Metropolitan Police officers have justified their heavy-handed crackdown under Covid lockdown rules at a Clapham Common vigil held for Sarah Everard by claiming that the gathering was morphing into an “anti-police protest”. MailOnline has more.
Scotland Yard is prosecuting six people they claim broke Covid lockdown rules at the vigil on March 13th last year, when hundreds assembled at the bandstand in the South London park following Miss Everard’s kidnapping, rape and murder by ‘evil’ Met cop Wayne Couzens.
The event had originally been organised by Reclaim These Streets, who cancelled it after the Met said it should not go ahead, and no definitive answer on the matter was provided by the High Court.
But people turned up throughout the day, and officers did not intervene for the first six hours while many came to lay flowers, with the Duchess of Cambridge also paying her respects.
It has now emerged that police have defended their widely condemned actions, saying that they faced resistance when they tried to break up the gathering using draconian Covid powers.
Witness statements given in Westminster Magistrates’ Court reveal that the Met officers feared being attacked by the attendees and were apparently branded “murderers” by some in the crowd.
According to PC Alexander Davis: “The mood of the crowd had also shifted from showing respect to Sarah Everard to anti-police protest. Over the course of the early evening the crowd size of the vigil increased to the 1,000 strong members and it quickly became an anti-police demonstration.”
The Standard reports that he said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist gave the order at around 7pm for the crackdown to begin, including arrests of women who were standing by the bandstand.
PC Darryl Mayne said in a witness statement that attendees shouted “go away”, “murderers” and “arrest your own” as the scene turned sour.
And in his statement to the court, Inspector Dave Laurie said: “I remember feeling sad that what started out as a vigil with people adhering to the coronavirus regulations had changed significantly and that I wasn’t convinced people were there to solely pay their respects in remembrance of Sarah Everard, and that they did not intend to leave the area any time soon.”
Hang on, aren’t police supposed to kneel before anti-police protestors these days? Or is it assault women protesting against police assaulting women? Hard to keep up with 21st century policing.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Mr Tucker has this pretty much spot on. The banality of evil, the unacknowledged consequences, the shattered trust.
An Obama appointed born again Christian.
As, in this country, so many dodgy public sector appointments lead back to Blair, so, in the U.S., they lead back to Obama…
Add in a dash of ‘What surprised us is that we hadn’t really thought through the economic consequences’ from Melinda Gates and you do, indeed, have a path to hell…..
Whatever the intentions, the public officials responsible must be held accountable.
This turns, now, in the U.S. and, consequently (embarrassingly) in this country as well, on the results of the U.S. Presidential election……
If a Republican candidate is successful and tears into the Democrats covid shambles, the excellent diversion will be to watch the ‘trimming’ that will take place amid the myriad panto dames within our own egregious, risibly silly, public inquiry.
And still, to this day, people write articles like this assuming there was some especially dangerous virus spreading around the world in 2020: “Nor did they think about anything other than this one pathogen”. Also the Great Barrington Declaration made this assumption, even though statistics data available at the time showed no unusual increase in deaths in many countries (those not implementing WHO guidelines).
“The Government, under Collins, emptied hospitals out from coast to coast …”. And there you have it. Now nobody can be surprised if the number of deaths suddenly increases.
When will people come to their senses and recognize that the so-called pandemic was never anything other than a criminal enterprise?
Just seems like reheated cockup theory to me. He talks about attaching an “infinite value” to “saving a life” (whatever that means) and claims this is how “Public health” people think. What utter drivel. They are not idiots and they know resources are not infinite and that there are always tradeoffs.
I know tof, as you repeat frequently: there was no pandemic. But enough people thought so, and I feel the wreckage created as a consequence of their thoughtless overreaction is summed up quite neatly here.
Wreckage yes. Summed up yes. Thoughtless – I simply cannot believe that.
As I keep saying, focusing on the collateral damage is dangerous as people will just come up with ideas for mitigation next time. I don’t want mitigations, I want the whole thing to be recognised for what it was – a scam, a fake, a Big Lie. I really want the whole “public health” industry to f off and shrivel up and die and leave us all alone.
We’re a million miles from anyone but a few thinking about this fake pandemic in anything close to what I consider the “right” way. I am not even sure if we’re getting closer to that. I don’t see much sign of it.
Spot on ToF
Where’s the pandemic except when they killed a whole lot of old folk by shoving those with rebranded flu back into their old people’s homes?
Yes, but Collins is selling himself as someone who was just human, a really nice person and, like all of us, tragically capable of making mistakes. In the short video, he explains “If you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life. It doesn’t matter what else happens. You attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered from.”
An incredible statement but that is his story, his excuse, the former head of the NIH, Fauci’s boss. As Fauci’s boss he also had no idea of the labs in Ukraine and the illegal Gain of Function research going on there and in China? Sure. And, as head of NIH he would know that in 2019 around 7,800 US citizens died each day but he wants the world to understand that his institute thinks along the lines of saving one life – at the cost of destroying the economy, etc..
The article does indeed a good job of listing the “collateral damage” and correctly slanders the guy but you still come away with the feeling it was all just a tragic mistake. “Does he have any idea of the carnage he caused? Does he even care?”
The question should really be why is he not serving a very long sentence behind bars?
Yes they are idiots and no they don’t understand trade-offs – they should but don’t.
Public Health officials are products of our education system, with its focus on humanities – easy subject – not science, doctrinaire, think only what they have been taught to think.
They believe in solutions, not trade-offs – and they have the solutions rooted in ‘liberal’, progressive fantasies which require central command and control over each individual.
“focus on humanities – easy subject – not science, doctrinaire, think only what they have been taught to think”
My scientific study stops at O level maths, but that is more than sufficient for understanding what needed to be understood regarding “covid”.
Of course they understand trade-offs – they have to limit their spending, so they will at least have to pretend to target it with a view to getting best value. It’s just that, for reasons we may never fully know, the “covid” budgetary and other constraints were effectively removed for a period of time, so they went full on.
I have met “idiots” – people with very low IQs. They can hardly string a sentence together. These people are political operators who have got to the top of the greasy pole, by reading situations accurately.
Some of them might actually believe in “solutions”, but I think the people who most believe in “solutions” re useful idiots who carry out and follow orders, not the ones giving the orders. I believe they sell “solutions” because that is what people seem to want and if you are selling “solutions” not “trade-offs” you get more leeway and power.
Not entirely accurate, we’re all responsible for letting these people do this. The propaganda is required to keep the majority on-side.
I’m not responsible for any of this.
I will never forget what they did …. and I will never forgive them.
He admitted that he failed Maths back in March 2020.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/interview-francis-collins-nih/608221/
Narrow focus? But Public Health is about wide focus, the health of society at large.
In times of epidemic the whole society is considered, so infectious individuals or their contacts may be quarantined to keep them away from the infected.
But with CoVid the uninfected were quarantined to keep them away from the infectious, whilst the infectious were shovelled in among uninfected people in care homes and general hospital wards.
Public Health has been colonised by those who think it’s about private health, and a political and ideological function to alter the behaviour of individuals supposedly to provide some communal benefit: eat less; stop smoking.
But in fact their meddling has more to do with protecting institutions, like hospitals or saving the NHS and power and control.
The people in Public Health do not understand what it is and are not competent to do the job – it is not an activist operation.