A British think tank on Monday alleged the existence of a “two-tier” law enforcement policy in London, which it said was also evidenced in the handling of anti-Israel rallies.
The 50-page report by Policy Exchange, a prominent conservative think tank established in 2002, reviewed the first three years of the six-year term of Mark Rowley, who has served as the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis since September 2022.
While the report does not focus on the implications of the anti-Israel rallies that began taking place in London after Oct. 7, 2023, the handling of those events is mentioned in several parts of the document.
“Despite the denials, it has become increasingly evident that ‘two-tier policing’ is a reality,” states the report, authored by David Spencer, head of crime and justice at Policy Exchange and a former detective chief inspector with the Metropolitan Police Service.
Spencer noted several instances he said exemplified this, including “failure to make arrests, when they should have been made, during the early stages of the large-scale pro-Palestine protests.”
On Oct. 25, the report noted, the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party faced restrictions in staging a rally at the heavily-Muslim Tower Hamlets, with police citing how it “has the largest percentage of Muslim residents anywhere in the UK and the prospect of this protest taking place in the heart of the borough has been the cause of significant concern locally.”
Such a decision “may well have been justified on the grounds of preventing serious public disorder,” Spencer wrote, “however, the willingness of the police to impose such stringent restrictions to safeguard the local Muslim population, while apparently being unwilling to go similarly far on behalf of the Jewish community or the broader public at previous events, indicates a readiness among senior officers to apply different standards to different groups.”
Last month, police declined to heed Jewish groups’ pleas to ban an anti-Israel rally from taking place outside a synagogue, eventually moving the protesters away from the house of worship after they had already assembled there.
Claims of two-tier enforcement in the United Kingdom are common and go beyond the anti-Israel protest issue. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is accused of leading a crackdown on what authorities define as “hate speech” on the right while ignoring offensive rhetoric on the left.
The first major anti-Israel rally in London happened on Nov. 15, 2023, the report states, leading to disruptions and “compromised the rights of Parliamentarians and others to make their way to and from Parliament.”
Since this protest, “the Metropolitan Police have not significantly and consistently changed their approach to protests in and around the Palace of Westminster,” which is the seat of the British parliament, the report continues. On June 4, “Again, the police were unwilling to ensure that free and unobstructed access to Parliament was maintained.”
In a statement about the report, a Metropolitan Police spokesperson said: “Our approach is always proportionate and lawful. We work to balance the right to protest with the need to keep people safe and minimise disruption.”
Gary Mond, the chairman of the National Jewish Assembly, told JNS last month that he “lost confidence in the police a while ago, like many in the Jewish community, and probably most.”
Police forces across the United Kingdom, he said, “have tolerated hate marches and their Jew-hating participants on a regular basis.” They also have “no problem in accepting calls for jihad as normal,” he said. Numerous cases of anti-Jewish discrimination have been exposed recently, he added, and “most U.K. Jews regard the situation as utterly intolerable, but feel sadly powerless to do anything about it.”
The report by Policy Exchange recommended transferring responsibility for the Metropolitan Police from the office of Mayor Sadiq Khan to the Home Office.
