There have been a lot of comments about how those posters who are sympathetic to this guy are only sympathetic because he's a middle class boy from a middle class family living in leafy suburbia etc.
I don't know why people think this.
There's not much biographical information out there to say whether he's working class, middle class or upper class. What info there is says that his mum is 37 and that he's the first in his family to have gone to university. Those two pieces of information, while hardly conclusive, do not particularly suggest a middle class background.
I would have the same reaction that the sentence is too heavy if he had a different background and if the context was not a student demo, so long as the act itself was the same. (I wouldn't have the same reaction if the act was chucking a concrete block onto a motorway, because contrary to what some posters have suggested, they're not equivalent acts -- chucking a concrete block onto a motorway can potentially create much more carnage. Both are bad, but one is much worse than the other)
Kungfupannda, this is is a bit misrepresentative:
"why are you astonished that I think that arguing about the police getting away with things is a straw man argument? It has nothing to do with sentencing tariffs."
You make it sound like your original argument was only about the police. But what you originally wrote was: "the whole "others got less for worse" or "the police have done worse things" is a massive straw man argument...." [my italics]
You thus suggested that sentencing tariffs were part of the strawman argument, not just whether the police are held to account.
Consistency of tariff is important. In my view, the balance between fitting sentences to particular circumstances and ensuring that more serious classes of crime attract more extensive punishment than less serious classes of crime -- should be a crucial objective of sentencing policy in delivering natural justice. You think the system is working well; I disagree: people who commit much more harm, such as killing someone when driving drunk, are punished much less severely, due to "individualising" of tariffs.