The Clapham vigil could have been a moment for police to show solidarity with women (Photo by JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP) (Photo by JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images)
It would have been a peaceful vigil. Women laid flowers for Sarah Everard, lit candles, held placards: “She was walking home,” read one. “We will not stop until women are safe,” another said. The Duchess of Cambridge was there, quietly adding a bouquet to the tributes. It would have been a peaceful vigil, and then it wasn’t anymore. Now the defining image of the protest on Clapham Common isn’t the flowers or the candles or the placards. It’s of a young woman, pinned to the ground by male police officers, eyes wide over her mask.
It is hard to imagine how this could look worse. The man charged with abducting and murdering Everard is a serving police officer; and the Independent Office for Police Conduct is now investigating the Met over its handling of various matters relating to the case. All week we women had been asking ourselves why we don’t feel safe in public spaces, why we so rarely report assaults to the police and why we get so little justice when we do.
Here, in one picture, was the bleakest possible answer: women don’t feel safe because the police are against us, just as they were against the vigil even taking place. Earlier on Saturday, the organisers of Reclaim These Streets had formally cancelled the gathering, saying that the Met “would not engage with our suggestions to help ensure that a legal, Covid-secure vigil could take place”. A representative of the police said: “We take no joy in this event being cancelled, but it is the right thing to do given the real and present threat of Covid-19.”
But the “real and present threat of Covid-19” had not seemed to apply to last summer’s Black Lives Matter rallies, which were policed with an admirably light touch (so light that in Bristol, protesters were able to topple the hated statue of slaver Edward Colston and chuck it in the harbour while the police looked on). And a week ago, in Glasgow, police seemed to take a much less aggressive approach to Rangers fans, who packed their bodies into a heaving mass of virus-sharing celebration.
We know that outside events are low-risk for Covid transmission. So an outside event where women quietly mourned together at a safe two-metre distance from each other is not a plausible superspreader event. Put these things together, and there’s an ugly undertone that when male-dominated crowds occupy public spaces, they’re exercising an essential human right; but when women do it, they do not.
This suspicion only grows when you consider the immediate police reactions to Everard’s disappearance, which included telling women in Clapham to “be careful going out alone”, an echo of the advice given in Yorkshire when the police were failing to capture Peter Sutcliffe. Women were outraged then, just as they are today: why should their freedom be curtailed because of a violent man’s actions?
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SubscribeIf there were eyewitness reports of a black man being a stalker/ killer, I wonder if the author think it would “be appropriate to warn [black] men that those acting suspiciously in the area will be challenged by police.” I sincerely hope she would not.
Should suspicious men be challenged? Absolutely. I think police should have very broad latitude to follow their instincts; those instincts are honed by years of experience in spotting dirtbags before the rest of us. We are foolish to hamstring them with woke policies that make us all less safe. But “challenging” 50% of the population is is a waste of police resources.
“Women are being policed” for mens’ bad behavior? No. Women are being told to be careful. Because women are being targeted. If someone was targeting people in wheelchairs, it would make sense to warn the disabled to be extra careful. Same if men were being targeted. Or Labour supporters. Or barristers. Again, let’s not let woke aphorisms distort reality.
No one is curtailing your freedom; you’re free to walk down as many dark alleys as you like. But if bad things happen in that dark alley, it’s not the fault of the police officer who “didn’t protect you.” Telling women to be careful isn’t “policing their behavior”, it’s encouraging them to be cognizant of the risks of the real world.
Rent a mob show up anywhere they can cause trouble but how many of the “genuine grieving women wishing to show solidarity” would have done so for a vigil in memory of all the young women abused, raped and even murdered in Northern towns? (Not that I can recall any taking place which rather proves the point).
The answer is pretty much none of them. This was mainly about the perpetrators with an unhealthy dose of “it’s important because she was like me” thrown in.
Edit. Sorry this was meant to be a general comment, not a specific reply to Brian.
I agree. The only people protesting about the systematic rape and torture of working class girls in the north were called ‘far right’. Disgusting double standards and to em shows the truly despicable nature of woke activists.
I wonder why barristers would be targeted? Lol.
It’s in Shakespeare: “First let’s kill all the lawyers.” No-one asked _him_ why.
I am sorry to hear that.
Although I am white, several years ago when I was a teenager I was regularly getting stopped by police on my way back home from my friends house. It is shameful if they now only target black people like yourself.
It’s a shame Sarah Everard could not defend herself with a firearm. She might be alive today had she had that right.
As it is, her attacker could be assured that she was not armed.
Legal firearms are not the problem. It’s the illegal ones and you already have an illegal firearm problem in the UK. A rapidly rising one, in fact. Disarming the people who don’t cause gun crime seems to penalize only law abiding people like Sarah.
And then, of course there are always knives but I doubt Sarah would have been saved by carrying a knife.
thanks but seeing the stats we are just better off without guns! Your system has failed if you can’t walk the streets safely! – the answer is not to arm the population but to fix the underlying problem.
You’re not without guns, you’re just without legal guns. As Sarah Everard’s case indicates, you can’t walk the streets safely. Had she been able to defend herself, she’d likely be alive today. Preventing women like Everard from defending themselves because someone else may commit a crime with an illegal gun doesn’t make much sense. The underlying problem is murder. Making a lot of progress fixing it, are you?
I would not suggest arming the population although it seems to work in Switzerland.
This case IS a fact. Not to mention the fact that probably wouldn’t make either Sarah Everard’s family or many posters here agree with you.
How many people killed in knife attacks could be alive today had they had the right to self defense?
Sarah is a fact. An inconvenient one, maybe, but a fact nonetheless.
Exceptions are facts. If people could walk the streets safely, Sarah would be alive.
Excellently argued throughout.
I want to be able to defend myself. I am pro legal guns. Those who advocate against guns need to think through the whole story because they are stuck in the “guns are bad” narrative.
A fact, yes, but not a statistic.
‘The underlying problem is murder. Making a lot of progress fixing it, are you?’
Actually, yes we are.
Crime in the UK has generally been falling.
We’re not particularly keen on wide public ownership of guns in the UK.
We’re not even keen on the police having them, at least not routinely.
We tend to see them as the problem itself, not the solution to the very problem they too often create.
For example, on a very quick look on the internet: Murders with firearm per million population: UK 0.236 vs USA 32.57 (138 times more).
So guns would make us safer in the UK how exactly?
Would Sarah Everard have been safer had she been able to defend herself?
No. In this particular case she was – allegedly – dealing with a rogue diplomatic protection officer who would be trained to disarm and incapacitate an armed and dangerous male assassin at close quarters. Short of holding a cocked & loaded pistol at the ready and spinning around on the pavement like a gun fighter in a saloon bar shoot out, you’re not going to see and hit/deter a potential assailant in the street. Even for a pepper spray the same logic holds true. Walking in pairs is a better strategy imo. Or cycling/driving.
Well, we will never know, will we, since Sarah didn’t have any self defense. In any case, there are certainly people who have used firearms to defend their lives. A recent case in the US was an 86 year old woman who would definitely have been as dead as Sarah had she not had a firearm.
I think you overrate the lethality of ‘PC ‘Blobby. He can’t even kill himself it seems.
Nobody has actually said this was a random killing. Right at the start of this being reported I read something which made me think it was not random.
Who knows what would have happened had she been armed? It’s a moot point.
Had she been armed she might have stood a chance. As it is she was a sitting duck. Hardly moot in my view.
Please give it a rest. Have you never heard the saying “if you live by the sword you die by the sword”
You are advocating a gunfight would be a good idea.
And if you don’t have a “sword” we find your body the next day.
Had Sarah had a “sword” she might be alive today. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
As you can see the ratio of people walking about on the street safely and without problem far exceeds.
gun crime is a problem (a real problem – not “might be” a problem)
No, is not! I think Brits were taught to be submissive, this is why there are so many crimes and so many innocent people die.
Unlikely! unlike the rest of europe only royalty they approved of stayed in power. They fought to get all the rights taken for granted! Brits are not submissive at all!
Up until about 1964 you didn’t need a licence for a shot gun in the UK.
In fact if needed one quickly you could hire one from Moss Bros, in Covent Garden.
Was the country devastated by people loosing off sawn off shotguns at each other?
No, off course not, even though we had also sadly, just given up hanging as well.
In Britain only the criminals and selected police have guns.
You are not keen on arms in UK because you don’t believe in freedom. This is why thousands of girls were raped by “Asian gangs” and British men are hiding somewhere.
I stand with Ben Shapiro who said that Many Jews were exterminated during WWII because they could not defend themselves. I believe that law abiding citizens should have the right to own guns!
Never trust the govern to the extent that you disarm yourselves!
Well, here is a little statistic that the media won’t tell you. The single highest gun ownership per head of population in the world, is Alaska, and yet they’ve had no mass shootings, and a low murder rate from guns..
Yes, I find that to illuminate the issue in a nutshell. Alaska also has an exceptionally low illegal gun ownership rate. Some have problems understanding who is committing gun crime in the US. It isn’t legal gun owners.
That’s even better than the Land of William Tell!
In 1979 in Shaffhausen I passed a smart Peugeot saloon and noticed a submachine gun on the rear seat. Isolated lapse by its trained owner, I hope. Between its challenging geography and its lavishly armed militia, Switzerland would be one tough country to occupy.
How low?
Interesting, but given Alaska’s sIze in relation to its population density and lack of urbanisation maybe less so.
Also what type of gun ownership are we talking about here in rural Alaska when the vast proportion of gun deaths in the US are attributed to smaller firearms?
Switzerland is perhaps the best run, and happiest country in the world in my experience.
It should be a beacon for all, including the wretchedly incompetent and woefully conceited UK.
Yes, although enforced arms bearing goes too far for me. I’m satisfied with having the right as it should be a choice.
it would be interesting to see what Switzerland would do with a flood of illegal firearms and a subsequent elevated gun crime rate. Would it disarm the law abiding leaving people like Sarah defenseless like the UK or would it refuse to address illegal gun ownership like the US? A third path could be leave the legally owned gun owners alone and throw the book at anyone caught with an illegal firearm whether in the commission of a crime or not.
The Swiss would undoubtedly go for your third option.
They are a very pragmatic people and have already had one major gun incident back in 2004 in Zug that left 14 dead.
Yes it’s interesting that they did not respond to Zug by disarming legal gun owners. Very pragmatic indeed!
Here in North America ‘already’ and ‘2004’ make a peculiar-sounding pair.
And that’s even for someone in Toronto, called by Peter Ustinov ‘New York run by the Swiss.’
(Back then, 1973 or so, it was 40 homicides a year for 2m people. Last year it was 71 for 3m, mostly gun murders. We’re all scared crapless it will all of a sudden be 200, and more or less expect it.)
You are missing the point!
You are talking about guns owned by criminals. We advocate for guns for law abiding people.
Criminals will always have a way of getting guns, but disarming good citizens is foolish to say the least.
Switzerland is no panacea of peaceful gun possession, with the highest rates of gun violence in Europe!
The American, Thomas Sowell, who favours gun ownership, has said that burglary increased in the UK when gun licenses were introduced for the simple reason that burglars knew they would not be shot. I haven’t checked the figures, but ownership is one thing, walking around with a gun is another.
I suspect the big factor in this case was the government lockdown rules. She was breaking the rules with the visit and when accused of breaking them she complied with the arrest without putting up a fight. Nobody wants to discuss this. The government killed her.
Good luck with that. In the early nineties a then elderly Russian women was telling me about the high level of street crime in Moscow. She remembered fondly how one could safely walk the streets at any time of the night when Stalin was in charge. The solution can be worse than the problem
I guess it went in a smooth gradient. In Kharkhov in Brezhnev times, you’d carry a screwdriver, according to my acquaintance.
This is a proof for what? That Stalinism was great? Do you realize that Russians are so brainwashed that even now, 50% of them regard genocidal criminal Stalin a good guy that they regret? I hope you don’t want the UK to sink to that level.
Stalin’s track record was tens of millions of deaths.
Proof that the price of safety may be lost liberty.
Annette, you post in so many places that it is hard to keep up with you!
You say: ‘Disarming the people who don’t cause gun crime seems to penalize only law abiding people like Sarah.’
Are you sure? Murders with firearm per million population: UK 0.236 vs USA 32.57 (138 times more).
That’s murders, note, not gun deaths in general.
Yes, I’m sure. Unless you believe that Sarah Everard could not own a gun without becoming a criminal it’s patently obvious that disarming the people who don’t cause gun crime penalizes law abiding citizens like her.
Your conflating safety with gun ownership… How about look at american culture of violence (its rape culture, its glorification of gun ownership. You have a violent culture with or without guns – Although violent incidents occur in other western countries, they are not as frequent… what is it about americans and use of violence…
Maybe, but we don’t know what happened. It’s possible the guy used his position as a policeman to abduct her. Was she supposed to gun a policeman down in the street?
Does carrying a firearm around with you genuinely protect you, or does it create a criminal ‘arms race’? The amount of gun deaths in the USA would suggest more guns, legal or otherwise, are not the answer.
You’re correct, we don’t know all the details. but people have certainly saved their own lives through legal firearm ownership.
Carrying a legally owned firearm, may indeed protect you. An arms race isn’t required when one has the right to bear arms. In my view, it’s highly unlikely that Sarah Everard would immediately commit gun crime were she to have the legal right to self defense with a firearm, which is why legal gun ownership is an important right.
It’s true that the very most cunning fiend is unstoppable, and could spirit the king’s daughter away from her mother’s funeral with no one noticing, though she carried a pistol. You make a real and depressing point even if it doesn’t cover ordinary situations.
Just like expressways with no speed limits, public drinking, and universal suffrage, you can institute it as soon as the people are ready. Otherwise it’s reckless.
Surely you don’t need a handgun to walk the streets. Look at the stats for murder by a stranger. Very low yet no media states them. We are mostly murdered by people we know.Women could carry tasers, illegal or not. The problem for women will always be that whatever you carry to defend yourself could be taken from you and used against you. Then you’re in an even worse situation.
We have no idea yet how it was that she’d safely crossed the common and was taken on a suburban street at that time of night.
It is always going to be the individual’s responsibility to assess the risks of various actions they take. Until we know more about her abduction and murder we cannot make any judgements. It is impossible for there to be a police officer accompanying each of us wherever we go.
If a handgun can be taken away from you so can a taser. But two points 1) in the US an attacker can never be sure (unless they live somewhere like Chicago where legal gun restrictions are very tight while illegal guns flood the streets) their intended victim isn’t armed so they are always taking a chance. And 2) faced with an armed intended victim, some attackers may decide to choose another victim. These are not judgements they are facts.
In the UK, an attacker can be sure their intended victim does not have a firearm.
I don’t personally need a handgun to walk the streets but then I chose where I live specifically because while legal gun ownership is very high, gun crime is almost non existent (and other reasons, good schools, nice climate, etc) . Maybe the fact that there are many people with legal guns here is not a deterrent to people seeking to commit gun crime with an illegal handgun but if you were an attacker wouldn’t you like to be pretty sure that your victim wasn’t armed?
