When it comes to protests against immigration and asylum hotels, accusations of two-tier policing are never far away.
This week the spotlight has fallen on Essex Police, and its handling of a demonstration last week by Epping residents against an asylum hotel in the town, following an alleged sexual assault by a recently arrived Ethiopian migrant believed to be housed there.
Essex Police has today tried to set the record straight
Essex Police has been forced to admit that they escorted activists from the group Stand up to Racism to the Bell Hotel, the site of the protest. In video footage, police can be seen walking along an Epping street flanking a column of protesters, with two officers clearly at the head of the column and escorting it. Soon after this, the counter-protestors would reach the hotel.
Why did the police lead them there? Assistant chief constable Stuart Hooper told the Telegraph: ‘We have a reasonable duty to protect people who want to exercise their rights. In terms of bringing people to the hotel, the police have a duty to facilitate free assembly.’ This afternoon, at a press conference trying to explain what had happened, chief constable Ben-Julian Harrington stood by this rationale. ‘There is a duty on policing to allow people to exercise their right to assembly and protest’, he said.
That is one part of the police’s duty – but there is also the duty to keep order and to keep people safe. Here were hundreds of justifiably angry locals demonstrating after a migrant allegedly sexually assaulted a schoolgirl from their community. Into the middle of this, Essex Police officers escorted dozens of protestors from out of town who were chanting ‘refugees welcome here’. After this incomprehensible, dangerous decision, violence ensued, including against police officers. What on Earth were they thinking?
This was the crucial question chief constable Harrington had to answer at today’s press conference. Did he stand by that decision, asked GB News’s Charlie Peters, given that it’s obvious these opposing groups would ‘confront each other and generate… hostility’?
Harrington didn’t deign to answer. ‘It’s not for me to comment… [on] that operation’, he said. Harrington rejected calls from Reform’s Nigel Farage to resign over the debacle.
Harrington may be unwilling to take responsibility for this, but it seems Essex Police already know that escorting the counter-protestors to the hotel was a mistake. Why else would the force initially feel moved to deny that it had done so? First, it made no mention of this inconvenient fact in its statement on Friday about the previous evening’s events. And then, when journalist and Spectator contributor David Shipley asked the force for comment over the weekend about the events of Thursday, Essex Police insisted that it had only escorted protestors away from the scene after tensions flared – not to the hotel. This face-saving narrative has now entirely unravelled after careful examination of locals’ footage.
Harrington’s non-answer is clearly an inadequate response which will only add to longstanding anger about two-tier policing. In the policing of the disorder that ensued, we saw one man appear to be hit in the face with a riot shield, while another was apparently driven into by a police van and pushed down the street, before managing to get out the way. This makes for a striking contrast with the footage of officers escorting protestors around the town.
Essex Police has today tried to set the record straight. In reality, it’s done anything but.
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