METROPOLITAN Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has pledged that demonstrations in the UK in support of protesters in Iran will be policed \u201cwithout fear or favour\u201d.<\/p>\n
Asked about the protests on GB News, he said: \u201cWe police protest without fear or favour under the law as Parliament\u2019s created it, we can\u2019t make up laws. We have to do that under those laws.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think what I\u2019ve seen over the last few years is the most challenging period of protest ever. And our command teams who are making the decisions and the officers on the streets, it is routine now for one side of the argument to say you were too lenient on that group and the support of that group saying you were too harsh on them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re constantly criticised from both sides, because we\u2019re the people on the street dealing with tension and trying to manage that tension and deal with illegal behaviour. So for example, there was a protest over the weekend outside a restaurant, and we\u2019ve made an arrest there, and we\u2019re looking to CPS as to whether we can prosecute somebody for incitement for racial hatred from that offence.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll keep doing those sorts of things. We\u2019ll keep intervening when people break the law, and trying to find that balance between freedom of speech, which I know is really important to people, and your ability to express your opinion, but also balancing that with not doing this in a way which intimidates or affects the rights of others.\u201d<\/p>\n
SIR MARK ROWLEY GB News.jpeg<\/p>\n
On Phone theft, he said: \u201cPhone theft is a really important issue for us in London, isn\u2019t it? What it means to people, as you say, Eamon is enormous.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a case recently where we managed to recover a phone shortly after it was stolen. It belongs to a doctor, and he was really worried about his ability to be on call and serve his patients without his phone. And that\u2019s just a very powerful example.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve turned the corner in the last year. Since April last year, this financial year, phone theft is now down by 15%. We\u2019re doing that through two things. We\u2019re arresting the people off the street, the people doing the thieving. But also, there\u2019s international organised crime exporting phones across the world, particularly to China, and we\u2019re intercepting those gangs and putting them in prison for organised crime offences.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re also asking the phone companies to do more to improve the security so that your stolen phone can\u2019t be recycled and used again as new because that\u2019s really important. We all need to be sort of sensible in terms of our own physical precautions, but I\u2019m asking people to go out on the streets of London feeling safe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked about failures that resulted in 5,000 recruits not being properly vetted, he said: \u201cThe work we\u2019ve been doing to bear down on standards, we\u2019ve removed more than 1,500 men and women from the Met in the last three years for standards-related issues. That\u2019s more than triple the rate before.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re the most vigorous, most serious you could possibly be on these issues. That data is a moment in time, some of that, some of those cases in there are with people who are currently going through vetting systems. Others will be minor offences.<\/p>\n
\u201cI will have people who, when they\u2019re 14, got a caution for a minor offence, and they join the police when they\u2019re 25, or 30. So there\u2019s a range of different factors in there, but the public can be assured we\u2019re being as robust and vigorous as is possible to make sure that we have these outcomes in the organisation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe thing I\u2019m most proud of is all the people being removed from the Met, that\u2019s not about me and a few senior people doing it. A lot of that is about the good men and women of the Met who care about Londoners, the ones who go out protecting victims day and day out.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey want a safe they want a safe Met, and they\u2019re giving more information, which is helping us deal with the colleagues who shouldn\u2019t be in the organisation. That\u2019s why we\u2019re being so successful, and that\u2019s why trust in the Metropolitan Police is growing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"METROPOLITAN Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has pledged that demonstrations in the UK in support of protesters in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":692242,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[748,393,4884,257,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-692241","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-london","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115885230245161612","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=692241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692241\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/692242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=692241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=692241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=692241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}