For all sorts of reasons that include inefficiency, two tier policing, politicised policing of the Gaza hate marchers, personal experience of the Met, corruption and much more, I’m loathe to dish out praise for the Met or its officers. They’ve not been all that we and especially Londoners should have expected them to be.
However, after seeing the Met’s Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley’s letter to the Green Party leader Zack Polanski, criticising him for his uninformed comments about the manner in which Met officers disarmed the Islamic man who is accused of stabbing two Jews in Golders Green, I find I have to step away from my previous position. All of us who saw the video of the officer’s kicking the suspect to get him to drop the knife he was holding could see that this was extreme but necessary policing for a situation that was extreme. The officers had attempted the use of a Tazer several times on the suspect but it still did not relax the suspect’s grip on his weapon. These officers did not know whether the knife was the only weapon this man was carrying and neither did they know whether or not this man, like so many other Islamic terrorists elsewhere in the world, was wired to explode.
Zack Polanski’s comments criticising the police’s actions here were so high profile and uttered at a time when there is serious political and social tension in the UK that they deserved a response. We are currently faced with a growing threat from terrorism from a variety of sources mostly Islamic but also from the jackboot lickers (neo-Nazis), non-ideological individually planned terror attacks, the remnants of Irish Republican terrorism and the threat of terrorism that is outside of these categories but which has often been linked to conflicts, such as between Eritreans, that has been imported from overseas. Britain has a terrorism problem and Polanski’s intervention has not helped the fight against such terrorism.
Sir Mark took the relatively unusual step of writing publicly to Polanski to express his displeasure at Polanski’s comments. I’ve pasted the letter from the Met Commissioner below. I’ve read this letter and cannot see anywhere in this letter that would imply, as many Greens and Leftists are saying, that Sir Mark is interfering in either free speech or the democratic process. All that Sir Mark has done is defend his officers who were dealing with a live, chaotic and stressful situation and that Polanski’s comments and the comments that he’s amplified where officers have been criticised might make officers think twice before dealing robustly with terror suspects. That’s something we do not need to happen. We should want police to take robust action when apprehending terror suspects. If they do not then the suspect might draw out a different more deadly weapon or set of an IED.
As I said there’s a lot to criticise about the Met but this apprehension of a dangerous terrorist is not one of them. In fact the terrorist got off lucky. If this had been France or Germany or Italy or the USA or Israel, this terrorist would not live long enough to be apprehended.
Letter from Sir Mark Rowley to Green Party leader Zack Polanski
