China. It's always the same case.

I do not recall seeing the report of a cluster (more than one person) outdoor COVID infection ever anywhere in the world. It must have happened. It may have been detected. It may have been reported. But it's probably rare. 

Well done the people who asserted their rights by ignoring police advice to attended the lawful and COVID safe event.

Bit like the garden party at No10 then? 🙄

I suppose it depends if the incident took place at a completely different time, when the understanding around transmission was different, the rule were different and you were responsible for setting the rules.

The right to protest is protected under the European Convention of Human Rights. The right to have garden parties... isn't.

Indeed.  Constable Savage appears to be employed exclusively to "police" UKC forums, given his alacrity to jump in whenever there's the merest whiff of criticism aimed towards Britains finest.  That's what - 32 mins after the OP.  Wonder what his polling interval is.  Every 60 minutes perhaps?

That's unfair.  There's no sensible reason to assume that off-duty is anything other than the off-duty copper he claims to be, expressing a personal opinion just like the rest of us.  A wrong one in this case, imo, but that's allowed.

If you want to see "policing" of what gets said on the UKC forums, forget about the Met Police and try saying something rude about Rockfax.

Or you could actually address the substance of the comments, I suppose.

I might have misread the judgement, but could you highlight where it said that the protest was lawful? 

You're just sealioning now.

I'm not sure what the term for misinterpreting, misunderstanding, misreading, or misrepresenting the judgement is?

I'm torn between stupidity and ignorance.

Perhaps you should focus on the bit where it says the police acted unlawfully, rather than quibbling over details of other people's and expecting a detailed legal analysis before you deign to think a comment worth considering.

You already said above that this latest judgement does not relate to the vigil as it took place on the day.  So which of those 'm' words applies to your asking elsewhere to quote something from it now in support of an opinion expressed about that?  (Not even that really, quibbling over one single word of elsewhere's post.)

Are you asserting that the vigil that took place almost a year ago was illegal btw?  In your opinion, did those who attended it break the law by simply by being there?

Respectfully, you are the one who claimed that daring to appeal this legal judgement indicated a problem with the Met's attitude and culture.

I've gone in to some detail regarding the actual judgement and what it says. I appreciate it's complicated - but that's not really my problem - as I am not the one using it as the basis to launch ill-informed criticisms of the Met.

Building a house on sand and all that...

No. I have said that this judgement has pretty much zero bearing on the actual policing of the event.

He's misrepresenting the judgement if he thinks that it ruled the event lawful. That might come from misreading it, misinterpreting it or misunderstanding it. Or indeed just be deliberate misrepresentation.

And if you want to base criticism or congratulation on the back the judgement, it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to at least demonstrate you understood it. But maybe I'm just picky.

As it stands, in line with the judgement, the gathering was not "lawful". The acts that the Met took in prohibiting it have been ruled to be unlawful.  Perhaps we will see further legal argument regarding lawfulness if Patsy Stevenson appeals her FPN.

And let's not forget the vigil lasted all day and was even attended by Kate Middleton. It only went wrong as darkness fell and a bunch of speeches from a variety of groups began.

No idea. But to me peaceful gatherings are lawful. If they are not I commend those who went even more.

How quickly we forget about Covid. And the fact that they were specifically illegal.

Outdoor events are COVID safe and I am pretty sure that was known at the time.

It seemed pretty obvious to me that elsewhere was expressing a personal opinion that it was lawful, not trying to assert that 'the judgement' had ruled it so.

Or maybe you're just sealioning.

So it was illegal then?  If it wasn't so, then it was "lawful" - that's how it works isn't it?  Things are generally presumed to be lawful (especially things that are enshrined as our rights by various articles of the ECHR) unless they are specifically prohibited by law?

Should Kate Middleton be prosecuted then, for attending an "unlawful" event?

Indeed.  So nearly passed off peacefully didn't it?  Too bad there were no organisers actually running it as an organised event, and no stewards there who might have been able to intervene at that point on Covid security grounds without it all kicking off.  Y'know, on account it not having been one of them who murdered Sarah Everard in the first place.

