One of the organisers of a vigil for Sarah Everard has said Cressida Dick should not resign, as the policing minister also rejected calls for the Met police commissioner to stand down, despite public anger at officers’ conduct on Saturday.
Dick’s position seemed to be in jeopardy after she was was publicly rebuked by the home secretary, Priti Patel, and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, for providing an unsatisfactory explanation as to why police broke up Saturday’s vigil for Everard in Clapham Common, south London.
But on Monday, ahead of Dick’s meeting with the policing minister to discuss how to protect women and girls from violence, Kit Malthouse said she should remain in her post, as did Anna Birley from the group Reclaim These Streets.
“We are a movement of women seeking to support and empower other women, and as one of the most senior women in British policing history, we do not want to add to the pile-on,” Birley told ITV’s Good Morning Britain.
Profile
Reclaim These Streets
Reclaim These Streets is a group of women in their 20s and 30s who live in the area of London
where the marketing executive Sarah Everard disappeared on 3 March. The
group has come together to help others honour the life of the
33-year-old, whose body was confirmed to have been found on 12 March,
and push for societal and political change to tackle widespread violence
against women and girls in the UK.
The group has formed five asks to achieve this aim:
Value women: Under new legislation going through parliament, a person
can get 10 years in prison if they deface or bring down a statue.
Statues are offered more protection than women. Women have a right to
live without fear. Their safety must be prioritised.
Overhaul the criminal justice system: Only 1.4% of rapes recorded by police in England and Wales result in a charge or a summons. Violent sexual offenders must be held to account and victims put at the
heart of the process. Only one in 7 victims of rape believe they will get
justice reporting to the police. Victims’ experience should shape
our criminal justice system – they need to be consulted at every stage on how we can make changes to ensure justice. The government should consult
with victims as part of its ongoing Rape Review, which it has as yet
failed to do.
Count dead women: We count what
we care about. And we can’t tackle something until we understand it. The government needs to centrally collect data on women killed by
men, including demographic and social factors.
Education on consent and boundaries: We must teach boys and men, from childhood,
about consent and boundaries. We must focus on men’s actions and
behaviours. Everard did everything she could to protect herself, using
every “how to stay safe” tool that women and girls are taught from a
young age. It didn’t make any difference. In her memory we must change
the conversation.
“We do want her to meet with us. We were hugely disappointed that she put out a statement yesterday without talking to any of the people who were organising the vigil and had such a difficult experience with the Metropolitan police force.”
Asked by Sky News if he backed calls for Dick to resign, Malthouse said: “I don’t, and I do recognise that police are in an incredibly difficult position.”
Sarah Jones, the shadow policing minister, also declined to back demands for Dick to stand down, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the focus “has to be on Sarah Everard and the increasing problems of violence against women”. But she said answers were needed as the police response on Saturday was “the wrong one”.
Malthouse said officers had been faced with “a very difficult decision” because of the pandemic and the home secretary’s directions that mass gatherings were to be avoided and were illegal.
He told the Today programme that senior Met police officers “laid out their approach” to the government on Friday morning with respect to the Sarah Everard vigil. However, he said this did not go into the “operational detail” such as arresting attendees but “we did discuss the possibilities of encouraging an alternative, an online vigil, all those other things for people to express their natural anger on these issue”.
It was suggested to Malthouse that the scenes on Saturday night “were made inevitable … by the decision of politicians and the police to simply declare that something that was going to happen, shouldn’t really happen”.
But the minister rejected that characterisation, saying: “Police are responsible for the on-the-ground decision-making, and for planning and dealing with the consequences of particular events or eventualities.”
Malthouse also rejected criticism of the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill amid warnings it will further clamp down on the right to protest by handing more powers to the home secretary and the police. Labour has said it will vote against the bill, which is being discussed in parliament on Monday, and human rights groups, trades unions and faith communities have urged the government to reconsider its provisions.
Malthouse said: “We’ve seen protests over the last few years adapt its tactics and we obviously have to adapt the legislation in what I think is a relatively mild way, recognising that protest and freedom of speech is absolutely fundamental to our democracy, but it has to be balanced against the rights of others, to go about their business.”