The Metropolitan police may have to seek support from other forces because of the pressure that managing protests over the Israel-Hamas conflict has had on the capital’s limited number of officers, the UK’s most senior officer said on Thursday.
Sir Mark Rowley told a meeting that since Hamas’s attacks on Israel on 7 October, successive weekend protests in central London had been policed by 1,000 officers, then 1,500 and then 2,000.
Police made about 70 arrests at the protests and almost 100 more for hate crimes, with anti-Jewish hate crime up 14-fold and anti-Muslim hate crime up threefold on last year, the commissioner told members of the London assembly.
Rowley said the mass protests were creating a “significant stretch” on the force, with no letup and more protests planned.
“I’m deeply concerned about the effect this has on day-to-day local policing and the balance of that effort across London,” he said. “And we are starting to look at at what point we need to look for mutual aid from other forces and change our approach to resourcing this to make it sustainable.”
Rowley has faced criticism over his force’s policing of pro-Palestinian demonstrations. He said his officers were taking a “very well-calibrated and very well-balanced” approach to protests and related incidents.
“There isn’t a sort of perfect solution to something that’s being driven by an international crisis, but the Met police will do everything it can do to reassure and protect Jewish communities. We are doing everything we can to police without fear or favour,” he said.
Susan Hall, a Conservative assembly member who was previously accused of dogwhistle politics when she claimed that Jewish people were “frightened” of the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, said Jewish people in London were “scared stiff” by the protests. “I do tell you, in the real world, they are scared stiff at the moment,” she said.
Rowley replied: “It’s very clear Jewish communities in London are traumatised and upset and sometimes fearful, based on events that happened overseas and the increasing hate crime in London. And that’s an awful place for us to be as a capital city, and we are doing everything we can do to tackle that.”
Rowley said he needed more officers but had 28% less money per head of population for policing than a decade ago. And recruitment issues mean that thousands of Met officers, rather than being on the frontline, were doing jobs that are normally done by civilian staff in other police forces.
Hall suggested the London mayor should help fund more police officers from his £21bn annual budget.
Khan, who also faced questions at the meeting, said the Met had been underfunded by central government and previous Tory mayors, but that his administration was now trying to plug the funding gap, recruiting 1,300 more officers.
He said: “I think the evidence from the last seven years is that we have, from City Hall, given the police more resources than the previous two mayors have given the police, for [one] simple reason – I’m pro-police but also anti-austerity.”
Khan added: “ What doesn’t help is politicians who seek to divide communities, rather than bringing together. And the chutzpah of the member to ask the question the way she did, bearing in mind the responsibility she has for sowing the seeds of division, takes some audacity.”
