As one of the founders of Reclaim These Streets, I rarely get to talk about good news. As a group of campaigners concerned with women’s safety, in the past year we have organised too many vigils for women who were killed by men and should still be with us. We have supported grieving communities such as those in Kidbrooke, where Sabina Nessa lived, and Plymouth, where an incel gunman shot seven people. And we’ve watched as violence against women and girls slips down a political agenda that thinks a centuries-old problem such as misogyny can be fixed with a few streetlights.
But this week, finally, we have a win. We beat the Metropolitan police in the high court. Our victory spells out, in no uncertain terms, that the police were wrong to block our attempt to organise a vigil in March 2021 for Sarah Everard on Clapham Common. At every stage, the ruling shows, the police’s interpretation of the law and their decisions were legally wrong.
It is a vindication – because while none of us imagined we would end up in court, we were unwilling to back down in the face of a police force determined to silence women’s voices. And, at a time where protest rights are under threat in the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill, the ruling sets an important legal precedent for protesters.
Last March feels a long time ago now. It was as cold and dark in the evenings as it is now, but we were in the middle of a lockdown too. Stuck at home in south London in tier 4 restrictions, my friends and I found that, faced with Sarah’s image on missing posters on every street, we started self-imposing restrictions too. We didn’t go for a run after dark; we shared our location even when we had just popped to the corner shop; we couldn’t stop looking over our shoulders.
The turning point was when the police started knocking on doors locally, suggesting women take extra care and avoid going out after dark. Our fear turned to resentment. Why should women change our behaviour in response to a problem not of our making? We decided to organise: we needed to reclaim our streets, our parks, our public spaces.
Fast forward 10 months, and I was waiting outside the court building for my lawyers, chatting to one of the photographers stationed there. “Who are you here for today?” I asked. “You” he replied.
It was this exchange that brought home the magnitude of what we were doing. We had been told time and again by the Met police that our plans for the vigil were unlawful, that we were likely to be fined £10,000 each and that we might find ourselves arrested under the Serious Crime Act. Instead of backing down, we stood our ground.
We were approached by the lawyer Adam Wagner on Twitter initially, and just 24 hours after we had first posted about the vigil online, we had an amazing legal team who wrote to the police challenging what felt like a blanket ban on protest. Going to court the next day was done via Zoom at my kitchen table.
The judge, Mr Justice Holgate, reflected our understanding of the law: that our human right to protest couldn’t be ignored. There needed to be a balancing exercise between how we exercise that right alongside the public health situation that banned mass gatherings. We met the police again to try and find a way forward after the judgment. However, while we were in that meeting the Met issued a statement: women needed to find a different, lawful way to remember Sarah. It felt like a punch to the stomach. They had misunderstood the law, and then, after the judge clarified it for them, they dug in their heels and pushed ahead regardless.
We were forced to cancel the vigil, but it went ahead without us. And we all saw on the news how the protesters were treated by Met police officers. Women protesting violence at the hands of a serving officer being violently treated by serving officers.
Still, we continued our battle in the courts. It is hard to hold public institutions like the Met police to account. The next months were a fundraising slog. I was overwhelmed by the thousands of ordinary people who donated a little each – a fiver here and a tenner there. Their collective donations demonstrated to me the wide support there is for our case and the extent to which people care about women’s safety and protest rights.
And it worked, we were able to refile our claim on amended grounds. We attended court in person this time, and it is nothing like the crime dramas on TV would have you believe – no glamour, fireworks or slam-dunk testimonies. Instead, a lot of wigs, gowns and heavy lever-arch files.
I couldn’t be more pleased with today’s outcome. The judgment leaves no room for manoeuvre: in the words of Lord Justice Warby, the decisions and communications from the Met police were “legally mistaken”, “simplistic”, “misinformed” and “misleading”.
The ball is in their court now. Women’s trust in the police has been eroded so much over the past 12 months – so now they have a choice. Do they genuinely want to rebuild trust with women in the capital, or will their pride and pigheadedness lead them to appealing the court’s ruling? I am confident that any judge hearing an appeal will uphold this week’s judgment.
So instead of spending more public money taking us back to court, I hope the police will instead do what they should have been focused on all along: invest in measures to tackle misogyny and end violence against women and girls.
Anna Birley is a founder of Reclaim These Streets and a local Labour & Co-operative councillor in Lambeth