I’m unwilling to blame Sarah no matter what the circumstances.
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If she was able to carry a gun it’s more than likely her attacker would also have a gun.
Well, that makes no sense unless you believe that legal gun ownership turns everyone into an attacker. In my view, Sarah would not have suddenly turned into a murderer simply because she owned a gun and her attacker would have been one without a gun. A murderer is a murderer. You’re stuck on ideology.
“that makes no sense” Actually it makes every sense.! If person A can have a gun So can person B.
It is shameful that a real problem – police racism – gets bundled together with imaginary issues like this latest woke diatribe.
In the middle of a pandemic, with standing orders prohibiting group gatherings, a bunch of woke feminists decide that they are above the law and will thus exercise their “right” to gather anyways. Police performs its public-supported duty of enforcing the law, with clear forewarning to disperse or face arrest. The wokes decide to play martyr because they are being “brutalized”. All they manage to achieve is embarrass themselves, as the world witness their pitiful try to twist into peaceful vs violent an issue that is clearly about legal vs illegal.
To compound their moral misery, they add the suggestion that police’s duty to protect females is somehow to be above their duty to protect the rest of the population… So yeah, what about the gender equality? Only when suitable, right? What a sad lot.
A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the U.S. criminal justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution, or sentencing. Crime and suspect behaviour, not race, determine most police actions.https://medium.com/@arkhanguelski/evidence-based-examination-of-systemic-police-bias-in-the-united-states-c2bdce0e1f4c
Thanks. I read that with interest.
I buy it for the most part but not entirely. I really don’t think a woman who murders faces the same consequences (intensity of suspicion, thoroughness of investigation, likelihood of arrest, length of sentence) as a man who murders, on average.
Once charged she probably, in my unlearned but slowly considered view, faces an equally energetic prosecution, and occasionally she may be punished just as severely, or (rarely) more severely.
(I have real-life cases in mind, of course, but also a TV show which may somewhat colourfully give an idea of the spirit of the thing which I’m getting at. The wonderful actress Naomi Watts uttered a memorable line in a Netflix show where she played a criminally wicked character: “If I robbed a bank,” she avowed to her interlocutor, having privately in mind her many awful misdeeds, “they’d probably hold the door open for me on the way out.”)
But if such differences exist and a study failed to find them despite the best efforts of the investigators, I’d understand that. It’d be mildly shocking if it were otherwise.
——
If anyone involved in such matters wants to agree or disagree, I’d welcome that. Their views would be worth something; mine are of little value.
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Dislike it though I may, I’m not bitter about this. The police deal with situations far more trying and immeasurably more urgent than almost all the rest of us. Not to put too fine a point on it, they clean up our stinking garbage for insufficient pay. They are commanded, ordinarily, and so are the courts, by principles distilled over a number of lifetimes, and I am thankful for that.
I concur with the David Bowie who (Stationtostation) enjoined us to “drink to the men who protect you and I / Oh, drink, drink, raise your glass, raise your glass high.”
I likewise agree with Jane Austen and the 18th century that prejudice is on the whole a salutary thing. (By that word they of course meant judgment.) It’s pride that wrecks things more often than what we call judgment.
Pride is the enemy, and it’s what generated this news story.
Women murdering and incarceration rates – I would agree with, they probably don’t get as long! About 90% of all perpetrators are men, and ∼81% of their victims are men. Moreover, 78% of the victims of female offenders are also men… the majority of crimes are interpersonal conflict
But if a woman does a crime i’m happy to see her locked up for the same amount of time. Such an individual is dangerous.
the issue you have then is with sentencing but not police!
It’s a simple matter of triumphalism. Once a given party has won, they often can’t resist making a show of it.
Triumphalism is a fancy word, mind you: the regular phrase is rubbing their faces in it.
And nothing will ever change this. I mean, not as long as instincts, hormones, and neurotransmitters are still what we’re all about.
Mr. Musk, have you thought of a technological solution to this yet, with your brain plug-ins? Hurry up, will you?
It’s not a race thing; if it were, police would be going around harassing non-white women all the time. Police are overwhelmingly suspicious of young men because young men commit an overwhelming proportion of crime. I guess that’s the cross young men will always have to bear. If I were the parent of a young man I would just counsel him to understand and accept this basic reality, to try to minimize any reason the police might have for targeting him (not dressing like a stereotypical thug, for example, not driving recklessly, not behaving loudly or belligerently in public, not being drunk or high in public, etc.) and to go along with whatever over-vigilant nonsense the police might subject him to no matter how unjustified he thinks it is, to not argue or resist. You can always sue them later, but if they shoot you dead or bash your skull in, there’s no recourse.
I live in Canada and all our police – urban, regional/provincial, and the RCMP – have always had guns. It’s just an accepted reality like in the US, so it’s hard sometimes to understand Europeans who are so nervous at the thought of their police forces being armed. In both countries, there’s always been a lot of firearms and a very high rate of firearm ownership (people are often surprised to learn that about Canada, but in rural and small-town Canada, almost everyone has always had shotguns and rifles, not just for hunting but for protecting oneself and livestock from wildlife), so it would have made no sense to forbid police forces to be armed. It would have just made them sitting ducks.
Good point. I cannot understand people who actively want people like Sarah Everard to have no means of defense of her own life.
I think the UK and European peoples were disarmed generally many hundreds of years ago to enable the easy oppression and slavery of the people by the feudal nobels and monarchys.
The US founding fathers in their, I believe, wisdom decided that the enforced helplessness of the common people was not going to be a thing for their new republic.
To avoid the eternal problem of the physically strong ruling over the weaker members in a society there are only 2 possible solutions I can see 1) many more police patrols 2) allow people to better defend themselves.
The only reason that neither of these things are being done is our rulers and the wealthy don’t care as they have acces to personnel security and because the original reason for disarming the population is still valid today.
Your conflating the situation. Defense is not certain! The gun can be used against her. Leaving her in a worse scenario. remembering she was up against a trained individual. The gun was not an asset.
I have no horse in this race as an American. However, I did have an experience some years ago which perhaps one must be a woman to understand completely.
I was at an all women’s retreat held in the Michigan woods, sleeping in tents and enjoying nature. Some of us ventured out at midnight to look at the stars and one said, can you imagine doing this anywhere else without looking over your shoulder?
As a city girl, I had not even realized that I was always unconsciously aware of that as I walked in even the safest areas. To be “safe” you had to have your street smarts on alert everywhere you went otherwise the question was, why were you walking in Central Park at all. I offer this only as an example of what life is like for a lot of us.
As a NYC native myself, I completely see your point. I spent a lot of time in Central Park although never at night. Of course today, it doesn’t have to be night for there to be a problem. While I was never bothered in NYC I did have an unpleasant experience in Italy once, in a very public place, no less.
And while I miss NYC and so so many things about it, I am very happy to live in a low crime place now. It took me years to stop frantically locking everything up.
The preception that the requirment to “have your street smarts on alert” to be safe only applies to women is false. I hope when you were in the woods you had your nature smarts on alert. Despite what the modern world would like to believe no-one is ever 100% safe anywhere, its not possible. Realising that you aren’t and taking appropriate precautions is the only sensible course of action.
That isn’t to say I’m not cognisent of the additional dangers and harasment women face.
The reality is that men are in far more danger than women, as statistically we are more than twice as likely to be attacked. Anecdotally, nearly every man I know has been attacked by a drunken stranger at least once, where as hardly any women have. Feminists think we stroll down the street at night carefree, when in reality I had to develop street awareness from being about seven years old.
Please. Every woman i know has been attacked while out in the world just living her life. Usually it’s because we refused the advances of some idiot.
I wish more women carried a weapon that could take an eye. That we’d men would be marked for their behavior.
“Please” what?! How the hell’s your comment in any way relevant to JD’s objectively correct and balanced post? In keeping with the theme of balance, I’ve known a fair few women down the years but none I’ve got to know at least reasonably well have ever been attacked – at least as far as I’m aware, and this has been sufficiently well that I’m sure it would have come up.
As the overwhelming majority of men will never rape and – I’m sure – find it abhorrent, increasing not decreasing the number of them on the streets at night would in all likelihood reduce the incidence of this vile crime. I’d explain why but wouldn’t want to lay myself open to accusations of ‘mansplaining’ or whatever the stupid term is.
I’ve been shot at by violent men in exactly one place on this planet: my own home state of Michigan, in the northern most woods on the shore of Lake Superior.
I was camping with my husband. The men were redneck thugs. We were terrified and my husband told me I could run through the woods faster than he could drive the trail so it might come to that.
The reason: men love violence.
It is not safe anywhere.
‘The reason: men love violence.’
Including your husband?
I do not know the statistics for the USA, but in the UK most women are murdered by somebody they know. Only 6% are murdered on the streets. Facts matter and not unsupported and offensive opinions.
Including men!
No one should fell threatened because of their colour, choice clothing etc its just not acceptable in this day and age, ‘no name’ says get used to it and he sounds scared, I say change the institutionalised police ideas and misunderstandings. If ever there was a case to allow a vigil this was it and now it will be remembered as a riot on the common which is so wrong. This was a gathering of women to show solidarity and respect for this young lady murdered in cold blood and maybe wonder if this might happen to them one day. We the male population need to stand by our wives, sisters, daughters, friends and the lady in the street and ensure that if we hear or see anyone threatening a women we step in to assist not take over just support. The police need to show a little more understanding and it could change our perception of them, women are entitled to feel protected by the police and supported by the rest of us and the same goes for any non white person as well.
This was a bunch of lawbreakers showing that they felt entitled enough to play havoc with society AND the law if they were angry enough. The same applies to Black Lives Matter, muslim groups, far-right groups.
The “right to protest in public” should be removed and protests should only be allowed on private property, in agreement with the owners, and causing no additional inconvenience to others going about their lawful business.
And those who point out that some changes were only achieved by protests need to remember that mobs can also rule by “peaceful protest”.
There are four imaginable types of people. They say, respectively:
‘I will restrain myself, and others must too.’
‘I will restrain myself, but others needn’t’
‘I won’t restrain myself, but others must’
‘I won’t restrain myself, and others needn’t.’
Three of those kinds, there’s some good in them. Only the third kind is no good.
“that everyone in the majority should bend society so that the minority doesn’t feel like a minority. That is silly, most sensible people can see that, surely?”
It’s probably impossible, certainly complex and many (naive) efforts to achieve it seem to produce practical problems and even some injustice. But I don’t think it’s silly to try. You’re being too nice about it.
Yes that is silly. I am a US government scientist and I think race and gender are poor qualities on which to base promotions for these jobs. But that is happenning in a very overt and conspicuous way. It is true that there has been and still is some unfair descrimination based on those qualities. But it’s complex. It might be the case, for example, that very smart black applicants prefer careers that pay more and simply aren’t available to be government scientists. I think that is, in fact, the truth. When you look at some of those new hires, they haven’t published nearly enough.
On the other hand, I am a white man and so far I have not lost out. Moreover, probably more awareness is a good thing. It’s a just a shame people always have to push an idea to absurdity. The reason of course is that the individual people implementing these changes in policy derive personal power from them.
What a rare awareness you’ve attained. If this rightly shows you, you are a complete human being with what I would call complete ethics and a complete mind.
(I’m not one myself, but luckily you don’t have to be one to recognize one.)
In my view you now have the right to do what you can to spread your wholeness outward and impress it on others until they partake of it and emulate it. I might call it a duty if it weren’t an imposition for me to do so.
Good luck in that endeavour if you choose to undertake it. I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t, since I expect it would be thankless work, and it won’t pay.
I wish you the best in any case.
Do you think part of then problem is that the Police cannot attract enough high calibre people and those that are, go into the various specialised units? Hearts and Minds has been British military strategy since Malay Conflict started in 1948 which is why so many are taught languages. Stopping people without cause is waste of resources and alienates the honest. When I suggested that a detective working in Bradford might learn Urdu she ws amazed. I suggested 6 months at SOAS or Army School of Languages and 6 months in Pakistan.
..and as a white Brit, I completely agree with you. We are all “innocent” until proven otherwise, but we should not be targeted because of colour, race, or suspicion.
As the article makes clear, to me at least, there is no objection to issuing warnings to women: the problem is when that is where police communication stops. The silence that follows is a, “men, you just carry on as normal,” message. It’s almost as if women have no good reason the be on the streets, while men are, understandably, on the streets to go to work and, in happier times, to the pub or to a football match.
I’m white, but have been stopped on several occasions when I matched a description of a perp and was unfortunate to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In my area of Canada, immigrants and “people of colour” are generally university profs, engineers, and doctors. The typical perp is white, skinny, with bad teeth from his drug habit so the police preferentially stop white males. Sadly, in other areas of Canada, crime is very much more rampant in “communities of colour” (I don’t know the best terminology now, thus the quotes). So POC are the ones who get stopped. I feel their pain, but police can’t go around stopping random little old ladies to make tings “fair and equitable”. It’s a waste of limited resources.
Thanks.
I can understand that. I’m a white guy, so it’s a perspective I can’t ever really have. But I get why that would make you nervous, and probably for good reason. Trusting instincts needs to be tempered with understanding when those instincts are likely the result of prejudice and bias.
My only question is this: were you there? From footage I saw on the Sky News website, right at the front of the crowd, goading the police, was a group of (white) men, as there had been at the front of Extinction Rebellion and BLM protests. By blindly accepting what we’re being told is to become an accessory to anarchy. How about not making this about you and leaving this poor woman’s family, friends and colleagues to grieve this horrific murder?
You expect Sarah to do research?
I saw the same thing.
So why didn’t they arrest those white men, instead of attacking a 5’2″” woman.
Answer: The men were too much risk to them personally. The woman was not. As I said above, they have become cowards.
The writer complains that only 1/3 of the police are women! Then says men are a physical threat to women, and does not see the contradiction! I guess she feels a 999 call should ask ‘is the perp a man or woman’ so they know which police to send out, as I can tell you, women are not capable of fighting tough men except in rare cases. Unarmed women on the beat are one big reason the modern police are so useless. They are forced to travel in packs because this, cutting their effectiveness in half. May as well think that a woman on the force has to have another cop along to protect her, and really reduces the effectiveness of the force.
In USA the woman officer is alone, but has her pistol and thus is a very effective cop.
(edited for spelling, I cannot spell and this spelling program see3ms to be temperamental)
What woman (or man for that matter) would take a job at any amount of money as an unarmed cop in Chicago or Newark?
The truth will out:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/15/rank-file-officers-claim-sarah-everard-vigil-infiltrated-members/
We are in the middle of a pandemic. Gatherings are banned. The police breaks up an illegal gathering. What do you expect – that the police should help you break the law? Because your political views are so right it puts you above the law?
If football crowds and BLM were treated with ‘light touch’ it was surely because the alternative was serious violence. Understandable, but in hindsight it might have been better to have suppressed BLM with force, to avoid setting the precedent that you are invoking here.
The police even JOINED IN the BLM protests, so at that point in time they lost all credibility.
Yes indeed all that “taking a knee” (in English: grovelling) outside Downing St, by Mr Plod & his chums.
