In November, Sir Mark Rowley made quite a show of being confused about why Suella Braverman, then Home Secretary, decided to brand some of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London “hate marches”.
“She’s picked two words out the English language and strung them together”, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner told the News Agents podcast. “I don’t know whether she means everybody there or some of the people there.”
Perhaps events this week have cleared things up for him: if his officers feel the need to forcibly remove people from the vicinity of a march because they “are quite openly Jewish”, that’s probably a hate march.
Writing in today’s Sunday Telegraph, Braverman has called for Sir Mark’s resignation. At this point, it is probably overdue.
The remarkable thing about this week’s events is not merely that the Met decided, in the heat of the moment, to turn itself into a uniformed extension of the worst instincts of those demonstrating. That was morally contemptible, but it isn’t new: as I wrote in October, the police seem too often to confuse genuinely upholding public order with merely keeping the peace by pandering to the violent.
Again and again, officers on the ground seem to prefer throwing the weight of the law against easy targets – counter-protesters and now, the “openly Jewish” – instead of recognising that maintaining an open public square means doing precisely the opposite.
No, what really twisted the knife this time was the first, now-deleted statement issued by the Met in response to the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s video. In it Matt Twist, Assistant Commissioner for Operations, deprecated the officer’s language but implied it really was the Jew’s fault when you think about it:
“The fact that those who do this often film themselves while doing so suggests they must know that their presence is provocative, that they’re inviting a response and that they’re increasing the likelihood of an altercation.”
This was, of course, deleted in turn; the later statement described it has having been “an effort to make a point about the policing of protest”.
For an officer on the scene to make a stupid, cowardly, and racist decision is one thing. It would still be a call to action and demand reform, but the Met’s senior leadership could have responded appropriately.
Instead, its instinctive response upon seeing the shocking footage was to try and insinuate that whilst the officer’s language was wrong, his approach to policing was not. Worse still, their original statement was then drafted, reviewed, and published without anybody involved realising how totally inappropriate it was. That suggests a force which has totally lost its way.
So we arrive, once again, at the increasingly baffling question of why the Government doesn’t seize the initiative and comprehensively reform the Metropolitan Police. At this point, it’s hard to think of a single political quarter, left or right, that wouldn’t welcome such a move.
Even a relatively simple change, such as separating the Met’s role as London’s police force from the various national functions currently housed inside it for historical reasons, would be a chance to institute a new organisation, with new leadership and a new culture, whilst ending the current confused lines of accountability created by having the Met answer both to the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London.
Such an overhaul is clearly required. To date, the Government’s efforts on reforming how protests are policed has focused on updating the law. But the law is only as good as the police upholding it, and the Met is not good enough. London, and Jewish Londoners in particular, deserve better.
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Author: Henry Hill
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