They were specifically illegal "without reasonable excuse".  Whether exercising the fundamental right to peaceful protest constitutes "reasonable excuse" is rather the nub of the matter isn't it?

It's not as if protests hadn't passed off peacefully under Covid restrictions before.  And it was well understood by March 2021 that those protests had also been almost entirely harmless in terms of Covid infections.

It is strikingly obvious was that the Met decided to declare this specific vigil illegal, as they do not like to be criticized, using Covid regulations as a convenient tool.

An then the poor snowflakes get all whiny when a court declares their balancing of rights illegal.

CB

Strikingly obvious to you, perhaps, and possibly your echo chamber, but not to everyone.

And of course the court.

CB

I think you're extrapolating a bit, tbh. I didn't see where the judges ruled that the Met shifted their interpretation of ill defined rules 'because they don't like to be criticised.' FFS. 

Some of you seem to be missing the following fundamental point...

The police action being ruled as unlawful does not make the gathering lawful (or unlawful).

It would (presumably) need a separate judgement to decide that issue.

If it's unlawful for the police to prevent a thing from happening, it follows logically that the thing must be lawful, no?  The police very much are allowed, albeit not necessarily required, to prevent illegal things from happening.

However the gathering that this judgement (and the previous one) relates to is not necessarily the one that happened.  It's the one that was planned by Reclaim These Streets and subsequently cancelled again when the Met forced them to abandon their plans.

The gathering that then actually happened is the one that it would have to have been a monumental failure of intelligence on the part of the Met to fail to realise was inevitable at that point: a spontaneous event with no formal organisers they could talk to, no stewards, no pa system (a marvellous modern invention that allows speeches to be made with no shouting and no 'bunching up' of a crowd straining to hear) and following their very publicly heavy-handed, unnecessary and futile attempt to stop it even less goodwill from protesters than they might have been able to rely on before.

You're saying that A = !B but in this case A <> !B; A & B are only loosely connected.

The Police can unlawfully stop both lawful and unlawful actions; they may either not be allowed to stop such actions, or they may use an unlawful method. The Police can also lawfully stop both lawful and unlawful actions; their "stop" may have higher "precedence" or they may be correctly stopping an illegal action.

I know this is a load of sophistry, but I really think that you're not logically correct.

Regardless, it's fairly evident that the Met didn't get this one right.

There are two echo chambes on UKC, those that agree with off duty and that the Police are above criticism. And those that don't.

I'll lay my cards on the table, I don't like the Police, guess which chamber I'm in?!

I could regurgitate my own anecdotes for my reasons why, but what's the fooking point?

I'll have to take your word for that; not a scooby.  (I might have a rummage about on wikipedia at some point and try to get my head around that notation.)

Do you have an example?  When would it be unlawful for the police to tell you not to do something or they'll prosecute you, even though the thing they're telling you not to do is in fact illegal and therefore something for which you could legitimately be prosecuted?

Do you know the joke about the economist, the physicist and the mathematician on the train up to Edinburgh? 

Just after they cross the Scottish border the economist looks out of the window and sees a black sheep.  "Ooh look", he says, "the sheep in Scotland are black."

The physicists says "You can't say that, it's only evidence that some of the sheep in Scotland are black."

Without looking up from his newspaper, the mathematician sighs and says "There is at least one sheep in Scotland, at least half of which is black."

Hmmm, tricky; especially if you restrict the Police to "telling you" rather than "stopping you".

Not sure about this but - Police shooting dead an armed burglar without giving verbal warning - that might be judged an unlawful killing.

Another possibility, again unsure about this - when attempting suicide used to be a crime (before 1961), the Police intervening before the attempt might have been unlawful (depending on the nature of the intervention).

You've joined two things there with your "and" - a bit like bad survey questions. It's quite possible that people can agree with off duty but criticise the Police, or disagree with off duty but think the Police are above criticism. So in fact there are 4 possible echo chambers 😁

I've not looked at the judgement but personally, I think off duty is generally correct here. The Police appealing a "popular" decision does not automatically make them scum of the earth. They may accept that the judgement is correct in the actual instance being judged but to ensure operational clarity, they may need clarification of the scope of the judgement.

