WHERE WERE THE POLICE?

Met faces vandalism storm as top officer in Bristol insists he has ‘no regrets’

POLICe were criticised last night for failing to stop protesters pulling down the statue of slave trader edward Colston in Bristol and defacing the monument to Sir Winston Churchill in Westminster.

Superintendent Andy Bennett said he had ‘no regrets’ about not intervening as activists dragged the statue of Colston to Bristol harbour and threw it into the docks.

Demonstrators were also able to graffiti the Churchill statue in Parliament Square, writing that he was ‘a racist’ in black marker pen.

Privately, there was disquiet among some senior Government ministers about the softly- softly approach adopted by police when yesterday’s protests began to turn ugly. One Whitehall source said: ‘I don’t know what the Metropolitan Police have been up to but they have got some questions to answer.

How was it that people were able to deface Churchill’s statue again? It’s the same in Bristol – what were the police doing while people were climbing up that statue and putting ropes round it to pull it down?’

even the protester who claims he ‘set the spark’ for the toppling of the Colston statue in Bristol was scathing of the police response.

John McAllister, pictured below, said the watching police officers could easily have intervened in the ‘dangerous’ situation by dispersing the ‘very peaceful’ crowd.

Mr McAllister, 71, a former university research assistant, said the attack on the statue was a spontaneous plan. ‘It was covered in a sort of huge black cloth. I knew the plaque was at the bottom so I tore off the black covering and shouted to the crowd about the inscription. It says Teddy Colston was a virtuous and wise son of Bristol, but the man was a slave trader.

‘I said, “This is an insult to our city”. People around me agreed, and they quickly tore off the whole shroud and started climbing over the statue.

‘ Then people wanted to tear it

Defence and Security Editor down.’ Mr McAllister likened the incident to the toppling of a statue of Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 2003.

Crowds with ropes pulled Colston’s statue down. Many placed a knee on it – copying what happened to George Floyd – as it lay on the ground before it was dragged to the harbour and dropped in.

‘I guess I’m the guy who kicked it off,’ Mr McAllister said. ‘The police did nothing. I saw some of them there, but they didn’t lift a finger. It was so dangerous.

‘The first duty of the police is to protect the health and lives of the public, but they did nothing.’

Bristol’s Labour mayor Marvin Rees, who is mixed race, told Channel 4 News: ‘I would never pretend that the statue of a slaver in the middle of Bristol, the city in which I grew up and someone who may well have owned one of my ancestors was anything other than a personal affront to me.’ But he added that as an elected politician he could not ‘support criminal damage or social disorder’.

Superintendent Bennett, Bristol Area Commander for Avon and Somerset Police, defended the force’s decision not to intervene.

He told the BBC: ‘We know that it’s been a historical figure that’s caused the black community quite a lot of angst over the last couple of years. So whilst I am disappointed that people would damage one of our statues, I do understand why it’s happened. It’s very symbolic.

‘You might wonder why we didn’t intervene and why we just allowed people to put it in the docks.

‘We made a very tactical decision that to stop people from doing that act may have caused further disorder, and we decided the safest thing to do in terms of our policing tactics was to allow it to take place.

‘Our policing style was from the outset low key. We were not able to get to the statue in time to protect it. There was clearly a pre-planned attempt to bring it down – they had grappling ropes and the right tools. Once it was down we made a decision that the right thing to do was to allow it to happen because what we did not want is tension.’ Asked whether officers should have stopped the protesters, Mr Bennett said: ‘I understand why people might think we should have intervened.

‘This was a very difficult policing operation. There’s a lot of context that sits around it, and I believe we did the right thing.’ He said he had no regrets about the tactics used.