Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Who’d be a police officer in 2025?
The court of public opinion is weighing up reports of a squad of burly London cops bursting into a Quaker meeting house to arrest six women who had gathered to discuss Gaza and climate change.
The police raid took place just after 7pm on Thursday. The women, aged 18 to 38, were there to learn more about Youth Demand, a political activist group opposing fossil fuels.
In the wake of Just Stop Oil’s noisy declaration that it was bowing out having achieved its aims, the Met is understandably twitchy.
So, when another group whose goals include “shutting down London” through non-violent methods including swarming (sitting zombie-like in roads to bring traffic to a halt), officers’ ears pricked up.
But then there’s the dreaded PR optics to consider.
No matter how well intentioned or justified based on the intel, how will it look when the world’s media gets hold of it?
Six women at the meeting place for Quakers, the famously pacifist Christian denomination, cuffed by shouting police officers armed with tasers, bundled into a van, held for many hours.
A tad heavy-handed?
The Sunday Times thought so, running it on the front page.
And yet … had the Met not acted, and had Youth Demand gone on to stage a JSO-style shutdown of the nation’s capital, and had it later come to light officers could have intervened to prevent it but didn’t, the Sunday Times would be first in line to criticise the police.
We’re a western democracy. Not China. Citizens have a right to peaceful protest and freedom of expression. If we meet to discuss something we don’t expect cops to barge in. That said, police have a job to do too.
Policing by consent in a western democracy is no easy task. A delicate balance to strike.
But in this instance there is one clear winner: Youth Demand, who until receiving the millions of pounds’ worth of AVE (ad value equivalent) that this story gifted them, no-one had heard of.
