VILE FAN NTASISTS POLICE AFTER HIJACKING PEACEFUL PROTEST
MAYOR’S FURY AT EXTREMISTS WHO INJURED
RIOTERS who fought with police in Bristol after a peaceful march held to defend the right to protest have been condemned by the city’s mayor as ‘fantasists’.
Twenty-one officers were injured in the ‘kill the Bill’ clashes on Sunday night.
A dozen of their vehicles were vandalised – including two set on fire – and a woman appeared to taunt them by urinating as they lined up behind riot shields.
Bristol’s main police station had many of its windows smashed by the mob, who also broke windscreens at random in a car park popular with NHS staff.
Six people were arrested for violent disorder and two more were held for possession of an offensive weapon.
Two officers who suffered broken bones have been released from hospital, Avon and Somerset Police said yesterday.
It did not say how many protesters were injured. Bristol’s Labour mayor Marvin
Rees accused those who took part of ‘political illiteracy’. He said he feared the violence would be used to justify the government’s controversial policing Bill, which prompted the march.
‘It’s selfish, it is self-indulgent and selfcentred activity – people living out their revolutionary fantasies,’ he said.
‘This has nothing to do with being in lockdown for a year. What has injuring police officers, smashing windows, burning cars got to do with the challenges we face as a city right now?’
Under the Bill, protesters could be jailed for taking part in demonstrations deemed to be noisy or a ‘nuisance’.
And judges would be handed the power to sentence people for up to ten years in prison for damaging a memorial. It comes after Black Lives Matter activists pulled
down a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol last summer.
Ch Con Andy Marsh said up to 3,000 people took part in the peaceful protest earlier in the day, but ‘a hardcore of serious criminals’ triggered the disorder.
‘I believe the events were hijacked by extremists, people who were determined to commit criminal damage, to generate very negative sentiment about policing and to assault our brave officers,’ he said.
Condemning the rioting, Boris Johnson said people have a right to protest but it should be done ‘peacefully and legally’.