The comments acting like if a woman is an actress, or if she supports trans rights, she somehow deserves to be violently thrown to the ground by half a dozen men are just vile. Let's not engage in purity spirals about what standard a woman has to achieve before she's allowed rights.
I don’t really blame individual police officers either, I blame whoever was instructing them. If their orders were “Go in there and break it up and clear the area” then going to the front and taking the ringleaders out of their will be a strategy that they cover in police training surely?
You absolutely should blame individual officers, because being there it was obvious that some of the officers held the women in utter contempt and just wanted to have the chance to shove girls around. Some of the police were nice and trying to protect the flowers and protect the safety of the crowd, most were neutral and just acting professionally, but a minority were acting in an overtly hostile manner (making unprovoked unpleasant and argumentative comments) right from the start, long before it turned into a protest or got heated. The actions of those individuals did a lot to stoke tensions and it was obvious those individuals wanted to exert their power over young women and put women in their place.
The police also left before the vigil ended and the rest of the vigil went ahead peacefully with almost no police presence. The fact the police created a human wall around the bandstand was just weird considering the bandstand was full of male press and male police officers, and about half a dozen seated female protestors. If the police had just not gone onto the bandstand in the first place, there would have been no need to form a wall. They formed a wall so they could kettle the girls, because they wanted to make arrests to prove a point.
It's telling that the police left the aggressive male protestors alone (including the shouty anti-maskers) but only targeted the young women.