Women endangered by police for coronation

[bd67thSaysReinstateLangCleg]

Buried in the middle of Grauniad article about the Republic arrests, the police arrested workers issuing rape alarms as part of a project called "Night Stars". Night Stars is run by Westminster Council with Home Office funding to help keep safe the women who work at night in places like Soho.

Adam Hug, the Labour leader of Westminster city council, said he was “urgently pushing the police for proper answers” after three council volunteers were arrested at about 2am on Saturday in Soho and later released on bail after they were found in possession of rape alarms. Police said “military colleagues” had believed such devices could be used to disrupt parading horses, posing “significant risk to the safety of the public and the riders”.

The council, however, said the devices were for the Night Stars volunteers to give out to vulnerable women and they were funded by a Home Office grant.

Can we talk about how women's safety has been undermined by the same Metropolitan Police force that employed the rapist-murderer of Sarah Everard (no, I will not write his name) so that a rich powerful man can have a crown put on his head?

They were wearing the ID, it's called a "uniform". The literal purpose of a uniform is to identify the wearer as part of a group.

I didn’t ask you to prove anything, I was pointing out that you can’t say with any certainty that any vulnerable women were harmed as a result of the arrests like you have been. If you’re going to keep saying women were harmed, you need to prove it.

As for there being a risk to the crowd, that’s proven. Risk is about probability and impact of something that might occur.

Lol, I can buy any uniform I want. A uniform isn’t ID as well you know.

No, but we have other parades with police horses in attendance, like Pride, and it sets a dangerous precedent.

@AP5Diva King Charles is 74 We could well have another Coronation in fifteen years time. With the road we are going down i dread to think where we will be by then.

Sorry? Did you just called rape victims ‘female prostituted women’?

Do you think prostituted women aren't routinely the victims of rape? And even if you misunderstood the group of people I was referring to, you appear to think comparing other people to sex workers would be an insult. I don't.

2am in Soho, some of the women at risk will be prostituted women, who don't report. I'd sooner protect one of them from further trauma than almost anyone else.

The risk to women of Night Stars not being there is also proven to the satisfaction of the Home Office, who deem there to be enough evidence of that risk to fund the project.

The Met did not have to arrest the Night Stars staff. They could have told them to not hand out the alarms this one night but otherwise carry on. The Met chose not to do this, instead taking the most heavy-handed approach to policing possible with a project that they are meant to be partners with.

This is pointless. According to @AP5Diva the only people that don't have to prove anything is herself and the police. Everyone else is wrong despite their evidence and the actual facts.

I am shocked and amazed that I wasn't arrested last night for carrying an alarm myself. It could have seriously disturbed the camels down the road and caused the coronation to become a nightmare.

Sometimes people only see the dangerous road they are travelling when it's far too late. And I am not talking about rapists there.

I seriously doubt that rape alarms do any good, especially considering most women who are raped aren't attacked in the street with a alarm at hand, rather they're caught off guard when in private with someone they know. If you set one off in London, no one would come anyway! If anything, they'd give women a false sense of security, and mislead them as to when, where and with whom they're most at risk.

Their confiscation is perfectly reasonable. The police were acting on intelligence. An entitled few have no right to ruin an important event in the life of the country that many have been looking forward to. The horses are not trained to deal with constant, ear-splitting electronic tones sounding in their ears. The use of rape alarms by the protestors would trivialise rape, as well as constituting both animal cruelty and reckless endangerment of the crowd.

A branded full uniform is harder to obtain than a custom plastic ID card, and considerably more expensive. If you don't want to leave a paper trail with a supplier of what you want printed on the card, the machines for printing ID cards are about £750 a pop, and if you work somewhere that already has one and can get unobserved access to it, you need only supply the blanks to have any ID card you like.

Nice try though.

And you are also missing the point, which is that someone wanting to use a rape alarm to disrupt the parade would reliably and cheaply obtain one from eBay in advance rather than hanging around Soho at 2am.

I do not understand why you are downplaying the damage out of control horses can do

Trust me, all the Kings horses could not do as much damage as the out of control organisation that is the Kings police force.

