Taking a wider view of the Mets' conduct around the protest rather than at the protest itself I have 3 issues:
- Why did the barrister for the Met state at court that the current policy was to assess protests in line with Article 11 of the ECHR (in an attempt to prevent an adverse judgement being made by making the hearing moot) when they have previously publicly stated that demonstrations were unlawful without consideration to this? A cynic might think that they didn't want a finding against them to be made resulting in actions from people previously prevented from protesting or having been arrested for doing so (for being in breach of the Coronavirus regulations). From my perspective it seems that the Met instructed its legal team to do everything they could to not have a judgement either way be made, which is what effectively happened. The picture being painted that the Met won the caught ruling on Friday seems to have been generated as a narrative by somebody, whilst at best it was a draw and at worst for them showed there previously stated policy of all protests being unlawful under the coronavirus regulations to itself be unlawful.
- Why did the Met not engage with the original organisers of the event as seemed to be assumed would be the case by the judge in his ruling:
Taken from
BBC reporter here. The full judgement has not yet been published probably will be tomorrow. Essentially they put the organisers in an impossible position by refusing to communicate about how the event could be done in a Covid safe way with sufficient distancing and stewards as had been discussed with both the local council and neighbourhood policing team who were ordered to cease communicating with the organisers by a senior officer. That the event went ahead in a non Covid safe way could be entirely blamed on this deliberate lack of communication.
- Post the protest event taking place why are senior police officers trying to evade responsibility as in this
Tweet:
When the Met absolutely had the opportunity to engage with the organisers of the event to allow it to go ahead in a safe manner and that the refusal to engage with the organisers directly caused the events in question. To me it looks distinctly like the Met didn't want to allow the protest to go ahead, didn't like the judge's comments do decided to completely ignore them and then seem surprised when a protest went ahead in a non Covid safe manner after having refused to engage with organisers who were endeavouring to make it so.
To me it seems distinctly that a person or persons in the senior leadership at the Met didn't like that there policy since January around policing protests was shown to be on very shaky ground legally and decided that policing this event in a similar way to the anti-lockdown protests that have been going on weekly would be proportionate.
Please don't read this post as anti-police in general, other forces have engaged with protestors to facilitate a protest having seen the judgement if they believed it to be proportionate when balancing ECHR and Covid concerns (e.g. Nottinghamshire and South Wales.) I don't really blame the officers on the ground for carrying out what they thought to be lawful orders using pretty minimal force when compared to other countries. My problem here is with the leadership within the Met setting policy as the strategic commander then making statements defecting blame afterwards.
The anti-police narrative really needs to be seen as something that should be directed towards some fairly awful command decisions not necessarily towards the police sent to actually enforce them. The guidance for rank and file officers has in several forces (and indeed that published by the NPCC and COP) not kept up with the legislation and wrongly interpreted guidance as equivalent to the regulations. Is the individual officer who then enforces the regulations wrongly really at fault, as happened in the Derbyshire case with the two women taking a walk last year?