...
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.
This past week Sarah Everard's killer was sentenced. Some of the details that came out during the sentencing hearing were extremely upsetting. Not only was he a police officer, he also abducted Everard under the pretense of an arrest. She was walking home, he stopped her claiming she was violating covid restrictions. He handcuffed her and put her in his police vehicle. Witnesses who saw the interaction said they "assumed she must have done something wrong." Afterwards he transferred her from the police car to a rental vehicle, drove her to the woods in Kent,
**** her, strangled her, and tried to burn her body.
There have also been a bunch of infuriating statements given by the Met (the Metropolitan London Police Force) since this became public. They released guidelines for women to follow if you're concerned that the cop arresting you might be a murderer attempting to abduct you. ("Ask probing questions!" "Know your rights!" "Run away!" "Get Help!" "Phone the police!") A police commissioner said on BBC "she shouldn't have submitted to that arrest. We need women to better understand their rights!" As if resisting an arrest from a police officer was ever a viable option for Sarah Everard or any other woman who might find herself in that situation.
The Met and the government have known all of the details of Sarah Everard's murder for months, but have only provided all of these helpful hints for women in the couple of days since this information became public. If this was actually about making women safe, they'd have provided this "advice" much sooner. But it's not, it's about public relations. There's also a lot of performative contrition going on in England right now. "We are so sorry." "We know we have a lot of work to do to rebuild the trust." "We are going to get to the bottom of what went wrong."
We learned that the murderer's colleagues thought so highly of his character that they nicknamed him "the rapist". He and other members of the force were part of a social media group where they exchanged misogynist jokes. We learned that there were indecent exposure complaints regarding the murderer that should have been a red flag to alert the police to what kind of guy their colleague was. But three different police forces over almost 20 years didn't seem to care enough to bother. We learned that the vetting process was more or less a sham.
The Met's commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick, assured Londoners that the murderer is "a bad 'un" who doesn't represent the whole force. But clearly there's institutional rot in the Met as in many other police forces, and clearly there are a whole bunch more "bad 'uns" who gave cover to this guy for a long time.
-k