They were enforcing a court order to uphold Covid laws. I don’t suppose anyone asked them whether they liked the idea of having to do something that would bring out the very reaction you have just displyed.
...
Well, you've made up your mind. Do you think carrying out court orders should be optional for police?
They (and the people giving the orders) clearly have some amount of flexibility when it comes to enforcing them, because we saw that the George Floyd protests were allowed to proceed, and a couple of weeks ago the Glasgow Rangers footie fans had a big unlawful celebration and the police didn't do anything about it. It's worth mentioning that the group attempting to organize the vigil, Reclaim The Streets, had attempted to work with police and was rebuffed at every turn. They went to court to challenge the police interpretation of the laws; the police fought them in court. That was a foolish move, because not only did people attend the vigil despite Reclaim The Streets cancelling the official event, but the police actions have further inflamed tensions to the point that there have been additional protests every night since. And, to demonstrate that they do indeed have some leeway, the police have learned their lesson and largely left the protesters alone.
A cynic might propose that the George Floyd protests and the Glasgow Rangers celebrations were allowed to proceed uninterrupted because BLM protestors and football hooligans will kick your ass and set your police cars on fire if you try and stop them, and that the Sarah Everard vigil was not allowed to proceed because women won't kick your ass or set your police car on fire.
But UK women
should set some police cars on fire, because UK police have been failing them to an immense degree for a long time.
We've talked at some length on this forum about sex grooming gangs that operated on a massive scale in the UK for decades, the Rotherham scandal being the most infamous of them. It was (and still is) hotly argued whether the ethnicity of the offenders was a factor in why these gangs were allowed to operate for so long, but two things are universally agreed on. One is that contempt for the victims (almost all being girls from lower social class) was a factor, and two it was a massive failure of policing.
More recently, the number of prosecutions for r4pe has absolutely nosedived in England and Wales. Since 2016 the number of prosecutions has dropped by
over half. In 5 years the number of prosecutions has dropped by over half. That's a stunning result. The number of reports has risen, but the number of cases referred to prosecutors by police has fallen substantially, and the number of cases prosecutors bring to trial has dropped even more dramatically.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/30/convictions-fall-record-low-england-wales-prosecutionsIn summer of 2020, the UK Victims' Commissioner, Dame Vera Baird, wrote a report in which she stated "we are witnessing the decriminalization of r4pe."
It's not just r4pe prosecutions. Here's a Twitter thread by an anonymous UK lawyer describing how hard it is to get a domestic violence case to trial:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1371030760501747712.htmlAfter Sarah Everard disappeared, UK women on Twitter shared their stories about being followed, being groped, being flashed, and having their complaints not investigated, ignored, or laughed at. Perhaps it's the result of a country raised on Benny Hill reruns that minor sexual assault and sexual harassment is viewed by the police as being amusing. These complaints took on an extra significance when it was learned that the man who was arrested had been named in two indecent exposure complaints just last month. Were the complaints taken seriously? Were they even investigated? In England, chances of that seem slim. It will be interesting to find out how the Metropolitan Police handled these complaints against one of their own; it seems like a red flag that could have saved Sarah Everard's life had anyone been paying attention.
While UK police say they lack the manpower and resources to protect women, they do seem to have time and energy to engage in all sorts of virtual signalling activities. Photo sessions with LGBTQ+ activists. Selling merch with Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ organization. Marching in parades, running social media accounts that would compare to anything a Tumblr SJW might come up with. They have even investigated Twitter accounts. In this case,
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/uk-judge-police-probe-transphobic-tweets-unlawful-68984071 police investigated a man for posting a "transphobic" limerick on Twitter; there are others. The weekend before Sarah Everard was abducted, police were driving around a billboard van that had the message "Being Offensive Is An Offence" on the side, along with an LGBT Pride flag. (they later issued a statement clarifying that being offensive is not, in fact, an offense.) It is infuriating that in an environment when prosecution of sexual offenses against women has absolutely cratered compared to even a few years ago, the police can somehow find the time and energy for these inane virtue signalling exercises. Instead of driving around in your little billboard van to falsely tell people that "Being Offensive is an Offence", maybe you should go and work on investigating some actual offenses. Freaking idiots.
To be clear: women in the UK are not saying "Defund the police". Quite the opposite. Women in the UK are asking "why aren't the police protecting us??" And to some degree the answer appears to be that budget cuts have reduced their ability to investigate and prosecute criminals.
-k