Incredibly, Essex Police have just made a bad situation worse

Telegraph

4 days ago

The Chief Constable of Essex, Ben-Julian Harrington, spoke to journalists yesterday about the policing operation in Epping on July 17 and the violent clashes, wrecked police vans, and injured officers that resulted on that and later evenings. The disorder occurred when a peaceful protest was held by people from the town against illegal migrants housed in a hotel where one of the occupants had been charged with sexually assaulting a local girl.
There were many questions for Essex police to answer, including the allegation first denied, then accepted, by the force that they escorted counter-protestors – some of who were masked – into an already volatile situation. He called his own press conference where journalists were quite reasonably expecting him to explain these odd tactical choices. He ended 20 minutes of what can only be described as bloviating word salad telling Charlie Peters of GB News: 'It's not for me to comment and criticise or indeed examine that operation.'
It begs the question of what the press conference was for? And indeed, what is a Chief Constable for? Mr Harrington spent a lot of his opening remarks defending the handling of the protest as a valiant attempt by police to guarantee the rights of free assembly and free speech for everyone.
The Human Rights Act was invoked more than once. Yet there is a profound misunderstanding in this interpretation of article 11 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which is enacted in our domestic law. This is the right that covers free assembly, including protests. Importantly, it is not an absolute right, but heavily qualified.
Signatory states including the UK can lawfully restrict that right in the following circumstances: 'in the interests of national security or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.'
If this seems a bit esoteric, I take it to mean that far from escorting masked protestors into an emotional gathering of townspeople, there was every right and reason for Essex constabulary to have kept this rabble from connecting with the larger, until then peaceful, gathering outside the Bell Hotel. But this was in fact facilitated.
As it was, the policing operation was clearly overwhelmed. Leadership is about admitting mistakes as well as celebrating success. While it is clearly not in anyone's interests to disclose tactics for future demonstrations, this could have been an opportunity for some welcome reflection on a police response that seemed perversely determined to drive two antithetical groups with violent fringes into each other. As usual, the front-line police officers stuck in the middle suffered.
Beyond what I think was an obvious and serious failure to anticipate and properly manage a foreseeable public order risk, there are bigger fish to fry than Mr Harrington's bizarre obfuscation. Illegal migrants housed in hotels across the country have been parachuted into small communities usually with no consent from locals and precious little risk assessment by authorities.
Chris Philp, the shadow Home Secretary, has complained that there 'hundreds and hundreds' of 'illegal immigrants' who are housed in 'taxpayer-funded hotels' and have committed 'multiple cases of rape, sexual assault, theft, violence and arson.'
The cultural dissonance between predominantly young migrant men from Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Eritrea, and Sudan and the local population, Philp said, is producing a 'public safety crisis' for women and girls. The police, learning nothing from last year's spasm of national social disorder after the murders of children in Southport, has called the disorder 'thuggery.'
That is the end of people not being listened to, not the beginning. Violence like what we've seen in Epping and will see elsewhere should never be endorsed. But dismissing legitimate fears as bigotry and tolerating disastrous policing appears to be as big a problem.