Our new colonial police force

Who would want to run the Met?

The Rosa Parks story, as many will know, was fake. The iconic civil rights campaigner, whose tale is now taught in many British schools, was carefully selected as part of an orchestrated plan to raise attention about segregation in the American South. Parks was just the sort of African American woman who even white conservatives would respect, and unlike Claudette Colvin, was not a single mother. So it was all a set-up.

The analogy has been mentioned a few times this week, since the latest drama involving the Metropolitan Police and their handling of community relations.

This began after a policeman stopped a Jewish man from going near the city’s 1000th Palestinian protest of the year, the officer’s reasoning being that he looked ‘openly Jewish’.

Gideon Falter was on his way home from synagogue and wearing a skullcap, and when he came upon said protest was warned by an officer who was 'worried about the reaction' protesters might have to his ‘presence’.

In a quintessential Met PR blunder, a senior office then issued an apology in which he said that Falter’s presence had been ‘provocative’. An apology was then issued for the apology, apologising for the ‘further offence’, with Met assistant commissioner Matt Twist admitting the choice of words was ‘hugely regrettable’.

The police had also said Falter publishing the footage on social media would ‘further dent the confidence of many Jewish Londoners’. Which is sort of the point, I imagine.

Mr Falter accused the Met of ‘victim blaming’ and said the ‘protests have made our city centres into no-go zones for Jews every weekend... What the Met under Sir Mark [Rowley] has done to the Jewish community... is utterly unforgivable,’ adding: ‘The time has come for Sir Mark to go. He must resign or be removed by the Mayor of London and the Home Secretary.’

Many have since suggested that Falter was going out of his way to cause a scene, and to embarrass the police. Indeed, he is chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a group which you’ve probably seen on Twitter in recent months. Many are obviously sceptical of his claim that he just ‘met up with some people to just go on a walkabout’ and was ‘not there to counter-protest’, as he’s had other run-ins with the police over this issue. The fuller version of the video, which is 13-minutes long, shows him declining an offer to walk an alternative route, and the officer calls his claim to be merely passing through ‘disingenuous’.

Maybe it was all a set-up, just as Rosa Parks was a set-up - but I hardly see how that diminishes the point he was making.

‘Openly Jewish’ is an unfortunate phrase, rather like newspapers calling someone ‘openly gay’, as if it was something one should keep a secret these days, although in the middle of a pro-Palestinian protest one understands what the officer meant. ‘Visibly Jewish’ might have been a more delicate term, but I’m not sure the police officer did anything wrong, except for his poor phrasing. He didn’t choose to allow the march to go ahead, and was only trying to stop someone getting beaten up. I don’t think being ‘openly Catholic’ in a pub on the Shankill Road in the middle of July would be wise either. But then this is London, not west Belfast.

The awkward phrasing is not the problem. Rather, it is the very fact that a British man can’t walk around his own city wearing a skullcap because it might result in him getting attacked. If Mr Falter was deliberately trying to publicise this problem, then maybe that’s a public service.

There has been a great deal of unease about the Metropolitan Police these past six months, but then the job of the Met, as has been clear since October 7, is now less like that of a conventional British police service and more like that of a colonial force, charged with preventing community relations from spilling over into violence. It’s out of their remit and beyond their capabilities, and yet they are expected to do this added job on top of their real one. When added to the burden of policing football crowds outside of stadiums, this leaves them very thinly stretched on Saturdays.

It’s a strange new role that goes against the British police’s traditional function. What makes it more unsettling is that it is clearly done in an inconsistent way, and geared towards appeasing the numerically strongest and most threatening group. It would be hard to argue that, since October, police have been treating everyone equally, without fear of favour.