The Metropolitan Police Service has failed the Jewish community. Too often, the advancement of senior officers depends less on what they do than on how well they can write up what they claim to have done.
Mastery of the internal “write-up” has become a route to promotion, and nowhere is this more damaging than in public order policing.
Every major demonstration begins with a familiar ritual. A senior officer sets out the strategic objectives of the operation, almost always the same three: the prevention and detection of crime; the protection of life and property; and the maintenance of the King’s Peace. On paper, these objectives are routinely declared achieved.
Yet this is often a triumph of presentation over reality. Like the emperor’s new clothes, as long as the paperwork can be made to suggest success, senior officers congratulate themselves on a job well done and move one step closer to the next promotion. The lived experience on the streets, particularly for Jewish Londoners, tells a very different story.
The gap between what is written and what is actually happening has become the source of repeated failure. Until outcomes on the ground matter more than narratives on the page, the Met’s assurances will continue to ring hollow.
In October 2023, the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, attempted to set clear expectations for policing the pro-Palestinian demonstrations. In an open letter to police chiefs, she urged a proactive approach. Chants such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” she argued, should be understood as expressing a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world and “may amount to a racially aggravated section 5 public order offence”. Glorification of terrorism and harassment of communities, she insisted, should be confronted head on.
Her stance was politically inconvenient. It also cost her the job.
The failure to follow that advice has allowed the Overton window to shift, drip by drip, towards the normalisation of Jew-hatred. Eventually, the drips have become something far darker: the mark of Jewish blood.
In the early weeks of the demonstrations, the police could claim success. Jews largely stayed away, leaving little immediate focus for the antisemites present. I walked through several marches myself, sat drinking coffee while people carrying placards calling for the death of my family passed by. It ate at my soul. Yet I knew the commanders I had once worked with would mark these operations as successful: the King’s peace was maintained; there was no one to report any crimes.
This false peace could not last. Jews and their allies eventually emerged. Gideon Falter was told not to cross the street for his own safety.
The police had no right to act this way. Cowardice, not law, drove these decisions. Officers are required to act against those causing a breach of the peace, not those acting lawfully, especially when there is time to plan. Protective tactics, such as placing officers around lawful protesters to facilitate their rights under the Human Rights Act, should have been routine. Instead, these individuals were targeted.
As counter-demonstrations by Stop the Hate and others grew and became focal points for offending, criminal behaviour became impossible to ignore. The pretence that there was no offending linked to the pro-Palestinian marches could no longer be sustained. Yet still, arrests fell disproportionately on those opposing antisemitism, rather than those expressing it.
I believe police leaders made a calculation. Better to absorb a false arrest or two than to accept responsibility for disorder or riot. The write-ups could remain positive.
Meanwhile, the unthinkable became routine. Calls for people to die were chanted on British streets. Police stood by as speakers demanded the removal of the “cancerous Zionist entity” or crowds screamed “death to the IDF”. When Jewish protesters held a sign stating the obvious, that “Globalise the Intifada” is a call to murder Jews, police planned their arrest even as they were physically attacked.
British Jews have lived under constant pressure since. A continuous noise, always present. The Met’s recent declaration that “globalise the intifada” has crossed a threshold for enforcement is not a gift to the Jewish community. At best, it may slightly ease the burden created by months of normalised calls for the deaths of our families and friends. But let us be clear: this is not a sudden show of courage, Commissioner Mark Rowley has not suddenly grown a spine.
As the war in Gaza has ended and the demonstrations continue to disrupt London day after day, while Jewish bodies lie in the streets of Manchester and Bondi, the lesson has finally become unavoidable and Sir Mark Rowley has realised what Jews knew from the start. You cannot appease a hateful mob. Police leaders may believe their familiar objectives were met. In reality, they failed British Jews, even if they could not see it at the time.
Now, as that failure becomes impossible to deny, enforcement begins, not as justice, but as damage control.
Let us hope it is not too late. But let us also refuse to allow them to write up another lie.
Gill Levy is a former Metropolitan Police officer
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