How embarrassing can it get?
I don’t think Sgt Dixon of Dock Green would have abased himself in such a manner!
Took the knee and ran away. Not only an embarrassment but a disgrace.
And to think the ‘running away’ was within yards of the Cenotaph.
Not to mention Kneel Starmer!
When Kneel Starmer’s toe curling photo was published, I was instantly reminded of that brilliant line by the chief baddie in Superman 2. The alien gang bust into the White House and command the President to kneel. An aide kneels to protect the President. The baddie sneers: “You are not the President. No one who commands so many could kneel so quickly”.
Yes, I think the police may oppress peaceful women & anti-Covid demos, and tolerate rowdy football fans, for practical/operational reasons, but the kneeling to BLM and also the tolerance for Extinction Rebellion seemed more ideological/political than operational.
The modern view of policing appears to be that the police don’t actually enforce the law. Unless you’re hurting someone’s feefees on Twitter of course.
So why did Cressida d**k go on a rally at the height of Covid?
When was that?
So this gathering should have been organised to be violent so the police would stand back? H’mm
Not necessarily violent. The organisers should just have arranged for a ring of Jamaican gentlemen, all down on one knee, to circle the vigil.
If you had a legal right to peaceful assembly as in the US, it could not be banned. According to SCOTUS, you don’t dispense with civil rights due to a pandemic.
Annette would it sastify you if you were to learn that the below represents the right to peaceful assembly and protest in the UK?
‘…there are often compelling reasons to limit the time, place or manner of communication…. I may not give speeches in the middle of the street without a permit, because the free flow of traffic takes priority… How important is it to speak at this particular time and place and in this particular manner, and how pressing are the countervailing interests of the state? …. Freedom of expression is certainly not absolute in [this country]’
What I am asking about is the actual affirmative law, similar to the first amendment in the US. An affirmative right to assembly. Speech is different from assembly and you may or may not have an affirmative civil right to that enshrined in law. I don’t see the word assembly in your quote which doesn’t appear to be from an actual written law. Is it? Freedom of expression or speech is not the same thing as assembly.
You seem verklempt over my asking this question. It isn’t a challenge I am simply interested in understanding whether there is or is not a right in the UK to peaceful assembly. So far, no one has been able to point to such a law which should be the starting point of the issue. Absent such a right enshrined in law, it’s left to courts and police to make individual determinations. So you have BLM and Extinction rebellion assemblies permitted even during a pandemic while Sarah Everard’s and lockdown assemblies not permitted with the pandemic being the excuse. And this will be the case absent an affirmative right.
Annette, if it’s any help, I think the difficulty arises in the way the question is posed. This is largely due to the different historic circumstances of the two countries.
In the USA, a citizen may readily say: ‘Look, my right is here in the Constitution, nth Amendment.’
In the UK, citizens very seldom ask what the constitution says. The reason is that, in cases such as we are looking at, the principle is ‘I have the right do anything that the law does not forbid.’
Or to put it another way, we in the UK less often look for a right in a document (Constitution). We have the right already, unless it is modified by a law. In other words, we don’t usually need to point to a page in a document, although I understand that this is what you are hoping for.
So I return to an extract on English law which I have recently posted in answer to you, but this time with italics:
‘These freedoms [of assembly and association] include taking part in public meetings, processions and demonstrations… Freedom to assemble means that there is no law forbidding people to assemble. If a number of people choose to go to the same place at the same time this is not unlawful, provided that they keep within the limits of the law.’
The limits of the law are effectively respecting other citizen’s rights: not blocking the streets and roads, not causing disorder or violence, and so on. I should imagine similar considerations apply to safely managing assemblies and protests in the USA.
The question is posed as do you have an affirmative civil right to assembly enshrined in law in the UK. I have mentioned several times that the US does so I am aware there is a difference. In the US, freedom to assemble most definitely does not mean only as long as there is no law forbidding it. Neither does freedom of religion for example, you could not suddenly make Catholicism illegal in the US, the bill of rights would prevent that from happening.
It appears that the UK does not have an affirmative such right. Which means that it is a matter left to police and courts. Your “rights” or what you think of as your rights, are subject to the whims of police and courts. And they may be removed absent court adjudication, Or they may not be. It’s down to whim. and that may be fine with many in the UK although from the conversation here it appears that whim is a problem for many. If one group has the “right” to assembly merely because it hasn’t been removed by the police (which means there is no such right) and another doesn’t, do you see the problem?
Freedom to assemble based only on there not being a law that prohibits it means you have no affirmative civil right to assembly. An affirmative right is very different to having a “right” until lawmakers decide to remove it in some cases and not others.
Annette, I always enjoy your posts, but google ‘Reading the Riot Act’ for your answer, basically it is an act from the 1700s Britain which means once an official reads the act to an assembly they have one hour to disperse or be committing a felony, which was a death sentence max back then. This is not used now, but could be.
The Riot Act, which read outlaws assembly, and any official can read it. ““Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God Save the King!””
UK has a hundred laws against speech allowed for any one which allows it! Do not believe the post below. UK is ‘Common Law’ which means law is based on judge’s rulings historically, and this means there is a tolerance of free speech, but NO RIGHT TO IT.
Yes I understand your point. The Riot Act is indicative of why the US has a bill of rights today. And I very much enjoy your informed posts as well. And the reason this makes a difference in my view is that if you are not starting any conversation or divisive issue from the point of basic rights that are not subject to whim, then you have little to stand on to complain when courts and police make varying decisions as to speech or assembly or any other “right”.
The right to petition in the US bill of rights, for example is based on the historical occurrence that King George III refused to accept a petition from the first continental congress. It was subject to his whim, IOW. The US bill of rights affirms that the right to petition one’s government is NOT subject to whim.
Two problems with the US approach:
Interesting post.
But even SCOTUS cannot alter the constitution on a whim. In the case of abortion, SCOTUS did not find a right to abortion in the constitution, it decided the case under the due process clause, specifically under the 14th amendments right to personal privacy. So they were not making fresh law so much as adjudicating that the law as it was, contravened the 14th amendment. So whether you agree or disagree with it, it all went back to the constitution, in that you have a right to privacy in your medical decisions. Abortion isn’t a human right in the US and the laws governing it vary by state. The right to personal privacy is.
In the same vein, SCOTUS has never found the right to gay marriage in the US Constitution. That case was also decided under the due process and equal protection clauses.
The purpose of a constitution isn’t to solve problems. Under such an understanding you wind up with something akin to the EU constitution, thousands of pages of law that is far above the purpose of a constitution. I subscribe to the original definition of a constitution as a “body of fundamental principles or established precedents according to which a state or other organization is acknowledged to be governed”. Fundamental principles and legislation are two different things but the second must flow from or recognize and abide by the first.
IOW, it’s the foundational document. It isn’t meant to take the place of legislation, which changes over the decades while the principles enumerated in the constitution and bill of rights remain constant. To put it simply, it explains why no body of lawmakers could make Islam or Catholicism illegal in the US. Because even if some such lawmaking body wanted to, it contravenes one of our fundamental principles, freedom of religion. It also allows 50 sovereign states which have varying laws to all agree on the fundamental principles. This also explains why the US constitution doesn’t change much while laws do. The fundamental principles really don’t change.
It may be technically true that the Supreme Court did not make fresh law, but simply deemed? discovered? that the law had always been like that. But I think that is sophistry at best, substantially false at worst. Before the relevant judgements, abortion and gay marriage were illegal. I take it you will agree that none of the people who wrote the constitution would have wanted or written or dreamed of that their words could be interpreted in such a way. The laws being struck down would have been universally seen as constitutional, right up until the moment where the Supreme Court decided that they were not. When, and by whom was it introduced in US law that you had a right to abortion or gay marriage?
If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck it is a duck. What this quacks like is a group of judges entrusted with a right to decide the law is anything they think it ought to be, taking guidance by a vague statement of principles and infinite use of their imagination. It is not necessarily a bad system, and the professionalism and sense of reponsibility of the judges has done wonders in maintaining respect for the legitimacy of their decisions and their authority, even while they took all the most contentious and far-reaching political decisions over a couple of generations. But out of respect for the truth I think you have to say that e.g. the right to abortion was *introduced* (not discovered) into US law by the justices of the supreme Court.
No SCOTUS doesn’t do anything other than determine if legislation meets our fundamental principles, I.e. the Constitution.
As to the Founders, it’s unlikely that medical privacy would have been a consideration for them.
Abortion was legal in some states prior to 1973. You might want to read the cases covering abortion and gay marriage. You are mistaking a right to abortion and gay marriage with a right to privacy, equal protection and due process. SCOTUS justices cannot “introduce” law, only the legislature can.
I think we must agree to disagree. But as a final comment I will say that it does not follow as a logical necessity that the right to privacy, equal protection and due process must mean that abortion and gay marriage must be allowed – or that there is a free-speech right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political donations. Another group of judges might have decided that the same clauses meant the opposite. Or they might have judged that polygamy was legal. If the legal situation is what it is, it is because a specific group of judges decided to interpret the founding document in a particular way. And they could have decided differently.
We can certainly disagree on whether the right to privacy, due process and equal treatment necessarily lead to abortion or gay marriage (and there is a wide variety of opinion in the US) but there is no disagreement on the facts of the SCOTUS cases and what they decided.
And yes, you are correct, a right to polygamy could be decided, (should a state pass such legislation and a case be brought before SCOTUS by an entity with standing) on due process grounds as well as religious freedom grounds. In fact, those against the Obergefell decision pointed specifically to this, why could three people not legally get married if all were consenting adults. What would be the argument against that? But the fundamental principle doesn’t change that there is a right to religious freedom and no court can eliminate it.
To the kind person or persons who down-voted this comment, and indeed other interested readers, if any: the above is actually an extract relating to US law.
The point is that the US rights to expression and assembly (often closely connected) included in the US Constitution are not absolute.
Unless it is the civil rights of Republicans, of course!
A light touch is one thing, kneeling to them and dancing with XR, quite another. Letting them get away with flaunting the rules (with which I do not agree, by the way), and subsequently using heavy enforcement on other protests was a terrible error on their part.
BLM should have been shut down to send a message to all that NO assemblies would be tolerated. Once one has set a precedent, rowing back on it is practically impossible.
Totally agree. If you’re not starting from the point that the right to assemble is an affirmative civil right, then you’re going to be all over the place deciding who can do what since people will make all kinds of different and contradictory choices. Whereas, if you do have an affirmative such right, the courts and police must start there. From that point, assembly management is a totally different issue from the right to assemble. Some here have mixed the two issues. One concerns a right, the other crowd management, they are totally different issues.
If there are no affirmative rights, then some will have the “right” and others not. It’s how humanity works absent enshrined civil rights.
England doesn’t have a written constitution although famously it is said to possess an unwritten one as a consequences of Magna Carta, parliamentary statutes and common law mashups from the 14th century. The US Constitution has provided endless opportunity for the Supreme Court and the Legislative Assembly to modify, amend and and interpret to the point that it is become a noble palimpsest of afterthoughts. Lord Sumption spoke eloquently on the respective merits of English Common Law and the American Constitution in his recent Reith Lectures. I rather agree with his conclusions.
In actuality, the US constitution is modified or amended very infrequently, (and never by the judiciary) which is probably why it has survived so long. It’s quite hard to amend the US constitution, by design, in fact. Courts, contrary to your claim, cannot amend or modify the constitution, it’s a state process. Don’t forget, the US is a constitutional republic. Getting 2/3 of the states to agree to an amendment is exceptionally difficult. I’m sort of surprised that it would not be commonly known that the US constitution is not easily amended or subject to judicial branch amendment. Perhaps your Lord missed that day in colonial history.
Middle of a Plandemic! The covi-bovine love their shepherd, but us feral sheep refuse to be herded about, we unherd, as it were. ‘The feral sheep have nothing to lose but their masks/chains’ to paraphrase Marx, and I have refused to mask at all –
I didn’t go last night.
I wanted to. Wanted to join in with others who felt so personally connected to this loss, this crime.
I didn’t go. Planned to. Wanted to show my daughters the strength of female solidarity.
But as soon as the victim’s family asked people to stay away, I felt I couldn’t. Because at that point, the nature of the event had changed.
Instead of this being a moment to reflect on this loss, it became a tool for people to air their political grievances. An opportunity for grandstanding and self-publicity.
I went today.
All the trampled flowers replaced. Women laying their Mother’s Day bouquets. Men, women, children. The young and the old. Quietly paying tribute. No megaphones, no speeches. No agitation, no aggression.
Watching the images of last night was extremely disturbing. But being there today was humbling. A collective sense of wanting the world to be a better place, and the question of how our society has deteriorated to such a degree. Sadness, but also hope.
I want my daughters’ futures to be in the hands of those present today. Not the police of last night. And not the girl with the red hair.
I’d like to ask you a question. What is it that made you feel so personally connected to this event? Because a couple of years ago near where I live, in a murder covered in national media, two young muslim women had their throats cut, and while one was being dismembered and shoved into a freezer the other managed to crawl out into the street and raise the alarm. The family of one of the girls had put a hit on her for the sin of planning to marry a darker-skinned man. In the week after there were maybe 4-5 wreaths placed outside, there were no marches, no protests, nothing, even though it made national news. So is it that you don’t feel a personal connection to the sufferring of muslim girls, but when you see a face familiar to your own you empathise? If that’s so then you need to attend unconscious bias training ASAP.
I would perhaps lay the blame at the media who I imagine reported a lot less on the story about the two muslim women than they have about the Sarah Everard case. There is probably a case to make that media stories gain more traction when it is a murder case related to a young white woman, but to effectively accuse this person of racism just because they felt emotionally affected by the murder of a young woman in their community strikes me as very harsh and unjustified.
Why do you think this woman is “in the same community” as Sarah? She does not mention that, you have interpolated that information. Unless by “in the same community” you mean that white women in London form a single community? And that people in one of your self-determined “communities” have no need to care for people in other “communities”? As I mentioned the national media made many reports on the case of the two muslim women, but I guess following your train of thought one “community” did not want to get involved with another “community” and so the death (only one died) went unmourned, the violence unprotested. This is the very definition of unconscious bias.
Middle class white British London women can see they are not likely to be murdered by their relatives over who they choose to marry, but are just as vulnerable to being abducted by complete strangers as anyone else. Things you cannot guard against are scarier than things that seem controllable.
“Middle class white British London women” are actually statistically far more likely to be murdered by a partner or an ex-partner than by anyone else. They are far less likely to be randomly murdered by some-one they have never met than men.
That isn’t to detract from the additional harasment and abuse women do recieve from strangers in the street, but the two should not be conflated.
My God, you are an expert at jumping to conclusions and going off down your own little rabbit hole. By “community” I mean where she lives, this happened to someone in the same general area (community) where she lives, so she responded emotionally to it.
And while we’re talking about interpolating information about someone, you asked a question of her and answered it yourself before she even had an opportunity to respond, effectively labelling her as a racist who only cares about white people dying and doesn’t give a crap about muslim people dying, based on nothing!
