The Metropolitan police continues to press its case against six people who attended the vigil for Sarah Everard in March last year – despite the fact that the high court has already ruled that the force breached the rights of the event organisers, Reclaim These Streets (RTS), and told the Met, when it tried to appeal that ruling this month, that its case was “hopeless”.
At every turn, the force’s behaviour has been the exact opposite of what it should have been. At the vigil itself, as one of RTS’s founders, Jamie Klingler, describes: “They should have handed out tissues. They should have facilitated a safe space for us to grieve.” Instead, they used Covid restrictions self-servingly to try to block the protest, in what would later turn out to be a chilling echo of the murderer’s own violence. When it went ahead anyway, the policing was heavy-handed and disproportionate, and the force has hammered the legal avenues to have the high court ruling reversed since without dignity or humility.
When you read the witness statements of individual officers, they don’t belong in a court of law at all, but on a therapist’s couch. They had to make arrests because they feared that it was turning into an “anti-police protest”. PC Darryl Mayne wrote: “From my own recollection I recall the crowd screaming what I believed to be the following: ‘Go away’, ‘Murderers’, ‘Arrest your own.’” He continued by noting that the crowd shouted: “‘It should be you’ to officers, which caused me to feel distress upon hearing this.” It sounds less like a safety issue than an ego wound.
When anyone is killed by the police, it changes policing for ever, and changes the experience of being a police officer. Whether it was an operational mistake rooted in institutional failure, often racism, or a brutal crime committed by a bad seed, violence corrodes the trust that must be vested in the uniform if it is to have any meaning. It must be profoundly distressing, when your principle is policing by consent, to see that consent undermined. But the police cannot arrest their way out of the distress they’re feeling.
It’s impossible to overstate how damaging it is that a woman on her own, seeing a policeman, would be more likely to feel afraid than reassured. It was catastrophic, in the aftermath of Jean Charles de Menezes’ killing in 2005, that any man of colour carrying a newspaper could justifiably consider himself in danger. It is still hard to fathom the remarks made in the direct aftermath of Everard’s death: advice from the Met to “flag down a bus” if you’re concerned about a lone officer; the police commissioner for North Yorkshire saying that women “first of all need to be streetwise about when they can be arrested and when they can’t”. A breach had occurred in the fabric of a civilised society – we could no longer assume that those empowered to enforce the law could be trusted by law-abiding people. And the nation’s assembled forces’ best answers were to use your noggin and trust bus drivers instead.
There is no alternative emergency service while the police adapt to their new lives in no man’s land, where to trust them is naive, but to obey them is still necessary. This relationship has to be repaired.
It isn’t enough for the Met to announce a “zero-tolerance policy” on bigotry and hatred, after another batch of leaked WhatsApp messages in which officers exchange rape jokes and casually admit their own domestic violence. The force needs to demonstrate that it takes misogyny and racism seriously, in its own ranks and in general. It cannot be brittle and defensive in court, and progressive by press release. It cannot get its own house in order while it continues to wage war on grassroots civic organisers.
The Met’s approach was too often similar to that of the Vatican when allegations of sex offences were first made against priests: circle the wagons, protect the insiders, wait for it to pass. It didn’t just not work: every passing day of it not-working made the grievances keener, until the Catholic church found a way to hear them. The next commissioner must build a better relationship with the public. If a women’s citizen army spontaneously masses (like the Irish Citizen Army of 1913, to “learn the police some manners”), the Met needs to hear it, even if it’s shouting, especially when it’s shouting. How can you show that you’re listening if you won’t acknowledge people’s anger?
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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