Mother arrested in front of child by Met over bus fare (that she had paid!)

[TERFinTheHouse]

Tw: upsetting content

twitter.com/saskia_cole/status/1682705268721737728?s=46&t=p6GESSn09HWHVXYgTLIbJg

Why was this woman arrested like this!?! Her poor child!

According to other Tweeters, she had paid her bus fare BTW.

I think this is possibly the case.

I'm only putting the idea out here but maybe she was the only person asked to show her ticket or maybe white people were not being asked to show their tickets.

The police can stand by while a violent ex con tells people to punch women in the face, but 4 can turn up for a possible dodged fare doesn't give me hope that the met are changing.

Sassh That doesn't happen. They ask black people to show their tickets but not white people? I have no idea where you live but I can assure that doesn't happen on TFL. There would be absolute outrage if it did. They ask everyone and it's perfectly reasonable that they do.

I never noticed overt racism on FWR threads but Jesus the ‘this doesn’t happen’ parroting is fucking shocking. WTAF is going on

It's not parroting. Ticket inspectors on TFL don't ask everyone else except white people to show tickets. There would, quite correctly, be an outcry if they did. If you are accusing me of racism you are very wrong.

I travel through Croydon several times a week. There have been a lot of ticket inspectors around lately. They board public transport mob handed to stop anyone who hasn't paid jumping off. I can understand her getting agitated if she had paid the fare and they were saying she hadn't. I'm not sure how that could happen because their machines read the card you swiped.

I've watched the clip and handcuffing a woman in those circumstances does look heavy handed but I have not seen the lead up (nor has anyone else who wasn't there throughout).

This incident did remind me of the only time I have received a penalty fare. I was commuting into London for a shittily paid temp job. At the time I had weekly paper travel cards that you had to put through the barriers at London stations but there were no barriers at my local station. As we came into London I looked at my ticket and realised it had expired the day before. I approached the first guard I saw and tried to buy a ticket (back then you used to be able to buy them on the train as well as at the station). He charged me a penalty fare despite me approaching him and having a wallet full of weekly travel cards going back months. I got into work and was ranting about it to a (black) work mate and how I was working for nothing that day. He said "that happened to me last week but the guard was a brother so he let me off". A probably rare example of racism working the other way.

Nope you really don't. The inspector has an electonic phone-sized reader that can "read" the thing you paid with. If the "electronic id token" matches the payment "id token" on the TFL record (stored in the bus payment machine and the inspector's device) then you're fine. If it doesn't then then they will take your details or ask you to "leave" the bus. This happens so often on 149 busses and no-one has ever had to open their banking app on their phone.

Exactly. I see this happen in Croydon on a weekly basis. When it happens to school boys and men (I've never seen a women found to have not paid in all honesty, it's mainly young men) they are just turfed off the bus. I've never, ever seen anyone arrested. I've seen many refuse to give their details and they just throw them off.

100%. Your composure, yet again, is really something else.

It is heartbreaking. Women who are calling themselves allies of other women are anything but if the woman is brown or black. The amount of white people telling black women what they are experiencing isn't what they are experiencing is shocking. It has really opened my eyes to people I come across in real life. I am pretty sure that a few of the mums on my children's whatsapp group post here (yes, I see you. And you are nowhere near as refined you'd like to think you are).

And as always, mumsnet let them run with it. And delete the posts calling them out rather than delete the racist posts.

Racism towards their user base is not an issue for mumsnet, it seems.

I think the police have gone rogue to be honest. They know that they are disliked but don’t care.

I used to respect them but now I believe half of them join to bully people, because they can.

That is fucking awful. So sorry you need to put up with this shit, honestly can't even imagine how it feels. Then you come on to a forum where your experiences are scoffed at, as if someone who will most likely never have to worry about something like this knows better.

@AntiSocial6DaysAWeek This isn't intended as a dig at you whatsoever because I understand what you're saying, but I do think by and large many of the women for whom things like this will never be a reality are actually aware of it and have reasoned that if it has to be someone then it's best it's not them. So they are willing to counter the facts to deal with the cognitive dissonance.

It's demonstrable on this thread alone in all the posts you see which say something akin to the incident has 'racist undertones', 'perhaps racist', 'hint of racism' - the lessening of the impact of racism allows them to appear empathetic without confirming what they can clearly see to be the truth - that this can and does happen to Black women. It's why they spend entire threads asking for 'proof' and twisting themselves every which way but genuine to decry anything resembling racism (this is hugely manifest on the forum at large when Meghan Markle was the theme du jour 'just something about her, she's too uppity etc etc). The lesser among us in those instances will then wheel out their sister's husband's half-black son as evidence they cannot possibly be racist.

White women's racism is a unique and separate brand to the rest. I am not being in the slightest bit facetious that the day I read the thread about 'WFH as a feminist issue' referring to the notion that women are still expected to be career women yet shut out from the deserved recognition they would receive in the workplace because they're now working from home and for all the thanks they get they're still expected to carry the mental load at home, my jaw was on the floor. Working from home has been nothing short of a godsend for many Black women specifically to get away from their white female counterparts.

It is difficult to tell who is at fault here because the video seems to start halfway. However the Met do have form for being racist and abusing their police powers especially with young black people so I don't find it hard to believe that she could have been treated unfairly . That poor little boy. Want to give him a cuddle.