Go and redirect your rage at people who actually deserve it, rather than someone who just felt sad that a woman in her city was murdered.
Your question is interesting and fair, but your suggested answer is unreasonable. It is both normal and reasonable that we react more strongly to events that also reflect our own worries, and show more solidarity with people we feel we have more in common with.
Let me ask you: Hundreds of women are killed every day across the world, in India, Papua New Guinea, South America, … Do you react to each of those murders as strongly as to this one, white British victim?
‘Unconscious bias training’, forsooth!
Don’t be ridiculous. We are not talking about Papua New Guinea. Both of these horrific murders took place in London. Both women abducted within 5 miles of each other. Both were reported in national media. Both were mutilated. We don’t know the motivation of Sarah’s killer yet, but the motivation of Celine Dookhran’s killer (for that is her name, I doubt many people even know it) was to exert control over her choice of who to marry. But not a peep from any protestor about the muslim. I am not saying the OP is a racist, I am saying she is displaying unconscious bias. How do you explain the difference in reaction to two very similar events taking place in the same city? The different outcome is a result of different biases acting on the information being processed.
I dont agree. You are trying to bring the race issue in where it doesnt apply .
The better race related case is the indifference to young black men getting stabbed weekly. Why is this not the subject of empathy ? Is it because it requires criticality of those doing the stabbing ?
The race card causes more trouble than it solves.
It’s kin preference. An evolutionary trait hardwired into us. For example would you expect to feel exactly the same way about a child killed in Myanmar, or just down the road, as you would at the loss of your own child?? If you did then you perhaps shouldn’t be a parent. Feeling more for your own, does not mean you don’t care about others – but to expect it to be the same flies against everything we know about evolutionary biology.
You are exactly right. I was hoping that what you are saying showed through in my post as well.
I don’t think it’s just that. The French au pair murdered in north Wimbledon did not get so much attention, because “I’m not an au pair/my daughter’s not an au pair, so that would not happen to me”.
We are not talking about the love of a parent for a child. We are talking about two strangers, both equal. Both women, both in London, both abducted 5 miles apart, both mutilated, both murdered, critically both are UNKNOWN to the original poster. She isn’t their mother, sister, kin, kith, caste, tribe, whatever, both victims are equally unknown to her. She has no relationship with either and has never met either. And yet one triggered a huge response and the other triggered no response. This is the definition of unconscious bias. I am sure there are many reasons why it exists but the OP should not try to deny its existence, she should admit that this disturbing event has exposed her unconscious bias and challenge herself to confront her bias. Maybe next time an unknown stranger is murdered she will show her concern for fellow humanity rather than limiting her kindness to people with whom she shares certain similarities in physical appearance and socio-economic background.
There is crucial difference . This tragic murder has no race dimension. To criticise the Muslim killings would have invited the accusation of racism.
Or, a thousand times worse, accusations of Islamophobia.
Celine Dookhran was murdered in 2017, I remember how awful it was, I remember thinking how beautiful she was and how that beauty had made her more likely to be a victim. It’d take me an hour to get to wimbledon, it wasn’t in my backyard, so I didn’t take it as personally.
I was more shocked and upset by the knife attack of the young black boy from Stockwell who was murdered 100 yards from my house than I was for Celine Dookhran.
2-3 women are murdered every week by men in the UK, there have been many more since then: should I know the name and circumstance of each one?
I am more shocked by things that happen in my neighbourhood and want to ensure that the people I know and are dear to me are safe. It’s very sad that there are so many murders that it’s difficult to keep track.
What’s wrong with the term ‘bias’? And by the way there is no measurable, objectivity to the phrase ‘unconscious bias’. It belongs in the same slop psychology bucket as ‘white fragility’, ‘white privilege’ and the other catch phrases of victimhood vocabulary.
First of all, how on earth do you know what response she had to the murder of the two muslim women? You didn’t even give her an opportunity to response, you just labelled her a racist because it was beneficial for your rant.
Secondly, I sincerely doubt the story about the muslim women was reported on to the extent to this story is, so why don’t you lay the blame for that at the door of the media?
Interesting point.
Huge numbers of people go missing every year. Children go missing at an truly unbelievable rate every day, as do men and women. With the numbers that go missing in the UK every year I have often wondered what makes just one of these numbers in to a media story more than any one of the other numbers
It certainly is a fascinating question. Suzie Lamplugh back in 1986 is the textbook example. Biggest ever search for a missing person in Britain. At a press conference in the early days of the search, a reporter asked her desperate parents what sort of girl she was. Her father said that she was just an ordinary girl, i.e. she wasn’t involved in drugs/etc. Her mother declared: “No, she’ s a super girl”. The reporter who wrote the book on the case credited this sentence as the turning point in capturing media attention, which continues to this day.
But Suzie was white, attractive and middle class…..All three key factors to drive media interest. And she and her family were London based (extra Brownie points).
The only bigger factor to drive media attention is the disappearance/death of a photogenic child or children (as per the Soham murders).
Even terrorist victims get prioritised if they are young, female and appealing. (check the 8 year old in the 2017 Manchester bombing). The three pudgy middle aged guys murdered by a nutter 100 yards from the front door of my church in Reading in June 2020? Sorry guys, not so commercial…..
Wow. Should I justify my sadness to someone who I’ve never met, who knows nothing about me, but has seen fit to accuse me of racism? I’ll try.
My sadness stemmed from many things. Knowing what it is like to feel physically vulnerable. I have been raped, groped, flashed at. I live in London, and know the area well: and I walked to the vigil yesterday. Sarah Everard’s journey home would have been a journey I took myself, taking similar precautions, so there was a sense of ‘there but for the grace of God’. It could easily have been me, it made me remember my close shaves.
There is also a sense that we are all currently incarcerated, that even now with fewer people on the street, she wasn’t safe. But more importantly Jess Phillips reading the ‘counting dead women’ list was a reminder that the most dangerous place for most women is in their own homes. It wasn’t just Sarah Everard.
That I was shocked by this case does not mean that I don’t care about other types murders or violence towards women. When I stood at the memorial yesterday I thought about not just Sarah Everard, but what sort of world it is that male violence and male attitude of entitlement and control over women, all women, is still tolerated. I also thought about the increase of antisocial behaviour and public aggression towards both women and men in recent years, and wondered what the cause was, and what could be done about it.
If that makes me a racist in your eyes, there’s not much I can do about that. I know my biases. Do you know yours, in particular your leap to judge me and make assumptions about the reason for my attitudes?
The same caring Jess Phillips who found the suggestion of a commons debate about the number of male suicides so hilarious.
I’m not making a judgement for or against Jess Phillips, merely on the message conveyed by reading out the list.
You are making a discussion on violence towards women all about race, and about my attitude to different murders based on your prejudice towards me. You are making huge assumptions on my character based on what you perceive to be my lack of emotional response to other women who have been murdered, without knowing if your assumptions are true. How do you know my attitude to previous murders, whether i ignored them or not, or whether i was even aware of them? And summing up by telling me the reasons that adherents to CRT would deem me so, underlines your judgement that i fit the criteria of a racist.
I am aware of my biases. Emotional responses I cannot control & I am surprised that you think with a bit of correctional training that this would change. Maybe the thought police could help?
I worry now less about my own safety, but for that of my children. They commute via Clapham to go to school. Does it make me a racist to be shocked that someone travelling a similar route to them would be kidnapped and murdered?
You have me all summed up it would seem. But no insight into your own unconscious bias towards me.
Your responses are very revealing. You seem unable or unwilling to confront the issues presented. This illustrates why structural racism is so enduring. Those perpetuating it do not even realise they perpetuate it. A muslim woman is abducted, murdered and mutilated, it makes national media both at the time and during the subsequent court case, and yet it still does not penetrate the consciousness of women living within a 10 mile radius of the event. I am sure the vast majority of women protesting have never heard the name Celine Dookhran because they closed their consciousness to her, whereas they opened their consciousness to Sarah. The question is why.
I didn’t consider what the race of her assailant would be, I was just concerned that she had gone missing and hoped that she would be found alive.
She was walking along the South Circular, Clapham Common, when she disappeared, which is a very sought after area which is predominately white, as it goes. The only assumption i did make was that her abductor was likely to be a man. So maybe I’m sexist rather than racist? Though I’d suggest that assumption was realistic, given the proportion of violent crimes committed by men. (All of my assailants have been white men)
Men in positions of authority often abuse it. Without wanting to elaborate further as public comment may prejudice the trial, the profession and colour of the assailant is of no surprise. The only thing that would have made me pause if I was wrong about the sex.
Oh, you’ve edited your previous comment to me in order to make my response inappropriate, changing the argument you made into something else entirely?
For anyone else reading, G Matthews asked me if I’d assumed the assailant was black, since the attack was in Brixton, and whether i was surprised that the alleged assailant was a white police officer.
You assume too much. I started drafting a point and had to take the dog for a walk so deleted it half-completed.
I think accusing everyone of being racist in this context makes no sense whatever.
You really do come across as a person who possesses a closed mind and displays an undercurrent of aggression in his musings.
? Do you have no aggression? I suppose you have no biases either.
“Your responses are very revealing” self-parody but no self-awareness.
So there is a choice: Either you systematically work to change your feelings, reactions beliefs, actions … into the proper antiracist pattern. Or you are a racist. No problem.I think what I think. If you, or ‘critical race theory’ want to call me racist, you are welcome.
I still think that Sue Julians reactions are a perfectly normal and positive human behaviour, and that blaming her for not feeling what your politics tell you she ought to be feeling is unreasonable and wrong.
The first paragraph sums up the position correctly. I am amazed people still don’t understand this. If you read Unherd, if you have any curiousity about e.g. BLM, then how can you not explore what CRT is?
So, you are saying I presented the situation correctly? Thanks.
I would say that people understand very well what is happening here – which is that you are using an invalid rhetorical argument to bully them. In normal English, ‘racism’ means an irrational or unbalanced idea that some races are inherently inferior to yours, which is accepted to be a very ‘bad thing’. In critical race theory, apparently it means something quite different, namely anyone who does not accept the demand to rework their own attitudes, feelings and thoughts completely to fit into a very specific political template. So you are trying to impose a completely new definition, while tricking people into carrying over the moral judgement that applied to the old definition.
The answer is simple: In the sense meant in normal English I am not a racist. In the sense meant by critical race theory being a racist is perfectly morally acceptable. It is only if you apply the two contradictory definitions at the same time that your argument has any weight.
In fact I am a devil’s advocate. I am merely trying to explain what CRT is. I have not made up my mind about it yet. In CRT you are either racist or anti-racist. It means if you are not actively anti-racist, then you fall into the residual category of racist, whether conscious of it or not. It’s not me being a bully, the basis of CRT is that society is structurally racist (i.e. it is white supremacist society that is the bully, and uses all kinds of nefarious and insidious ways to enforce its supremacy) and only if this bully is confronted with no middle ground allowed (because it is so entrenched, it cannot be shifted without a cultural-revolution style fight) can equality be achieved. I’m just the messenger.
There is nothing wrong with having a bias favouring your own .
OK, well I hope you aren’t a judge and I never meet you in a court of law.
In the current climate, non Muslim women might feel rather uneasy protesting about Muslim attitudes towards women, horrid ( yes , I have dared to say it) though they are to English eyes.
I feel a great deal of empathy ( or maybe sympathy, since I was fortunate enough to be born into a culture and at a time, when women are not seen as chattels) towards girls forced into cousin marriage, girls having their c******s excised , women being tricked into being a second ‘wife’ in a country where that has no legal status, women being ‘discouraged from speaking the language of the country they have lived in for twenty years.
I wonder though what the OPs attitude to my condemnation would be? I have a sneaky feeling he would criticise me for having insufficient appreciation and tolerance for the mores of other cultures.
Unusual news wins out over the common.
I believe the lack of mass demos / vigils over the murders of muslim girls is because the perpetrators almost exclusively belong to the same community . Nothing for the middle class left leaning women to get upset about.
You are conflating issues and very unfairly attacking someone who sounds like a fine young woman.
I’m sure we can all agree that the cultural practices within some communities, some religions are a throwback to the stone ages and abhorrent in any modern multi-cultural society.
We certainly need far more education in this area within these communities, and I think the law needs to come down hard when such instances occur. There is, or certainly ought to be, an implied acceptance of the norms of behaviour of any host society once refuge is sought and given there. The crime should be nonetheless a crime for it apparently being accepted practice in other communities, from which the perpetrators have escaped.
Unconcious bias training doesnt work. You should have asked a different question. Where are the outpourings of grief for the young men killed almost every week in London by knives.
No one has been killed BY a knife, they have been killed by someone WITH a knife. Knives, like guns or even cars are inanimate objects incapable of feeling or independent action without the human hand and more over the human mind to direct them.
What an unreasonable response to Sue Julians’ comment. According to you our response to an event is only valid if it is influenced by every piece of relevant information which we cannot possibly know.
I like your answer and I agree with it.
Well I like the answer.
I was thinking this exact same thing today driving back from work. By making Man the center of things the West has lost its moral compass. The grievance industry in unholy alliance with corporate interests have become the new producers of morality.
About 670 people are murdered every year. about 67% of them men and most women are murdered by somebody they know. Why don’t people feel connected to all of them, or even the 1800 or so killed on the roads?
This was never about Sarah. Clapham Common wasn’t safe to walk across 40 years ago and I don’t suppose it is any better now.
But if you allow vigils during lockdown, then why not unlimited numbers at funerals, football matches, gay pride parades etc. There cannot be exceptions to the Law for one group but not another. And remember, this wasn’t about Sarah.
But this protest was politically approved by lots of journalists – laws, logic or fairness should not come into it, the mighty have spoken.
On a serious note what could the police do, it wasn’t spontaneous as it had already been ruled illegal – the huge press coverage meant that turning a blind eye wasn’t possible either.
If we had proper police patrolling this would almost certainly not have happened. There are plenty of countries where police are all over the streets – I remember being in Romania, amazed at all the police I saw.
Clapham Common is hardly an isolated locale – the collapse of British policing since the 1960s has to take part of the blame.
When it comes to the met. Cressida d**k would look out of her office window at New Scotland Yard and year after year see the Romanian mafia operating with imputing on Westminster bridge.
Nothing was done.
I came across a wanted poster in Frankfurt airport. Wanted for homicide and I recognized criminals from the Bridge. I checked with some friendly officers, and they picked the same out without prompting.
They are clueless. d**k won’t do a thing. Lots of police won’t. It’s more important to eat donuts and coffee and protect buildings etc.
I fully agree. You rarely see a policeman on the beat so the streets are basically unpoliced in this country. It surprises me that crime is as low as it is.
If the Met put out a message that plain-clothed female police would now be patrolling you would see a sudden decrease in crime against women even if the patrols never happened.
If the Met put out the message that plain clothed female police with full military training and lethal weapons under their designer garments were patrolling…..conceivably that might reduce crime against women.
I agree with you. BUT, BLM marches were held last year – during lockdown. Those marches were illegal too. The police not only ‘took the knee’ but stood by and watched as property was destroyed.
Sometimes the police need to use common sense, even when something ‘illegal’ is happening.