However, I also don't think the Police are above criticism. No organisation or person is above criticism, but criticism should be justified, not just jumping on the bandwagon because it's the zeitgeist of the moment. 

You've put it much better than I could.

Reading between the lines Maggot has obviously had some run-ins with the police. In the immortal words of Don Whillans, 'That's 'ardley surprisin' '

I what way was the public interest served for the police to interfere with COVID safe assertion of democratic rights?

Who knew it was covid safe? The people paid to assess it didn't, Valance and Whitty... they may have been wrong (in hindsight!) but that was the  guidance at the time.

What would have been the outcry if the guidance had been in place, which it was, but the Met said 'Yeah we got that, but these protestors thought they knew better so we let 'em get on with it.'

FFS, that is not the point. The court found that the Met could not even be bothered to ASSESS whether the initially proposed vigil, socially distanced and with limited participants, was complying with the current covid regulations.

Instead, they banned the vigil and threatened the applicants with 10k fines without weighing the competing goods of the right to protest and public health. Compare and contrast to the parties at No 10 and anti vax demonstrations later. The assumption must be that the initial ban was to avoid public criticism.

This is the behaviour of a right wing, autocratic organization, and not worthy of the police in a democratic state.

The actions that followed are also consistent with such an antidemocratic state of mind, both the pointless violence at the protest, and the lack of disciplinary action against officers harassing demonstrating women on social media / dating sites afterwards (never mind not acting against an officer nicknamed "rapist", so don't give me the shit about colleagues and superiors not knowing what kind of man they were working with day after day).

Judge them by their deeds, not their press releases.....

CB

Everyone following the news. It was a year into the pandemic during which as far as I know not one single outdoor cluster of infections had been reported WORLDWIDE. 

I what way was the public interest served for the police to interfere with COVID safe assertion of democratic rights?

I'm not sure there's a distinction there.  The organisers of the Clapham Common vigil were stopped from going ahead with their plans through the medium of being told that they would have the book thrown at them and each would receive a £10000 fine if they did.

Nah.  That wouldn't be preventing an illegal act, it would be responding to one that had already happened. 

Besides which, going back a bit earlier in Cressida Dick's career, it turns out it wasn't an unlawful killing for the Met Police to shoot dead an unarmed electrician who was innocent of any crime without warning, on the erroneous suspicion that he might be about to commit a suicide bombing.

There's a gestalt thing at work here - we're looking at the same events through two different lenses. Seems to me that Offduty has, in painful detail, explained the complexities of police decision making during an unprecedented event - the pandemic. He might as well have not bothered.

I'll tell you an anecdote that illustrates policing in this country. My daughter, who has grown up here, found herself completely lost in Perpingnan. Based on her 25 years experience she thought 'no problem, there's a policeman, I'll ask him.' He looked at her, completely baffled: 'I'm the police, I can't help you.'

Specifically, there was a remarkable absence of clusters of infections resulting from the protests that had happened the previous summer in response to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and associated with the Black Lives Matter movement more generally.  Protests that went ahead on a large scale in London and every other major city in the UK.

It seems very strange that the Met found themselves apparently so much less able to facilitate a vigil 9 months later in response to a murder committed by one of their own officers.

It was no longer entirely unprecedented by the Spring of 2021, on account of that happening some time after the Summer of 2020.

You already told a rather different anecdote that also illustrates policing in this country above.  About a policeman who ended up leaving the job after being frozen out by fellow officers closing ranks around a colleague that he had naively tried to prevent from dishing out a punishment beating to a junkie.

A little bit upthread you were rolling your eyes a bit and suggesting that perhaps Maggot had 'got on the wrong side' of the police and therefore it would be "ardly surprisin" to have a jaundiced view of them. 

