Photo via @philAllottPFCC/Twitter,
Tim Dennell/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
October 1, 2021, 11:39 am*
Women in the U.K. and beyond, and also people everywhere of all genders, are not happy with North Yorkshire Police Commissioner Phillip Allott for suggesting that women need to be “streetwise” about what constitutes a legal arrest so that they can avoid the fate of Sarah Everard. This comment comes on the heels of a rare life-without-parole sentence (referred to as “whole life” in the U.K.) sentence for the former cop who was convicted of her murder — a case that rocked a nation not as used to police violence as we are here in the U.S.
Featured Video
Hide
“So women, first of all, need to be streetwise about when they can be arrested and when they can’t be arrested,” said Allott on the Everard murder during a BBC interview. “She should never have been arrested and submitted to that.”
Advertisement
Hide
“Perhaps women need to consider in terms of the legal process, to just learn a bit about that legal process.”
These remarks were quickly and resoundingly panned as a clear and classic case of victim blaming, with Allott seeming to suggest that it was Everard’s fault she got murdered by a police officer because she didn’t know that Couzens was engaging in an unlawful arrest before he abducted her. Many found his words to be not so different from people asking what a woman was wearing at the time she was abducted, assaulted, and/or murdered by a man.
Following the swift backlash, Allott issued an apology on Twitter retracting the statements, which he called “insensitive.”
Unfortunately for him, the damage was already done. And that’s on top of the damage already done by U.K. police during the entire case, starting with Couzens. Women’s rights and anti-sexism advocates poured out of the woodwork to condemn Allott for his comments and calling them much worse things than “insensitive.”
Advertisement
Hide
“These comments are appalling,” wrote Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon on Twitter. “It’s not up to women to fix this. It’s not us who need to change. The problem is male violence, not women’s ‘failure’ to find ever more inventive ways to protect ourselves against it. For change to happen, this needs to be accepted by everyone.”
Legal experts have also stepped in to say it’s unreasonable to expect any regular person to refuse orders by a police officer with a warrant card regardless of what they might know about legal requirements for arrest due to the power held by cops over the people they’re ostensibly supposed to protect.
“There is not a competent lawyer in the country that would have advised Sarah Everard to resist arrest by a police officer with a warrant card,” said English lawyer and legal writer David Allen Green.
Pretty much anyone who cares at all about women instead of dismissing the violence against them with victim blaming rhetoric had something to say to Commissioner Allott, including calling for his resignation.
Advertisement
Hide
North Yorkshire police commissioner, Philip Allott, saying that Sarah Everard ‘should never have submitted’ to being arrested, and women should be ‘more streetwise’ about the legal process.
Just how the FUCK are we still at this stage, six months after her murder? pic.twitter.com/1hiGRY2PFT
— Max Morgan
(@SpillerOfTea) October 1, 2021
Advertisement
Hide
*First Published: October 1, 2021, 11:34 am
0 Comments