Whatever reasons those ‘protestors’ had for turning up when they had been told not to, the Met moving in on them when it was one of their own who allegedly killed Sarah was a great big PR disaster, and simply adds to the ‘men commit violence against women’ trope.
This reminds me of Dany Cotton telling people to stay in Grenfell whilst it burned. Two women promoted to their level of incompetence.
The Met were certainly wrong to take several steps back during the BLM protests. Perhaps Saturday’s events show they have learned from their mistakes, perhaps not. We’ll find out during the inevitable BLM protests this summer.
Meanwhile, if the Met arrest Piers Corbyn for an unlawful gathering they can’t really not arrest protesters on Clapham Common, just because they were protesting a different issue. The organisers went to the High Court and lost. They correctly cancelled the event but people still turned up. What were those people expecting to happen? Of course the event was hijacked by the far left – it’s what they do.
The police were intimidated by BLM protests, they clearly were not intimidated in Sarah’s case. But is that the law? Protests allowed as long as they intimidate the police?
Is there a law that allows the police to “not allow” vigils? What’s the authority for this?
Is there a specific US law for ‘vigils’?
Is it in the US Constitution?
I’m just guessing wildly here, and happy to be proved wrong, but I imagine the answers are No and No.
Are you dissatisfied with UK law for its deficiency in provisions for ‘vigils’? If so, how would you propose to frame such a law?
A vigil would be an assembly, so yes. What occurred yesterday in the UK would be covered by the first amendment in the US. What is the authority for not allowing it in the UK?
I am an American so dissatisfaction with laws that don’t affect me is rather beside the point, is it not? You seem extremely offended at my question. If so, you aren’t required to participate.
Your question was: ‘Is there a law that allows the police to “not allow” vigils? What’s the authority for this?’
My reply was: is there a US law specifically for ‘vigils’. You have answered that vigils are assemblies. That’s the point that I am making: vigils are covered by the law on assemblies. So there is no need for a separate law about ‘vigils’ specifically.
You say: I am an American so dissatisfaction with laws that don’t affect me is rather beside the point, is it not?
If that is so, why have you posted quite so many comments about your dissatisfaction that UK law does not have a constitutional provision for assembly, protest, and so on?
If you don’t want to read other peoples’ posts, then don’t. But it would be sensible if you at least read your own.
I never said there was a need for a law that covers vigils. I asked what the authority to not allow them was. Read more carefully. Weyland Smith provided the answer below, btw in case you are interested in the answer to my question.
If my asking a question, bothers you, feel free to skip my posts. You are not entitled to an answer as to why I have asked a question although you may choose not to respond, particularly if you don’t know the answer.
Currently, the emergency covid legislation makes gatherings of more than two people illegal.
Thank you Weyland. I thought there must be some legislation that allowed the police to disburse assembly. Is it applied evenly? If not, who decrees how it is applied?
Way too much interpolation in this article.
Will identity-group mouthpieces ever stop inventing bias when there is no meaningful evidence ?
Probably not …. as many would struggle to earn a living any other way.
Based on the leading MSM image, I await the ‘“police have a ginger problem” rant with interest.
What you can bet is that these mouth pieces want us to rejoin the EU.
So lets see. You can show women are discriminated against because they earn less on average than me. Statistical discrimination
The EU is statistically white. Indian is statistically brown. Going back to the EU means different rules. Statistically white get special treatment over the statistically brown.
They are just racists.
We are living through the most peaceful and non-violent time in human history. For a detailed and nuanced exploration of the data, please see this link.
https://towardsdatascience.com/has-global-violence-declined-a-look-at-the-data-5af708f47fba
Yet, listening to the news and following the Guardian logic, what we really need is an outright race and gender war which white men must lose. Or else…..
Guardian logic = oxymoron.
Vikram you’re talking too much sense
I beg to differ. The Romans got there first and did it better, with the fabled ‘Pax Romana’.
There are two quite different definitions of the word “fabled”.
1.famous, especially by reputation.
2.mythical; imaginary.
The general consensus amongst current historians would favour the second definition.
I prefer the former, although I agree that many ‘modern ‘, historians, Mary Beard for example favour the later.
However let’s be positive it is the Ides of March after all.
I’m glad someone has made this post. Its always a horrible thing to do, to introduce facts into a good emotional “debate”. I may have remembered then numbers wrongly but there was an article on the Beeb saying there were 214 murders of women last year (for men it was 5 times higher but we don’t count do we). It really does seem like a time to be scared to be on the street if female. I could understand that when the Ripper (the yorkshire or jack the) was about and if your lived or moved in their areas.
Those middle class types who influence public opinion have become so enfeebled in spirit, body ad mind that what little violence occurs induces panic or petrification. It is not the magnitude of violence; it is the ability to control one fear, through training of the mind and body which is important. England won at Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt, the Armada , etc because even though though outnumbered, training induced a level of skill, courage and discipline which won the victories. The same can be said for the Romans, Alexander, The Zulus, etc
Ibn Khaldun said men protected by walls and garrisons lose their uprightness and manliness. Genghis Khan said ” It is not the height of the walls which matter or the numbers of soldiers on the walls but the fighting spirit of the soldiers on the walls”.
To those scared of their shadows, shadows induce fear.
Oh, please. That’s such a sweeping and dishonest representation of reality that it’s hard to take the author seriously.
You claim “the police are against us”: okay, then, imagine a world where there are no police at all. Feeling safe, are you?
And a lot of people were appalled by the double standards on display.
You’d have to be a bit thick to come to that conclusion.
Because you live in the real world, not in some utopia in your heads.
So you’re in favour of sexual profiling. Are you in favour of racial profiling?
The vicious? The police acted in the same way as they would when breaking up any unauthorised demonstration. Are you suggesting that women should get softer treatment?
Excellent points, well made. Modern day feminists see everything through the lens of victimhood and active oppression to the exclusion of everything else. Now I will not argue that male violence is a wide problem, the figures overwhelmingly bear that out, but it seems to be that making ‘men’ the enemy is not helpful. Women are more than capable of cruelty and violence and quite often get away with it by virtue of being female. The language the author uses is full of Marxist-feminist tropes – and I recognise it because it was drilled into me at Uni in the 90s, and I became quite the little militant for a while. But fortunately I grew out of it, because being in a constant of fear and anger, that bears only a little resemblance to the real world, is exhausting, debilitating and doesn’t help you have healthy relationships with 50% of the population.
.
Please know that very few women actually think like the author
Unfortunately few bother to say so, which is really taking a toll on intergender perceptions. You are a welcome exception!
Thankfully, you’re right. It’s incredible how many journalists have opinions that are completely out of line with the population in general.
“Women were outraged then, just as they are today: why should their freedom be curtailed because of a violent man’s actions?”
You deal with the world as it is. Why should my freedom be curtailed because there is a virus on the loose? It shouldn’t – but the virus is there.
The question is not what is fair, but what should occur?
It is hard to argue that a protest vigil was a good reason to undermine anti-virus public-health laws. Talk of curfews on men borders on brainless.
We should have calm, sane and fact-based discussions on what to do to prevent street violence. Posturing is not what we need.
Excellent point. It does often appear that activist outrage is rather self-centred.
Yes, last year the Met gave lefties BLM and Extinction Rebellion a free pass. BUT people turing out to protect our statues were set upon by the Met. Clearly the crowd on Saturday were seen as ordinary people not the protected class of the extremist left.
I think that this article was one of the worse UnHerd articles I have read because it was so unbalanced. It was in truth very “Herd” like. Counterweighting points
– the police have an obligation to stop public gatherings. In effect, you are saying that they should not enforce the law even though the meeting was sadly hijacked by groups not there to remember Sarah Everard. I agree that a lighter touch may have been better but the idea of one law for men gathering and one law for women gathering is just sensationalist.
– Rotherham happened ironically because of the fear of the authorities taking decisive action against a racial group for fear of being branded racist- how the zealous Liberal left orthodoxy can actually harm or kill people
-men behaving suspiciously in the street? Is this China? Are the Liberal left not against precisely such laws?
-the police advice for women to be careful was obviously well meant advice. Of course in a Utopia, no one would be attacked. But we live in the real world
Overall, this is an article which was far too unbalanced to belong in UnHerd
The number of women killed every year by men is significantly fewer than the number killed in road accidents, and only a third of the number of men who are killed. The number of women killed per-capita is lower than in 2000.
Our legal system is now grotesquely distorted in favour of women. Despite the higher prevalence of male victims of homicide, the Crown Prosecution Service prioritises and allocates resources to the elimination of violence against women and girls. The number of men killed rose 20% last year; the number of women killed fell 16%. In court, female plaintiffs can admit as evidence the social media accounts of the accused; male defendants are denied the right to do so, even when that evidence is exculpatory. When lesbian Jemma Beale falsely accused 15 men of rape, the Crown Prosecution Service prosecuted some of her victims multiple times in their determination to secure a conviction, causing their false imprisonment.
The deaths of these women are tragedies–but no more so than the deaths of men. There is no reason why we should focus disproportionately on one gender or another. But we do, because we live in a gynocentric society obsessed by the grievances and demands of a £200 million a year feminist industry.
Who kills the men AND the women? Just curious.
Which is more prevalent, false accusations of rape or murder, or robbery, or?
At least 2/3 of violent assaults against women are committed by males and the majority of violent assaults against males are committed by males. This doesn’t include rapes and sexual assaults. Those numbers are just the strictly physical assaults. The ones that get reported that is.
How many women sexually assault men? How many men sexually assault other men? How many of each sexually assault children?
The numbers are demonstrate quite clearly who the largest criminal problem is in the US. Must be an outlier……or not…..
We have 15,160 untested rape kits in North Carolina alone and most women don’t even bother to report here. These tests have been sitting around in some cases for DECADES. Recently, a black woman was raped and her kit went untested…..and her rapist, a black male went on to rape and murder a 13 year old Mexican girl. Police and law are great! I feel safer already.
Just kidding. I don’t believe in mythical protection from the state on my behalf.
The protesters and the Author want reforms that will make women safer. But what specific reforms do they want? If the real concern is to really immediately make women safer then here are four reforms that will do that:
Bringing back proper law and order and getting rid of all the bleeding heart reforms that have over recent decades turned the criminal justice system in to sick joke. Long, harsh sentences in unpleasant prisons.
Getting police back on the streets patrolling instead of trawling the internet for “hate crimes” and wasting their time on other woke guff
Foreign violent sexual offenders are deported from Britain regardless of their “human rights”
Getting men who think they are women out of women’s prisons so that we never get a repeat of horrendous cases such as that of “Karen White”
The problem is that those calling most loudly for something to done about women’s safety, be it radical feminists, Labour, the Lib Dems, the Guardian, BBC, academics ,etc. are, these are the policies their “progressive” sensibilities recoil from and which they have railed against for years .
As a result, I expect nothing effective will actually be done to make the streets safer. All we will get is hollow anti-male rhetoric from the same type of people whose implemented “progressive” ideas are the actual reason the streets aren’t safe for women to walk.
Spot on.Not enough police officers are out there policing.
Every woman who becomes a victim of men’s violence deserves justice under the law;
How about when the man is a victim, or when the violent party is female – is justice deserved then, too? This selective outrage theater has made cynics of us all. Well, at least many of us. After a summer of anti-cop rhetoric that saw multiple jurisdictions in the US cut police funding – and then witness a predictable spike in crime – my sympathy meter for the aggrieved is not moving a great deal. What happened to this woman is sad. So are the numerous other violent deaths that do not attract vigils because the victim was not politically useful.
Most of the time Sarah writes interesting thoughtful articles, sadly this isn’t one of them. Her approval of the Police approach to the BLM riots in the Summer is a glaring double standard and her dismissal of Anti Lockdown protests as Idiocy is incredibly smug.
Are the protests that she approves of, BLM and Reclaim the streets etc less likely to spread COVID-19? No of course not , but that seems to be her logic. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
“The Met created a vacuum”.
No. The Met said “No demonstration” and the women said “Shan’t”.
I noted that most of the trouble was from the usual suspects. Far left activists, once again hijacking a cause to push their own agenda (I also noted their silence on the problem of grooming gangs but obviously outrage is only reserved for white middle class victims of male violence). ‘Abolish the police!’ said one placard. I’m a woman and the very LAST thing I think would reduce violence against women is the removal of the police. The minor positive from the case of Sarah Everard is that the culprit was found, and found quickly, and is likely to have a nasty time of it in prison, which the lowlife thoroughly deserves.
What about sub judice and the presumption of innocence? Someone has been arrested and charged: we don’t have a “culprit”. I do hope you’ll excuse yourself if you’re called for jury service.
Another week, another news story that we are asked to view through the lens of identity politics. Last week it was Meghan and Harry and their relations with the rest of the royal family, to be viewed through the distorting prism of racism. Now it’s the murder of a young woman in south London, to be viewed from the perspective of a pretty extreme feminism. I can see why these things happen, although it’s frustrating that the media accept these narratives in a typically unthinking way. But the long-term effect of such tactics is to exacerbate differences and to foster conflicts, as those who do not buy the preferred left-liberal interpretations get angry at the distortions and dishonesties involved, as evidence is used selectively to support a political agenda and any questioning is dismissed as racist or anti-women.
although it’s frustrating that the media accept these narratives in a typically unthinking way.
the evidence suggests that the media go well beyond just accepting narratives. Much of the media are driven by narratives; those narratives have replaced what used to be known as reporting.
although it’s frustrating that the media accept these narratives in a typically unthinking way.
The media lost all capacity for thought some time ago.
The author has a very blinkered and narrow view of the world……seems to be a common problem amongst most journalists these days; a very closeted upbringing. There is a distinct lack of common sense and understanding of ordinary people. She lives in a bubble – so her views/opinions/interpretations cannot be taken at all seriously.
Where were the Sarah Ditum articles during the Asian Rape gangs over the past 20 odd years?
Bottom line: The Police have become cowards. COWARDS. There, I’ve said it.
They hide behind “risk assessments” when they want an excuse for avoiding something which might make their own situation worse. They have utterly lost perspective.
I witnessed them seriously beating up peaceful Countryside Alliance protestors years ago. Apparently there were police volunteers for that bit of overtime (town vs country?).
They will shut down anything where they can strong arm it without personal consequences. Those poor women at Clapham Common are just the most recent example.
But the summer riots a few years ago and the BLM protests saw them RUNNING AWAY, and kneeling down in front of lawbreakers.
The Police, and specifically the Metropolitan Police, have become wet, sanctimonious cowards. A huge change in approach which has brought lawlesness to our streets.
The Police need a huge boot up the backside. To regain the general public’s trust they could start by changing their name from police service back to police force, and ditching the ghastly, demeaning PC mantra they seem to have adopted.
Cowards are invariably bullies.
How, Sarah, should the police decide when to enforce a law and when not? I don’t remember an outcry when, on the 9th of January, 16 people (LBC had the crowd at around 30) protesting against lockdown were arrested and handcuffed, in Clapham oddly enough, using the same laws.
Are you suggesting they should not enforce the law if a protest is peaceful? If so then they should not enforce any part of The Health Protection (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020.
