A volunteer who helps people at night in Central London today told of the moment she was detained by officers before King Charles' Coronation.
Suzie Melvin was one of three volunteers for Westminster Council’s Night Stars safety scheme held hours before the monarch's crowning - despite their organisation working in partnership with the Metropolitan Police.
"Recalling the moment she and her colleagues were arrested, Ms Melvin said: “We made the decision that because it was quite a quiet night we’d do a final circuit around Soho, which is generally the busiest area, and then we would go home.
“We started walking towards Soho, and Soho Square is always the last area that we would patrol because there are often people waiting for taxis on their own there.
“A large part of our role is trying to keep people safe, particularly towards the end of a night out, so if we see people who are on their own waiting for an Uber, we will offer to wait with them so they can feel safer and they’re not at risk of incurring any crime.
“As we were entering the north side of Soho Square, we were approached by a number of TSG (the Met’s Territorial Support Group) vans and then a large number of officers got out of the vans and approached us and said they were going to stop and search us.
“We were kept separate and the officers looked through our bags, checked our pockets.
“We explained to them who the Night Stars were, showed them emails from Westminster City Council and showed them the Night Stars website, we gave them leaflets which had been printed by Westminster City Council, or hi-visibility vests - which do display the Met Police logo as well, because we are in partnership with the Met Police.”
She added: “We did the best that we could to try and explain who we were to the officers.
"Then they also searched the church we base ourselves out of.
"We were told we were going to be arrested. We were then taken in police vans to Walworth police station where we were held.
“I was interviewed at approximately 1pm the following day and released a little bit after 4pm on Saturday May 6."
She was unsure why the trio were arrested and detained after officers searched their bags and spoke to them.
"I fully accept it was a challenging situation for the police,” she told MPs.
“I was informed by the officer who arrested me that they were specifically looking for the Night Stars and they had been told where we were going to be."
Ms Melvin feared her experience would “dissuade other people from volunteering, if there's a risk that you could be arrested and detained in the course of carrying out your volunteering”.
Stunned Commons Home Affairs Select Committee chairwoman Dame Diana Johnson admitted: "I'm a bit speechless having heard that account of what happened to you and your colleagues."
The revelations came as MPs held a one-off evidence session following arrests, including of anti-monarch campaigners, in the run-up to the royal spectacle.
Republic chief executive Graham Smith said his arrest on Coronation morning was "traumatic” and his group "never had any intention" of disrupting the service.
He held meetings with police in the months before the crowning, outlining how many placards his protest group would bring, what signs would say on them and confirming activists would have amplifiers and megaphones.
"We gave them every piece of information we possibly could,” he insisted.
"We never had any intention of doing anything which even came close to falling outside of the law.”
Mr Smith believed Republic’s protest was “diminished” by the arrest of six of its members.
They were held under suspicion of going equipped to "lock-on" - a measure protesters use to make it harder for police to move them - but later released without charge.
A senior Metropolitan Police officer denied the force was put under political pressure to protect "the look" of the Coronation by cracking down on protesters.
Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist told MPs: "I felt under no pressure politically - I felt pressure to deliver a safe and secure operation, but that was because of the fact that it was a once-in-a-lifetime event for so many people and there would be hundreds of thousands of people in London to celebrate it and also, and importantly, this was the biggest protection operation we have ever run.
"There were 312 protected people that we managed to get in and out of the Abbey and across the footprint in about 90 minutes, so the stakes were enormously high, so I absolutely felt pressure to deliver a safe and secure operation. But that wasn't political pressure."
Mr Twist told the committee officers had faced "the most challenging, fast-moving and complex policing picture we've ever encountered for national celebration".
He said: "Officers have to make a difficult judgment at the time, in the moment, based on what they are faced with and based on the information they have.
"They have to form reasonable grounds for an arrest and, as the committee will know, reasonable grounds is actually quite a low threshold and is much lower than where you would need grounds to meet the evidential test to charge and a public interest test to charge.”
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