While the Met wastes time pursuing the Sarah Everard protesters through the courts, it destroys what little trust is left
The Metropolitan police continues to press its case against six people who attended the vigil for Sarah Everard in March last year – despite the fact that the high court has already ruled that the force breached the rights of the event organisers, Reclaim These Streets (RTS), and told the Met, when it tried to appeal that ruling this month, that its case was “hopeless”.
At every turn, the force’s behaviour has been the exact opposite of what it should have been. At the vigil itself, as one of RTS’s founders, Jamie Klingler, describes: “They should have handed out tissues. They should have facilitated a safe space for us to grieve.” Instead, they used Covid restrictions self-servingly to try to block the protest, in what would later turn out to be a chilling echo of the murderer’s own violence. When it went ahead anyway, the policing was heavy-handed and disproportionate, and the force has hammered the legal avenues to have the high court ruling reversed since without dignity or humility.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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