Here’s a thought experiment for you, if the EDL held a peaceful anti immigration event, would you expect the police to enforce the Health Protection regulations?
What we don’t know about this event is exactly how the events of the evening unfolded. It would be helpful if we could have an explanation as to why the police acted the way they did… What was it in response to?
What we do know is that there was a court ruling (not the met as claimed here!) That the event shouldn’t go ahead.
Did you read the article?
Yes – it seems the police even favour black men over white women. Who saw that one coming?
“Where two or three are gathered together …” there is a television crew in the midst of them.
The police aren’t intimidated by women.
Yes. It may also be that they realise that they will get far more blowback on race issues than they will on feminist issues.
Race issues seem to be very much in the ascendant right now.
31 per cent of people murdered in the UK over the last decade were women. Last year it was only one in five. But the annual rate remains about the same every year over the last decade at a little over two hundred.This compares with the over seven thousand women killed in motor accidents in the UK in the last decade. In terms of risk perception vs risk reality we are little out of kilter. Ms Everard wasn’t male and she wasn’t black so presumably that explains the hysteria.
I think a black man abducted and killed by a white police officer would have got some attention!
Apologies that should have said over the last decade.
The total number of people killed on the roads in the UK was 1,752 in 2019, so your “seven thousand women” figure is a little on the high side.
Apologies that should have said last decade. Corrected.
69 per cent of murders are men. Men need twice the protection it seems?
90% women police officers at the demo. Far Left agitators stir stuff up and you highlight. the article with a picture of male police officers. Would have expected better.
No article yet about the female Trump supporter shot by the security guard in the Capitol building? Wrong type of woman? Wrong type of protest?
Yes indeed, shot by an ‘out of control’ policeman, who should never have been allowed near a firearm
Will the relatives of the slaughtered
Ms Babbitt received $27 million like those of the habitual criminal, the late George Floyd?
“Look at the Rotherham care scandal, where men were permitted to carry on exploiting the most vulnerable girls by police who dismissed the abuse, disgustingly, as “p*** shagging” (so much for the pretence that their inaction was down to fear of “inflaming racial tensions”).”
I don’t know where you got that ‘P*** shagging’ remark, but if you read Maggie Oliver’s book Survivors, and Peter McGloughlin’s book Easy Meat, and listen to the victims’ testimonies on Triggernometry inter alia, you’ll find that fear of appearing racist was a major factor. It wasn’t just Rotherham either, it’s been happening up and fownnthe country.
No FGM Prosecutions for 30 years for the same supine reason.
Twice as many men as women are murdered on the streets each year. How about just making the streets safe for everybody?
That might involve socially unpleasant items such as imprisoning people for long periods. Would the public be willing to do that and if so, why isn’t it already being done?
We already imprison people for long periods. I have heard of judges recommending minimum “life” sentences of 20 or 30 years. And there are a few serving “whole life tariffs”, such as Levi Bellfield, Millie Dowler’s killer.
We would doubtless save a few lives a year by not letting any convicted killer out. There are around 6 murders each year committed by released murderers. Would the public support the extra cost? My guess is that they would. Witness the unending rage against Myra Hindley.
I guess I don’t think of 20 years as life. Nor do I think it’s a long sentence for murder. It’s a matter of saving lives by preventing a murderer from repeating their behavior, yes. But people murder in prison. The reason that 20 years is not what I would call a long sentence is because prison is punishment. In addition to keeping a murderer off the streets, they need to forfeit their own lives and die in prison. That would be the minimum in my view.
This is about control. Nothing more. Until you have a constitutional right to peaceful assembly, there isn’t much you can do about authoritarian actions.
And leaders across the West will use Covid as a reason to take away our constitutional right to peaceful assembly for years to come. The only difference between our leaders and those in Russia and China etc is that those in Russia and China are generally competent.
Not in the US, SCOTUS has already ruled that you don’t lose your civil rights in a pandemic. But I don’t know that you have an affirmative right to peaceful assembly enshrined in law. Do you?
I suggest you read George Orwell’s essays, released on the 70th anniversary of his death: ‘Fascism and Democracy’ and also ‘Notes on Nationalism’, before you make comments like that.
Do we have a constitutional right to not catch COVID? Or to get home from work without being blocked by demonstrators? Should we have?
Agreed Rasmus – there is a selfish element to this behaviour which must not be visible in the mirror. These people have no respect for anyone’s safety. They have, like BLM before them shamed their cause and put those they claim to represent in a bad light. They act contrary to guidelines and clash with our police who have better things do than babysit these childish malcontents.
That’s a totally different issue. As it happens I agree with you that assemblies during a pandemic are risky at best and if selfishness could be legislated out of existence, we might all be better off. If we could all agree on what constitutes selfishness.
But that has nothing to do with whether or not there is an affirmative right to assembly in the UK as in the US. If there isn’t then the police and courts are free to pick and choose which assemblies may happen and which may not. And this looks to be the case. Which may be why it rankles some, with one assembly permitted and the next not permitted.
Perhaps this is a good argument for there NOT to be an affirmative right to assembly in the UK, as there is in the US in the view of some. But my question is about whether such a right exists. If it doesn’t, then you have no legal basis upon which to complain when one assembly is allowed and the next not because it is a matter left up to the courts and police by default.
No, I’m sure you don’t have a constitutional right (and it’s arguable if you have a constitution to begin with) not to catch COVID. Or the flu for that matter. You also don’t appear to have the right to travel unbothered by demonstrators if this summers Extinction Rebellion demonstrations were to be considered. I watched people pull them off trains so they could get to work, the question is why didn’t the police do that? Why did commuters have to take matters into their own hands?
But do you have an affirmative right to peaceful assembly? So far, no one has been able to point to such a civil right enshrined in law.
In the UK we have the right to do anything we want so long as it is not prevented by Law rather than having to look at a code to find out what right we have been allowed. The protest was against temporary Covid restrictions.
The police didn’t get the protester of the train because of health and safety issues they are so scared of being criticised should anyone get a scratch.
Annette, I see from this and threads on another UnHerd article, that you are interested in the rights of citizens to protest. You may find the following helpful.
A ‘…there are often compelling reasons to limit the time, place or manner of communication…. I may not give speeches in the middle of the street without a permit, because the free flow of traffic takes priority…. How important is it to speak at this particular time and place and in this particular manner, and how pressing are the countervailing interests of the state? …. Freedom of expression is certainly not absolute in [name of country]’
B ‘These freedoms [of assembly and association] include taking part in public meetings, processions and demonstrations… Freedom to assemble means that there is no law forbidding people to assemble. If a number of people choose to go to the same place at the same time this is not unlawful, provided that they keep within the limits of the law.’
I should mention that one is drawn from a book on the law in the UK, the other from a book on the law in the USA.
Which is which?
The US civil right to peaceful assembly is the First Amendment, which guarantees the right to the following…..speech (expression), religion, press, assembly and petition. The case we are discussing is an assembly case. Not a speech case or a petition case.
Do you have in the UK a similar civil right to assembly enshrined in law? If so, would you indicate where in law that may be found?
btw, a law permitting something unless there is a law expressly prohibiting it is not at all the same thing as a law that outright provides a right to do a specific thing or an affirmative law. I’m sure you see the difference and it’s important.
Annette, I have done my best to answer your question at another place on this page. Please look for it if you are interested.
In the meantime, although I appreciate the distinction you are making between assembly and free speech, you may be interested in the following short extract from a book on American Law that suggests that in US legal analysis free speech and assembly are intertwined:
‘Supreme Court opinions dealing with mass demonstrations – classic exercises of free assembly – have tended to analyze the cases in terms of speech rather than assembly.’ (Fundamentals of American Law, New York University School of Law 1996, reprinted 2000, p 101.)
They were indeed entwined at one time but separated in the bill of rights for very good reasons.
History books are great and much has been written on the reasons the two rights were separated and are distinct within the first amendment. You can find it quite easily. The conversations were fascinating.
The book I referred to (the New York University Law School one) was published in 1996, which must be a little more recent than the First Amendment?
If it changed the first amendment, you’d have a great point. But as it is, the two rights are still separately enumerated in the first amendment for the same reason they were in 1776. Obviously, while sometimes both rights are relevant in cases, you can have one without the other, which is why they are different rights.
Similarly, the right to speech and the right to petition were once considered too similar to list separately and sometimes a situation includes both but in this case as well, there are important distinctions and they too are enumerated separately in the first amendment.
It was fine until rent a mob turned up. SWP etc with Piers Corbyn in tow. Same old faces and the Met knew the event was being hijacked and behaved in a predictable manner which got the press coverage they wanted. The Mets failure was to get a senior officer on the ground as it was a Saturday night. It wasn’t a gig for the local bobbies.
Despicable though the police was on this instance we will go nowhere if we focus on the tree (police vs women in vigil) and do not realize it is the forest that should be the issue.
The issue is that we are now in a regime that has granted the police unlimited obtrusive powers extending to the sphere of private homes while at the same time rescinding (temporarily???) fundamental rights in the name of the pandemic. While also bestowing the police with the necessary indemnity as the principle of proportionality has also been rescinded and the bans and restrictions are absolute.
Watch the – now prophetic – interview of Lord Sumption here on Unherd and stop cherry-picking on police going after one gathering and not another – the fact that they have this absolute discretion is the problem
Yes this is a poor article which does a disservice to many men and women who have done all they can to Police our nation. It is so unfair and so incorrect – why tarnish the many when it is the few at fault. There is a pandemic on with restrictions and those who protested chose to break the rules and should take some responsibility for all of this as well. I feel deeply uncomfortable that Sarah’s horrific murder is being used to pursue a wider cause – this should be about her and her family. What has to be questioned is the amount of virtuosity in our country rather than real action. I have had enough of rainbows, heroes, clapping, taking knees and lighting candles amongst others. These vigils and protests do not lead to the real action that is needed to stop any form of violence or prejudice – that is the debate we need today, but first let Sarah and her family grieve. We need to stop all forms of violence and we need to take real action.
An honest left wing activist admitted, “The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution!” Sarah’s death is a pretext.
Should the government’s latest bill on policing & crime, pass through parliament (as looks likely) then the right to protest or assemble will be curtailed further as its proposed to give the police wider powers to restrict protests
Gosh, they really do feel put in the shade by BLM don’t they.
“They”?
That actress got herself some great publicity; the rent-a-mob got the headlines they wanted; the media got another opportunity to have a go at plod. What’s the problem?
‘Anti-lockdown speakers hijacked the stage, showing their typical sensitivity to the value of human life by making a dead woman into the vehicle for their idiocy.’ – this statement is too loaded by half. First, I agree that this vigil should have had one purpose, to pay respects to the lady who was murdered. Second, if you go down this path, you could argue it was hijacked by all sorts of messages which were not appropriate. Most anti-lockdown people I know are incredibly sensitive to human life (one reason they are so sceptical about counter-productive killer blanket lockdowns) and they are certainly not ‘idiots’. This kind of emotional slur null and voids much of the value of what’s being said and, ironically, polticises the very event it claims should not be politicised.
Well said, Ruth. If this is the standard of “analysis” on Unherd, then I am already regretting my subscription. Surely comment pieces go before a section editor before publication? This is so obviously contradictory, it undercuts the rest of the piece. If you believe there is a substantial risk to public health from demonstrations, the vigil shouldn’t have taken place; if not, the law is disproportionate and wrong.
Hear, hear. The most intelligent people I know are anti-lockdown for the very reason that they are sensitive to human life.
Why would anyone consider it right to glom onto the family’s grief and protest their feminist political grievances on top of their grief?
It really doesn’t get more disgustingly selfish than that …
Women 51% of UK population
Disabled 18% of UK population
BAME 13% of UK population
LGBT 2% of UK population
Trans 0.02% of UK population
Looks to me that the smaller the percentage of the population, the more influence you have and the greater chance of being allowed to air your grievances in a public event
Marxism 101.
Bit rich of Ditum to bring up the Rotherham paedophile rape gangs when she was writing for the Guardian which was trying to get the investigation shut down as ‘racist’, and recently gave a platform to the lawyers trying to prevent the worst perverts from being deported to their native Pakistan, where they still have nationality. And the police did not dismiss the gang’s actions as ‘P*** shagging’. One police officer ‘was said to have used the expression’. No evidence for it was ever presented.
I wonder how the same blind eye turned by Social Services that was and still is overwhelmingly staffed by women fits into Ms Ditum’s assertion that the disgusting abuse perpetrated by Asian men in the North and throughout Britain was allowed to continue because of misogyny?
The police are in an invidious position, as pointed out in other comments here.
The truly disgusting feature of these events is that the politicians that caused it are now scrambling in the uncomfortably contradictory position of supporting the protesters and criticising the police, whilst denying any responsibility for foisting rushed, ill thought out, unenforceable, rafts of illiberal dictats onto the nation, with the connivance or at least acquiescence of a supine and largely absent parliament, and then finally complaining when it all goes predictably wrong.
Good God, we have a real problem with modern women. We also have a problem with feminised men. Can we all get a grip and deal with the real issue. the police have been politicised. The politicians don’t deal with the real world. The education system is not fit for purpose.
Deal with this, break up big government with its committees, quangos and think tanks. The problems will naturally be solved by citizens thinking logically rather than emotionally.
I’m glad some of the comments reminded everyone of the terrible tragedies that occurred in the North o England. Terrible tragedies that very few people cared for.
Our police are a sick joke. I used to respect them but their behaviour in the last ten years has destroyed any trust I ever had. They are a bunch of lazy, stupid and frequently overweight thugs. I think the low point was when I tried to inform them that my teenage daughter and her friend had been approached by an adult drug dealer outside the school and was told unless I had a name they weren’t going to bother following it up, as we know drug dealers always give their full name and address. I should have said I was going out with a few friends to sort the dealer myself, the one thing the police will respond to is anyone trying to do their job for them. Sack the lot and start again
If you’d told them they were also carrying ‘All Lives Matter’ placards, they’d have been round in minutes 🙂
The trouble with demonstrations is they’re always hijacked by extremists.
Made worse by the fact that the media are aware of this, but never seem to mention it
it’s almost as if the media are complicit.
“The police have women problem” more accurately “The middle class have a police problem”.
For crying out LOUD! The country is *supposed* to be in LOCKDOWN!!! Those of us who have supported the health authorities (even if with serious misgivings) and temporarily given up our freedoms – including our freedom to peacefully demonstrate, feel ZERO sympathy for those who not only flout this legislation but who also denigrate and abuse the UK police service who, let us not forget, have put up with putting themselves ‘on the front line’ of this pandemic without a murmur nor sought any special thanks for doing so.
The police have carried on with their duties with the stoicism and professionalism that we in the UK are privileged to have the ability to enjoy – and expect. That a very large group of individuals suddenly felt it acceptable to break the law and are surprised that the police decided to try to stop them from doing so is not ‘a problem’ it’s what they get paid for… to protect us ALL and quite rightly so!