Also I'm pretty sure the black women who describe their experiences with the police aren't lying. What would they gain from that?

It's horrific that these attitudes still remain in the police and society at large. Black women (and men) deserve better.

Truth!

I think you're a very understanding person despite so many others not being understanding of what you are saying.

I genuinely do not know any black people. My friend has mixed race children (although they stay quite far so I haven't seen them for years) and both my sons have one mixed race friend each at school. Everyone is white.

I can understand people in the first instance thinking 'oh, it wouldn't have happened like that' as an automatic reaction because that's their/my experience, but when people are literally telling you 'no, these things do happen. They happen to me, my family, my friends daily' and people refuse to even attempt to believe it's possible...I honestly don't know how you can keep your composure or even look at threads like this because it must be so awful to read.

I was a total bookworm growing up and was never away from the library. When I was 9 or 10 I read my first Mildred D. Taylor book and I remember the absolute shock I felt thinking people got treated like that. I finished reading her books then I remember not long after trying to take a book out from the young adult section that had an illustration of a black person in chains on the front, and the librarian told my Dad it would be inappropriate for me so he made me put it back. I defiantly went back and sat in the library to read it, and I have read and watched so many things ever since.

I'm waffling but I suppose my point is, if people are not willing to learn then they cannot have an opinion. Well, we can never have an opinion because it is not our lives and never will be, but it would help people try to understand. Some of the comments must be so hurtful to read.

Apologies if I appear to be minimising anything talking about books (I'm really not), think it's just that because my young mind was so innocent when I read about other children my age being treated the way they did it genuinely had a profound effect that's never left me.

I still make mistakes, all i can do is try and learn/listen.

But I never look at this topic specifically (I'm assuming I'll have read one through trending now at some points) and even I can see just from this and the thread about the white woman on the bike the difference.

No one can see the footage on either video leading up to each recording but only one woman was vilified.

I'm in Wolverhampton but I did live in Hampstead Garden Suburb and Finchley.

Are you denying the accounts on here from women who have experience of racism?

I’m a white woman living in London and have never experienced anything like this but when black women tell me this is a racist incident and it’s an aggression they’ve lived with all their lives , I listen and I learn from it as it’s their lived experience, not mine.

A woman, or man, is allowed to have an emotional reaction to something like this incident and maybe allow a situation to escalate more than they would have wanted but the reaction from the police was heavy handed and over the top and directed towards a black woman in front of her young child. Of course this sort of thing was happened to a white person before but that’s really not the point here.

if people can’t see that this is another example of deep rooted racism within the met police at best you’re incredibly naive. As someone above said this wouldn’t happen to middle class white woman shopping in Waitrose.

That's it isn't it, it's someone else's lived experience. If a man tries to tell a woman about her lived experiences as a woman there is uproar so why is this any different?

Honestly, such a stark contrast of opinions on MN between this incident and the bike one.

I said I was exiting this thread due to the racism but here I am again lol…just wanted to say This kind of happened to me recently in Cheshire but I didn’t fully realise it at the time. The ticket inspector started barking out tickets please and he was walking quite fast towards the back where I was and a (white) boy across from me in the aisle.

He was looking at both of us initially when he said tickets please but then standing very close to me. I got my ticket out and showed him without thinking anything about it but then I noticed after he did that the boy across from me kinda muttered and shrugged as if he couldn’t find his ticket but the inspector just left immediately without a word barely looked at him so he was never interested in checking his ticket!! . I Strongly believe that if roles were reversed and I was the one who didn’t have my ticket he wouldn’t have just walked away! So yeah I can imagine that this is a modern day watered down version of asking minorities only for tickets. I can imagine it was more blatant even 10-20 years ago.

Sorry if this has been mentioned within thread but what’s the ‘bike one’?

@Oatycookies

I'm sorry you have had these experiences. We all know it shouldn't happen.

As a white woman I don't experience much racism, and even if something might be racist it probably isn't.

Example: in a classroom talking to another teacher and a girl said, "you can't cook" I said that yes I could and she qualified it as, "Well you can't make Jamaican food" and I said, "I'll have you know I make a mean salt fish and ackee".

It could be interpreted as a racist comment but the look in her eyes was just 'does not compute'. In her experience white people don't, or didn't, cook Jamaican food.

Another time I answered the door to a delivery driver who looked at me, then at the delivery note and asked, "Mr Wong?", my housemate was Chinese, again it was more surprise than malicious.

Honestly, such a stark contrast of opinions on MN between this incident and the bike one

Are you saying you did a survey and compared the same posters and the change in opinions across each thread?

That's very detailed work you have done, can you link us to it so that we can see your methodology? It would be a shame to keep this analysis under a bushel.

I am not sure, but just maybe the the original poster of that comment was referring to the fact that there are white women on this thread acknowledging that Black women are treated differently ( often negatively) and have different experiences (again very often negatively) to white women. Also that white feminists poster's (not all, but a vocally dominant contingent) are trying to oppress black women. On the bike thread the experiences of black women (and men) and were very vocally shouted down. The thread was held up as men being the only treat. When in reality, white feminists like them are as just as much a threat to black women as any rapist could ever be. it's a shame they are the most vocal group.