I don't suppose it has occurred to you that actually those who have been on the 'wrong side' of the police might not only be prejudiced on account of being subject to enforcement of the law - they might also be the ones best placed to see the true colours of the occasional 'bad apple'.  And the indifference of the others, who would rather close ranks around a wrong 'un who crosses the line now and again than tolerate someone in their midst who isn't willing to turn a blind eye to that kind of thing.

I think the idea that the senior staff at the Met chose to police a dem differently because it concerned Wayne Couzens would be risible if it wasn't  so serious. Can you imagine a meeting where that sort of decision might be taken - it would be career ending.

We're not getting anywhere here - as you yourself have noted, I recognise that ALL the institutions on which we rely are less than perfect. But when it comes to the police they can become a focus of all sorts of grievances, whether anything to do with them or not.

It's risible that you write as if the word ostensible is not in your vocabulary.

The point is that there the entire organizational culture ensures that there is no need to hold such a meeting . It is just SOP to police protests differently depending on what the issues are. Anyone going against the police, has vaguely lefty ideas,  protests for nuclear disarmament or for the environment? Throw every stick you have in their path. If there is enough time, try to criminalize them and infiltrate them with undercover spies, having stolen the identity of dead children.

Differential policing is ingrained in the Met, it fits in with the institutional racism that they also deny.

No cholera epidemic to be seen here, just thousands of isolated cases.

That's not how organisational cultures work, is it? Similarly, no one decides not to employ the black/female/disabled  job applicant but they still end up under represented. 

I don't want to overstate my case, but decisions about policing a demo are hardly likely to be trivial - do you really think they're organised on Facebook- 'Anyone fancy a bit of a rumble - just bring riot gear, beers afterwards in the Rose and Crown'.

For goodness sake there will been legal advice, overtime payments, budgets to consider, withdrawing resources from other duties where other bad things might happen as a result... Yes I do think there will have been meeting(s) to decide what to do, with agendas and minutes, and contingency planning.

And do you think all the bad decisions in the world have been accurately minuted?

I mention the fact that Sarah Everard was murdered by a Metropolitan Police officer not to hint that they were heavy handed because of that, quite the reverse really - that it was a good reason why they might have tried to be particularly sensitive.

And I'm not speculating as to why they found themselves apparently unable to take the distinctly 'softly softly' approach they took to the Black Lives Matter protests 9 months previously, merely noticing that they did.  (Events one year ago today - protests occuring during a global pandemic were not 'unprecedented'.  They were very much precedented, and recently.)

Had they allowed the vigil to go ahead as organised there would have been a timetable for who was going to make a speech and when, and when any speechmaking would end.  The speakers at an organised event don't just get up on their hind legs spontaneously and start making a speech when they feel like it, it's stage-managed, that's what organisers do.

There would also have been stewards present tasked with enforcing that schedule and who would, with the police on hand but maintaining a discrete distance, have been able to deal with a certain amount of minor disorder around the platform, as happens quite routinely at all manner of demos, protests and other events, without the police having to get 'hands on'.

Off-duty says it's all very easy to know what was inevitable with hindsight.  But dear god, given the circumstances of Sarah Everard's abduction, rape and murder, how little foresight would have been necessary to realise how it quickly things would escalate the second it became necessary for a male police officer to lay hands on a woman at that vigil, and how easily that might descend into a profoundly embarrassing debacle for them in full view of the media?

The Met themselves made that debacle all but inevitable the day before the vigil, when they changed the event from one with organisers who, other than being unwilling to voluntarily cancel it entirely, were keen to cooperate with the police in any way they could to one that went ahead anyway with no organisers at all.

As it happens the photos of a bunch of male Met officers piling on to arrest Patsy Stevenson could not have been more striking.  A film director who wanted to make them look like absolute chumps could scarcely have set the scene any more effectively.

Some time after that it emerged that a number of male Met officers had been 'stalking' Patsy Stevenson online after one of them spotted her on tinder and passed the link around, because they thought it was a laugh.  Some months later again, when Couzens was sentenced the Met issued the official advice that a woman who was worried about being approached by a plain-clothes officer should flag down a passing bus for help.

I'm locking this thread as it's getting out of hand.

Nick