As others have stated, why this further outing of mass-hysteria over one unfortunate female victim and not the other 80 or so in the last 12 months (or any other time period for that matter)?
temporarily given up our freedoms
When did freedom mean taking orders and asking permission? It’s cute that you think this is temporary, that somehow the political class is going to realize the error of its ways and give you back what is yours in the first place.
How can you curtail the actions of a violent man if you don’t know who he is, whether it is Peter Sutcliffe or the policeman alleged to have murdered Sarah. These men had to commit their crimes before they could come to the notice of the police or anyone else.
Marching around with banners that say “Reclaim the Night” are fine for militant first year university students. The thing about Sarah is that she did not feel threatened which is why she set out to walk home despite the pleas of her friends.
All women women obviously do not fear the dark as feminists claim. What happened to Sarah was a rare event which is why it is so shocking. No one condones male violence against women whenever it happens but eradicating it is impossible no matter how many police they are.
Sarah seems to have been the victim of an opportunistic sociopath. She did not expect to meet him and he didn’t seek her out specifically. He pounced on her at a spot where their paths crossed which could not have been foreseen by the police or anyone else.
I’m sure if the person in charge of the Met were a woman things would be much better.
/s
I have to say where were the women condemning the widespread grooming of underage girls in Rotherham? There was none, because supposed racism/islamophobia clearly counts for more than the sexual grooming of young white girls. I detest the hypocrisy – where were all these women when the Rotherham scandal was going down??? Edited for spelling.
Analysis – I enjoyed reading the writers debate, but the idiginaty and reaction will not resolve this issue. When remembering at 12 and then a young innocent teenager in the 60s I was stopped by a black man and two years later stopped by a white man and in both cases I was innocently walking my dog. Then to read back through the centuries, and in its varying degrees of violence it happening again and again, attacks by men on woman and young girls. But then to add on the night of the vigil, I have no sympathy for those unceremoniously carted off for they should not have been gathering in large numbers and they knew the rules, as adults.. When an online vigil could have been set up to allow millions of others following the rules to place a candle for the wickedness of what happened that night to Sarah. Those organising the vigil should be fined and the police need to find out what political undertones were afoot that night. There are too many over zealous individuals hiding in the shadows creating this chaos for their own gratification. As one couples name comes to mind, when not to bring forth and bring out the gentleness of human kind. But increase and promote their selfish needs for power and money
Societies biggest problem seems to be all the ideologies that want to breakup all the traditional “hierarchies”, but don’t replace them with anything that does the same job. Is it the police’s fault that some kids are not brought up to behave in civilised ways?
Aggressive illegal protests like this seem designed to get media attention, which the media always oblige like sycophantic puppies, generating more outrage but never stepping back and looking at the causes. Modern sociology and the new “studies” treat the world like a great big petri dish to try out their ideological experiments in, with no evidence of what their result will be.
I cannot make any sense of this. Why do people want to lay flowers for some people who have been murdered but not others, and why for people they do not know and have never heard of? According to the ONS there were about 670 murders in 2019 and probably a similar number in 2020 but when did we have the same hysteria for every other murder. This seems to have started since Diana’s death but only for specific cases.
Facts do not matter because they do not support the arguments being made. Twice as many men are murdered and most women are murdered by somebody they know. Only 6% of women are murdered on the streets. It might seem unsympathetic to discuss hard facts at this time, but they are the only basis on which views can be formed. It is unfortunately not an ideal world and I doubt that murders are likely to be eliminated. It is more likely that we will die in a road accident and there were 1870 deaths in 2019. There is nothing rational about the views in this article.
One important issue is mentioned but not discussed further and this is the fact that apparently around 30% of the murder cases are not solved. Risk cannot be eliminated but not getting justice makes it even worse. It shows how difficult policing can be and it is easy to be wise after events. It is also easy to point the finger at the wrong person, Colin Stagg and Barry George being good examples. Everybody is entitled to a fair trial and not a trial by the media which I suspect will happen in this case.
It makes no sense to object to being advised to take care and then object to freedom being curtailed, which it is not. Then there is the rant about policing and women with all the blame being put on all men. The police are the same as the rest of us, far from perfect. As for complaining about the small number of women in the police force, then women should act to change that, but how many want the risk of danger every day. It is not a job I would do, and I am grateful for those that do.
The photo shows a peaceful line of police. Methinks the author is seeing what they want to see.
Sorry, photos in some papers show that this ‘young woman’ was ‘woman handled’ to the round by female police officers. By that time the vigil had become a demo.
I suggest that it’s not the police who have a police problem – that it’s the whole lot of us who have a problem with the lockdown-rules enforcing police.
Or is is alright when anti-lockdown protestors, some clearly elderly, are pushed to the ground by that police?
But perhaps being a woman makes one now exempt from adhering to a court order or doing what the police says?
I suggest that we’d do better fighting the continuous robbing of our civil liberties than erecting political fronts based on gender.
The problem is not the Bobby on the street, it’s the piss poor management structure in the police force coupled with a lack of leadership training and selection. One has only to endure the inept little pronouncements made by senior police officers after some ghastly event to lose confidence in the ability of those same officers. Bring back the days when senior military officers trained in leadership were drafted across into the police.
The thrust of this argument is that the Police were wrong to uphold the law . Because they had failed to do so in other cases. I can see that argument. Policing needs to be both legal and consistent.
Politicians would help by stopping passing laws which are not policeable.
it is hard to argue that they don’t have the right to legislate in these matters.
That should be the headline. For this measure and for countless other laws, none of which are passed by cops. It’s easy to knock police for being heavy-handed or too lax, but it still comes back to those enacting the laws in the first place. In the US there is a great deal of pearl-clutching over the size of the prison population. Well, those folks did not imprison themselves. We have enough laws here that the typical person is a thrice-daily felon without even realizing it.
Did these women gather en masse to “grieve and remember” their underage sisters who were groomed, drugged and raped? Did Ditum?
She has a pop at the Police. But not the social workers and Labour council that so grievously let these children down.
Have these women and Ms Ditum gathered to “grieve and remember” thousands of other underage girls drugged and raped. Girls who had no choice.
The protestors say they wanted marshals and managed social distance to “grieve and remember”. Even though mourners can’t have them at funerals. Even though they been unable to touch or kiss their loved ones as they lay dying? Much loved parents, children partners and dear friends.
Why is their mourners shock, sadness and distress any less than Ditum and the protestors?
It appears that one man might be guilty of murdering Ms Everard. Ms Ditum cannot and has no right to put all men in the dock with him.
The author does have a point to make about policing. Pity she has gone down the feminist route, rather than a human being murdered ( by a serving police officer ) and a vigil being held against the backdrop of a pandemic.
Around 2 or 3 males are murdered for every female in the UK, so the feminist angle is just bias on the author’s part.
Yes. I saw some other placards in abundance at the Everard vigil which Ditum seems less keen to nominate for selection -among which, ‘ACAB’, ‘Defund the Police’, ‘Police, the blood is on your hands’, ‘End State Violence’. The aggression was palpable, and the smears and vitriol being leveled at the men and women of the police force were extremely hostile. So who hates who here? And who arrived with the hate?
Oh, not forgetting the superbly inane ‘Educate Your Sons’ (the irony that almost every son has a mother for his first and likely most personality shaping relationship quite lost on this frenzy of feminists). It’s almost like they just hate men. Surely not?
The Police have a woman problem and her name is Cressida d**k.
Doesn’t she also hail from the island of Lesbos?
Allegedly, which makes #D**kout all the more hilarious
The ‘woman problem’ the Met has is the woman supposedly in charge of them, Cressida d**k. Include a few more winnin like Priti Patel, Carrie and I suppose Boris is a bit of an old women.
Look at the lovely trio now leading Derbyshire police, and there sport is arresting other women drinking coffee.
Unherd sadly seems to be going left or “woke”. Murder isn’t the same as harassment or flirting. Supporting a “george floyd” media manipulation exercise (just before a vote in parliament on criminalizing “misogyny”) is pretty shocking. I’m not just whining about lefties…just observing that it seems to be true that they always manage to take over institutions…
it would be interesting to know who was most at risk on the streets these days, men or women. I have a strong feeling it is men; particularly young men.
The vigil was hijacked by a few extremists who deserve to be incarcerated.
The police lost all credibility when they knelt to BLM, danced with XR and then behaved abominably to the veterans who turned out to protect Churchill’s statue. They are paid to police without discrimination.
JAT, to your first two lines:
Statistics that I have seen very recently stated that, in the very specific but most relevant category of being killed in a public place by a stranger, 87% of victims are male.
Sorry that I haven’t a reference for the statistics.
What rubbish. The vile perpetrator of this crime – a deranged policeman was locked up in a cell rather soon after he did the crime. He was locked up by his colleagues – the Met Police. Meanwhile, women who acted sensibly and expressed their solidarity in a legal way were left alone to do it. When a group of loud mouthed activists created a covid hazard, they were asked to move away. They didn’t. The ring leaders were repeatedly asked to stop and only then were arrested – some of them resisting.
Meanwhile, Boris and the Labour Party seem to think they should have been left to break the law – rather in the same way as the Bristol rioters were. I disagree. Keep the law, or get arrested.
What a load of wrong-headed tosh. Right from the start I’ve not been sure what these people have to complain about. I don’t personally agree with the lockdown policy, but it exists and as such is the law. If you break it, you must expect consequences. Being a woman with a candle doesn’t exempt you. And as to the reaction, how do they imagine the police will move them on? If they cling to each other, or refuse to leave the central pivot of the demonstration, getting manhandled (or should that be womanhandled in the case of female officers) is what’s going to result. Interesting, too, the woman with the flaming red hair who seems to have become the poster girl for the whole fiasco is first described as a physics student, but then also as an ‘actress’ (uh-oh, here we go) and then there’s her post on some left-wing blog. Yup, rentamob now fully on board. And defended, what’s more, by politicians who have been all in favour of lockdown. Khan, needless to say, well I expect nothing less from that weasel, and then of course ‘please love me’ Boris. Shame on them, leaving the Commissioner – charged with carrying out their legislation – hanging out to dry.
The present direction will backfire. The law has been so changed over the years to demonise the average male that the solutions are impossible. Most men do not harrass women and if a women was being harassed in public and asked for help the first instinct of the vast majority of men wouldbe to help.However there is so much risk now of false accusation that many men think twice about getting involved and unless there was imminent danger to the lady they would tend to not get involved. The same legal impact effect is shown in the lower numbers of male teachers because of the risk of fals e accusation. To demonise men further will not improve the situation on the average city street. Of course teh investigation of real harassment is appallingly bad and does need sorting. Minor law changes would help but the laws are there it is about attitude.
Women are not all saints…try running the gauntlet on party street in Newcastle and other cities to see revese harrassment.
You’re aware that the head of the Metropolitan Police is a woman, are you?
Oh no, she’ll only be a ‘real’ woman when it suits.
If the police were too “pally” with the BLM protestors, they were roundly condemned for it in much of the media. It is surely possible that they learned from that experience and corrected their approach as, indeed, their handling of anti-lockdown protests would suggest. It does not follow that because they dealt with one episode in one way, they are bound to treat all similar events in the same way, particularly if that approach is deemed to be flawed.
Further, I think the article displays the common flaw in much of our therapeutic culture of seeking to extrapolate too far. The protest was, per the police, unlawful. The judiciary had declined to over-turn that opinion. The protestors were, therefore, engaged in an unlawful activity. The actions of the police tell us a lot about the force’s attitude to people who undertake such actions, but little about their approach to women since those who suffered from the police action did so because of their unlawful behaviour, not their sex. While it is attractive to see our own concerns as revealing some over-arching narrative, it is also usually false. Most things just are what they are.
England is still in a national lockdown! That was most certainly not the moment to show solidarity – gathering on mass whatever the reporter thinks! What ever support I would naturally have given in other circumstances is withdrawn in contempt of these self absorbed idiots. I hope they are all fined to the maximum! Gathering in a pandemic is not justifiable and just grossly irresponsible!
if not for this ongoing irrational lockdown, who’s to say this lady would not still be alive? Could have been more people out and about, making an attack riskier. And the assailant was a cop, was he not? You’re freaking out over civilians no longer willing to abide by asinine house arrest orders while an agent of the state is carrying out a homicide.
I have heard so many conflicting views on the events of Saturday night, but it does seem that had a socially distanced gathering been permitted, trouble might, perhaps, have been prevented.
However, the planned meeting has been variously described as a “vigil” and as a “protest”. One is a solemn thing, in remembrance, often held in silence, or if religious, with the saying of prayers or the singing of hymns. The other exists to make a point, usually political. It is difficult to be both at the same time.
We don’t know yet why Sarah Everard was not safe on a surburban street when she had just crossed the Common unassailed.
But the author is not speaking for ‘most women’ in her article.’
‘All week we women had been asking ourselves why we don’t feel safe in public spaces, why we so rarely report assaults to the police and why we get so little justice when we do.’
Reply:I feel sure that a survey asking women if they feel safe on public streets would find that most say ‘yes’. Ask them too if they take care where and when they walk alone and they’ll tell you they do that too.
#Ask most women and you will not find they consider the police are ‘against them’.
#Really tired of the ‘comparison’ test that keeps popping up. What happened at other protests that also became riots just isn’t the issue.
#Police telling women in Clapham to ‘be careful going out alone’, sound advice I’d say.
#What does it look like when a man is ‘acting suspiciously’? Who is it that will be challenging him? Not many Bobbies about these days.
#The police didn’t create a ‘vacuum’, the violent activists were going to use this event no matter what.
Can someone please explain to me how I am supposed to find my old comments in this new system on Unherd? Thank you.
Go to your “My Account” page online, not in the app (as far as I can tell). Across the top you will see a number of tabs such as My Unherd, eMail Preferences, Comments, etc. Click on Comments, and Bob’s your uncle! At least that’s what mine is like, I took out a paid subscription a few days ago.
I have a paid subscription, but the old comments functionality was cancelled when UnHerd released the App.
A number of people have requested that they rebuild it, and apparently they are working on it.
Like you, at the moment, I can’t see anything in Comments.
I don’t understand why Susan (below) can ….
If you made comments under the old, wonderful, DISQUS system, you only have to type in your name & Disqus, online and all should be revealed. Good luck.
Thanks for your help, everyone. If I click on My Account, under Comments it tells me I have no comments.
Charles, can you please tell me where I should type in my name and Disqus? I’m a bit slow at this kind of thing. Thank you.
You are not alone.
The fundamental problems can be boiled down to two.
First we have the police investigating the police, starting off with the premise the police are infallible. It’s protect the police officer first. They don’t care about the public.
For example, the police in Manchester pinned a mans arms, then proceeded to smash his face in using handcuffs as knuckle dusters, then strangled him. So I made a complaint. They refused to accept it. I made a crime report. They refused to accept it. Instead they charged the man with assault on the officer, presumable, because he hurt his hand when he was pummeling the victim. Or the Met who think corruption by McDonalds with free food and drink in exchange for fast responses is a good thing. One of many.
That needs to change.