I seriously doubt that rape alarms do any good, especially considering most women who are raped aren't attacked in the street with a alarm at hand, rather they're caught off guard when in private with someone they know.

They aren't to summon help but to disorient an attacker whilst you kick him in the nuts and leg it. Which can happen anywhere.

I carry a strobe-capable torch for similar reasons. Would I have the presence of mind to use it? Probably not. Am I going to deny myself the chance to try? No. I get that "harden the women" is easily interpreted as victim-blaming, but taking SERE options away from women who want them is misogynist.

OP, if you don't like the monarchy just come out and say it. But please don't use assaulted women as a skinsuit for your beliefs.

Like 95% of the posters on this thread I have fuck all idea what a genuine police ID looks like, let alone a fake one.

Mind you, Wayne Couzens had a genuine police ID. Oh hang on, that's because he was a serving police officer

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The horses are not trained to deal with constant, ear-splitting electronic tones sounding in their ears.

That's a startling oversight, given that they are trained to deal with fireworks, cannons, whistles, car alarms (which sound exactly like rape alarms BTW), fire alarms (like rape alarms but louder), 29-piece brass bands, airhorns, etc etc. There's a lot more rape alarms out there than there are brass bands (1200 at last count), so why train the horse to cope with the rare sound and not the common one?

Or it's just a bullshit excuse they are using to cover up their mistake in arresting Night Stars.

I've hardly mentioned the monarchy. This isn't about them, it's about how the police are contemptuous of women.

Do you even read my posts?

Also, if the horses can't be trusted around crowds if a common, legally-owned device makes the noise its designed to do, then the horses should not be there.

This is safety 101. Unless they strip-searched everyone in that crowd, the police could not guarantee the total absence of alarms on the route. So they should not have had the horses at all there if the horses cannot cope with the noise.

If you want to shill for the police and defend the demolition of free protest in this country, than just come out and say it. But please don't use horse welfare as a skinsuit for your beliefs.

I hate the monarchy. I also care about assaulted women. I'm also very concerned about the idea that the end justifies the means in policing.

I'd imagine the Venn diagram of those things is pretty close to a circle.

If you want to shill for the police despite their contempt for women and defend the demolition of free protest in this country

This is part of a pattern of police institutional misogyny.

The police are relying on us being a nation of animal lovers to use "but the poor horses" as a fig leaf to avoid accountability for wrongfully arresting members of an official publically-funded outreach team who were carrying out their agreed duties. And you've fallen for it, hook line and sinker.

I dont recall such concern for animals when they gave the Emergency Alert a trial run two weeks ago.

So the police who work with horses. I take it they all left their mobiles well away from said horses back on the 23rd April

It's a problem when women's issues are treated as the property of resentful, petty-minded and envious leftists. Opposing violence against women and girls doesn't go hand-in-hand with opposing the monarchy you know!

This whole thread is so disingenuous. The rape-alarm threat has been in the papers for a few weeks now. If these activists were legit, why couldn't they have delayed handing the alarms out until last night?

Exactly.

And the police horses are never used at the same time as the police cars and vans have their lights and sirens on, apparently.

The real reason for confiscating rape alarms and arresting those with them was to stop protests, not protect horses. The horses are a fig leaf. And now that the "arrest anyone with a rape alarm" tactic has caused people doing their jobs and volunteering in an official council-backed project to be arrested, they are doubling down on the "oh the poor horses" line, hoping that the british public will both swallow the illogical argument that horses are somehow specially vulnerable to this one precise noise that is conveniently only ever made by rape alarms and not, say, car alarms or police sirens whilst at the same time these same horses are somehow fit to be used in crowds of people and care more about horses being startled than about women being raped and the people trying to keep said women safe being wrongfully arrested.

Judging by some of the commenters on this thread, the lie has been successful.

Night Stars aren't leftist activists, they are working for Westminster council. They hand out alarms every night that they operate.

But you keep on not actually reading the web pages that I link to and the comments that I write. If you aren't going to read the thread, then why post to it?