Second we have the police acting as the armed wing of a political faction. Khan is using the police for political ends, attacking demos of people he hates, ignoring those of his mates. We have Cressida d**k herself going on a rally at peak Covid, and nothing happens. Others do that, they are arrested.
So the police have become politicized and that is Cressida d**k’s choice.
If I step back and look at what is happening, aren’t the police just trying to enforce the draconian laws introduced under COVID, by the current government.
Laws which will become stricter in next few days if further changes are approved. Including 10 year sentence for causing ‘an annoyance’. Hope it doesn’t apply to online chat forums!
Yes. Almost all of those at the vigil will have voted for one of the three main political parties, all of whom are responsible for the insane and draconian lockdown laws. First the came for the anti-lockdown protestors…
How wrong can an article be?
The “woman problem” the Met has is (1) Credulous Cressida; an utterly useless leader promoted beyond her capabilities because of (2) ‘identity politics’ totalitarian preference for women, that means that (3) women are not seen as perpetrators when in fact they they are (as in intimate partner violence, when research and data reveals they are the predominant perpetrators), and that there is (4) a pathological risk-averse police culture, pandering to ridiculous feminist activists, with (5) police trained in extreme measures of restraint because of having women front-line officers in need of protection from potential injury, given their weak body frames, and their lack of ability otherwise to restrain given their lack of strength
I’ve seen reports, with photo of the resultant injury, of a female Police officer being punched at this vigil turned protest. I suspect that was the triggering ‘event’ that brought the male police officers into play, and exactly what was intended by the anarchists to get their photogenic ‘twirly’ (actress) pictured being manhandled by the ever willing sycophantic left whinge press.
If I had been told as these people had that they should not hold the vigil then they decided cognitively to break the law, I think it was a totally selfish gesture in the main part as this would not of given comfort to the grieving parents, in fact making it worse due to the heightened coverage.
If they had cared they could have rescheduled until unlock, I did not witness any social distancing ether so that lacs validity
I have not been impressed by the police since the start of the lockdown a year ago despicable shambles, yes differentiation of the groups protesting has been obvious and deplorable too with disproportionate responses to each.
But I stand by this opinion that the organisers where reclass and irresponsible, also this total man hating rhetoric, I never felt this response to any of the Pakistani grooming gangs (which is still ongoing) “any one who hurts or kills women are scum and should be treated as such!” but no one should marginalise any part of society in the name of wokeness or PC which has grown idiotic in its rhetoric
The author mixes vigils and protests and they are very different, although both would be assemblies. A vigil is an expression of sorrow or sadness. A protest is a petition for change which includes action.
In Sarah Everard’s case the vigil is obvious, but the “change” being petitioned is not easy to discern. For some it is that these types of random murders must stop which is vague and not actionable.
For others it may be that the change sought is more strenuous legal consequences for perpetrators of such crimes or for the right to legal, lethal means of self defense. This is much clearer in that it is the government that is being petitioned to act.
The problem with the first kind of protest (that random murders must stop) is that no one disagrees with it, there is no one making a counter argument.
I can certainly more than sympathise with the legitimate women protesters concerned about safety on the streets. Does it surprise me that the meeting was hijacked with those of a different agenda? Not at all. Why would the fascist group extinction rebellion be there? What use do these people have in society other than the destruction of everything that we know is good.
What does not surprise me and infuriates me is the fact that the black liberation movement, yes, let’s give it it’s registered name in the UK, the movement with no basis of any substance in the United Kingdom was allowed to run rampant In their lame efforts to link Saint George Floyd, an American man allegedly, yes, let’s remember that, allegedly killed by police in the USA. I do know that the mob aided and abetted by the press and populist left-wing politicians for whom facts and the process of law simply no longer matter would have this police officer executed today. But nothing done against this mob. And that’s what it was, an uncontrolled mob. But dear me, we must not be seen to be the most anti woke of all things, racist, even if there is absolutely no basis for it. Goodness me, that of course is the catch all card in any of these so-called movements these days.
I am greatly saddened to hear about this terrible murder of Sarah, and any others that came before or may come afterwards. Like any right minded person, I would wish for nothing but safety on our streets for all.
The defining image is of a woman refusing to obey the instructions of a policeman in the execution of his lawful duty.
It’s arguable that any of those arrests were actually lawful. The regulations specify an FPN. If a parking ticket ends up in a group of burly coppers in body armour manhandling and then forcing a woman to the ground then something has gone very badly wrong. That much force being used by the police is more likely to be the more serious unlawful act of the two.
The Rule of Law is foundational to Democracy and Freedom.
This unlawful superspreader event was condemned in the same way the BLM superspreader event was.
If you want Inequality before the Law, then you need to earn that right through Democratic Consent.
The three Cs, crowded places, close contact and confined spaces means your premise is spurious.
As is your gender stereotyping and gender profiling.
Or do you condone profiling Blacks because of violent black drug dealers.
Do you condone profiling Pakistanis because of violent Pakistani grooming gangs.
The target is sexual harassers, sexual intimidators, sexual abusers and sexual predators.
Not ‘men’!
This is all smoke and mirrors bullshit to push the liberal left, cultural Marxist agenda. Let’s face facts here. This is a psyop to get the crime Bill passed through parliament, to give police more powers. It was a cop that killed this woman. NOT every male in the whole damn country, and yet we see that clown of a woman in the house of Lords saying all men should be curfewed after 6pm, and then the BBC (Charlie State) actually goading and egging on the Welsh Covid lock-down king to consider a curfew on men. It seems the media want to paint every man in Britain as a woman hating Neanderthal, and yet what really boils my blood, is that the Media, the Police, and the judiciary were completely silent on the 14,000 sex grooming gang victims, instead they actually issued D Notices to hide it from the public. The UK police are no longer fit for purpose, as are the main stream media and political class. They’ve let everybody down, not just women..
I was just looking at these comments. Virtually every one has been reported to the moderator. What is going on here. This is Unherd not Herd. It seems that there is someone objecting to anything that is written
‘Anti-lockdown speakers…their idiocy’. Certainly inappropriate to hijack that vigil but Sarah Ditum are you calling thousands of doctors, scientists, professors and countless others idiots for understanding that Covid19 is no more lethal than Influenza and that society has completely lost perspective?
You are talking complete b0ll0x. Your assertion is easily demonstrated to be completely wrong.
I disagree, he’s 100% accurate. The morbidity rate for this virus is 99.97% full recovery, and the average age of death is 82.2 years old. Show me where the evidence for a pandemic is, because I haven’t been able to find it.
Amusing as it is to castigate the Metropolitan Police and its hapless Commissioner, let us not forget the progenitor of all this mischief is that wretched institution we call Parliament.
To use modern terminology it really isn’t “fit for purpose”, and hasn’t been for some years past.
We shall have to do better.
Agree – The Police merely uphold the law (allegedly) it is the chinless wonders in parliament that set those laws!
Boris should change his name to Expediency.
The thing is, they are not laws, they are merely regulations.
Interesting below – the right to bear arms. If Sarah Everard had carried and been proficient in the use of a sidearm she may be alive today. But what news and what protest would we be seeing if a woman had shot, in this case, a policeman?
A good article, marred by some wide missing of the point. The police advice for women in Clapham to be wary of going out alone was tailored specifically to a moment in time where there was a fear there might be an individual kidnapper on the prowl. If, for instance, a child had been kidnapped, the advice would have been different. Or if a gay man had been targeted, different again. It’s not an example of either misogyny or institutional sexism, or some tacit acceptance of a sexist society. What happened to Sarah Everard is thankfully extremely rare, and the police were doing the best they could given the uncertainty around her disappearance at the time.
“Public gatherings of more than ten persons are prohibited, unless you feel really strongly about something.”
Wow nice template “X has Y problem” 😀
So journish… so professional :D, when you know that the article is a trash before even reading it. 😀
“X has Y problem” – you know when article will be a complete trash.
No. The Police are good and there is always room for improvement. They were on a hiding to nothing. They did a great job. Cart a few testers away to show that it had all gone too far. Only feelings were hurt.
I found stats at dataworldbank showing that in Saudi Arabia the murder of women is half the rate in the UK, that France Canada and Germany are marginally worse than UK and that the US has a rate three times UK, before you get to the really bad ones who are ten times UK and more. Of course men are murdered at twice the rate of Women in the UK but I doubt anyone would join me in protesting.
When discussing these issues I suggest people listen to Field Marshal Manekshaw . At 3 min55 , the Field Marshal says there are many shortages but no-one talks about the shortage of leadership in India. How many Police Oficers, Politicians, Civil Servants, Lawyers, Academics and writers have the leadership qualities born of experience to solve the problems?
Leadership Lecture Sam Manekshaw – YouTube
We put a woman in charge of the Met.
If women will not get behind her then who will?
This vigil was going to happen. Given the circumstances of Sarah Everard’s abduction, possible rape and murder, how the police reacted to it (and most possibly to opportunists who used the vigil for their own political agenda) was of paramount importance and I have a few questions – Why wasn’t Cressida d**k there on the ground giving proper leadership in such a foreseeable and charged atmosphere? She is very committed to defending her police officers in retrospect but why wasn’t she supporting them on the night in question, helping the right and proportionate decisions to be made and to be seen to be made? Also – who cuts her hair during Covid lock-down? Who cuts Nicola Sturgeon’s for that matter? And if Sarah Everard were to have had a positive Covid test in the 28 days before her abhorrent ordeal and brutal death would she actually go down as a Covid statistic? I know this last question isn’t relevant to the facts of the case or even becoming in the circumstances but I ask it because I can’t help but wonder at the madness of our collective and political Covid dominated mindset that does not even allow grief or fear to be voiced.
So let’s get practical- far more CCTV sureveillance ( I believe cameras were the link to catch this nutcase); far bigger police budget; build a fair number of new prisons- more prosecutions and longer sentences; ID cards and carrying them mandatory; reduce the need for proof; allow non jury courts for many crimes. I’ll hazard a guess that this would mean more public protests.
Profiling ?
Anonymity is the criminals friend. The bigger the city the greater the anonymity.
Anonymity is now more available than ever because of mobility.
Societies with smaller communities with less anonymity have less crime.
“ACAB” said another. And “Scum” said another. Peaceful vigil?
There was a time that a woman blowing a whistle could be confident that a policeman would hear it in central London. The population was around 50m then, Now is 70m and there far fewer policemen than there were then. The pollution needs at least twice the number of police.
How wrong can an article be?
The “woman problem” the Met has is (1) Cressida D; an utterly useless leader promoted beyond her capabilities because of (2) ‘identity politics’ totalitarian preference for women, that means that (3) women are not seen as perpetrators when in fact they they are (as in intimae partner violence), and that there is (4) a pathological risk-averse police culture, pandering to ridiculous feminist activists, with (5) police trained in extreme measures of restraint because of having women front-line officers in need of protection from potential injury, given their weak body frames, and their lack of ability otherwise to restrain given their lack of strength.
I don’t think that the police are that philosophical. There’s a simpler and more concerning explanation: Applying Occams Razor makes it a combination of physics and cowardice ie they were reluctant to stop the Rangers fans, mostly men like themselves and who were unlikely to have put up with thuggery by the police. However, they were quite happy to apply thuggish tactics against people generally smaller and lighter than themselves as the physical risk was much less.
Rubbish!
There were no thuggish tactics. Women clearly breaking the law and making speeches at the band stand were asked to desist, because they were proving to be the centre of a crowd an attracting more people. They refused. They were repeatedly asked and were eventually arrested. Then some of them resisted arrest and a riot ensued. This was not the doing of the police. If other forces failed to act – and they did at the Bristol Riot over the statue and at Rangers, that is on them, not the Met.
Obey the law. If the police advise you that you are breaking the law, cooperate with them, or face arrest. No favours for some special self appointed virtue signallers.
It seems to me that crimes are reported / not reported not so much to solve the actual crime but rather on how it can be used to advance a social agenda.
Surprised to see such an ignorant comment as this in an UnHerd article: “Anti-lockdown speakers hijacked the stage, showing their typical sensitivity to the value of human life by making a dead woman into the vehicle for their idiocy”.
The moral case against lockdowns and the government’s removal of basic rights, including the right to peaceful protest, is very strong; this has been set out by many intelligent people, perhaps most clearly by Lord Sumption, on this very site. Those opposing lockdowns are neither idiots nor insensitive to the value of human life, quite the contrary in fact.
It is particularly galling to have a radical feminist using a tragedy to push her own hateful, ant-male agenda, having the nerve to point a finger at others.
Paranoia or what!
Equivocation! The author says the football fans “packed their bodies into a heaving mass of virus-sharing celebration.” But says if the women protesting, … “We know that outside events are low-risk for Covid transmission”.
The comparison in terms of police response is undermined by the author’s obvious dislike of football fans’ celebrations. Perhaps the article would be more supportive of the women’s very worthy cause if the author could compare police response to the Reclaim protest with police behaviour in another protest.
Ian Wilson
The Black Lives Matter movement was started by women. Why no Women’s Lives Matter movement, yet, at which police officers could take the knee?
Woman murdered walking home at night through one of the worlds mega cities. Such an utterly shocking crime.
ask some young police women who have left early.
A balanced article. One point though was missing. Stats show that twice as many men as women are murdered. A disproportionate number of these men are black men. These stats are ignored either due to an assumption that the men murdered had done something to provoke their murder or out of pure misandry.
This article is fraught with flaws and conjecture which I can only surmise its author has penned with a view to promoting a not entirely reasonable agenda…
The Police are really NOT your friends. There is enough evidence out there of their over the top thuggery against the old & the young during these over the top lockdowns. Power corrupts & the Police have shown at all times they are NOT on your side.
“Here is the key difference between authority in everyday life and the power of the state: the state’s edicts are always and everywhere enforced at the point of a gun.
It is interesting how little we think about that reality, but it is the core reality. Everything done by the state is ultimately done by means of aggression, which is to say violence or the threat of violence.” —Lew Rockwell
Predictable article.
“vigil could have been a moment to show solidarity” Yes A moment to show solidarity with the stopping transmission of covid! of being a responsible citizen and protecting society! Of not congregating on mass!
Those incredibly selfish women (and any other protest held at this time) don’t have my support, there are times and a places for protest – but in the middle of a pandemic is just reprehensible!
Author seems to have priorities wrong!
This is the result of the media not sharing the fact that transmission of Covid outside is basically NIL. That is why everyone in my neighborhood walks around with a mask on with no other human in sight – in a high wind no less. It is scary what the police will do in the name of Covid, in the name of “being safe.”
The media have shared that fact repeatedly, including reporting Chris Whitty saying exactly that last week. People have been saying “the law is an ass” since at least 1654 but we still have to obey it.
But at least they chopped the King’s head off in 1649, so all is not lost.
Generally a good article that would make useful reading for those wondering what to do about this.
She lost me momentarily when she wrote, ‘the hard Left to luxuriate in the pretend feminism of anti-law-and-order’ because people all around the political spectrum could benefit from reading such an article so why antagonise one group when there is an opportunity to enlighten. So many opportunities to inform are lost by politicising something that affects everyone.
Well said. An opportunity lost, and a ridiculous response compared to allowing a soccer celebration!