Perhaps women need to consider
WHAT???????????
Yes definitely because the police are always so understanding when people resist arrest, as everyone knows. So stupid of Sarah Everard not to shout “NO!” and flag down a bus (because there is always a bus coming down the street at any given moment, and the drivers always stop for people waving at them nowhere near a bus stop).
A police boss who said women “need to be streetwise” about powers of arrest in the wake of the Sarah Everard case has apologised for his remarks.
North Yorkshire commissioner Philip Allott sparked fury when he said Ms Everard “never should have submitted” to the arrest by her killer
But her killer was a cop. When a cop arrests you…
During Couzens’ sentencing at the Old Bailey, it emerged he had tricked Ms Everard, originally from York, by falsely arresting her for a breach of coronavirus guidelines.
Speaking on BBC Radio York earlier, Conservative Mr Allott said women should be aware this was not an indictable offence – one considered serious enough to warrant a prison sentence or crown court hearing.
And so you just walk away from the cop, and the cop lets you walk away, and everything is just fine.
Nicola Sturgeon tweeted it was not “up to women to fix this”.
“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,” she said.
Legal commentator David Allen Green added: “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.”
Allott has apologized and withdrawn the comments. I suppose what he was doing was running the scenario in his head and trying to intervene. I think we all do that. If only – if only – if only – if only she had gone another way, if only she had left an hour earlier, if only he had had a flat tire – if only she had realized he couldn’t arrest her for that, and run like hell screaming her head off.
But we can’t intervene in the scenario. We can’t do anything at all.
Yeah, that gets unworkable fast.
If you put it out there that it is the responsibility of each individual to decide for themselves whether to submit to arrest or run/fight for their lives, then you are going to have a lot more people resisting arrest.
The U.S. state of California has inadvertently created a situation like this. They passed a law that says, basically, 3 felony convictions = life in prison. So a cop stops someone who already has 2 felony conviction, and the suspect shoots the cop. They have nothing to lose.
Phillip “Backpedals” Allot should get some kind of award for new frontiers in victim-blaming.
I am almost surprised he didn’t say “What was she thinking, getting arrested dressed like that?”
I await the trial of the first woman who refuses arrest on the grounds that the Commissioner told them they should.
Perhaps all women need to be criminal lawyers just to know when not to be arrested.
The problem is that many (most?) people seem to believe that individuals have free will in a deterministic universe, that individuals are not constrained by factors not under their control. Sure, she could have/should have resisted arrest but so many factors made that an untenable choice. I suppose that even applies to the murderer to an extent but he clearly had more choices he could make and he chose evil.
I honestly think that this is where she should have used her x-ray eyes to kill him before he could harm her. Women, why do you hestitate on these things?
Seriously. Why are women so lazy about engaging the x-ray eyes?
What about the women being arrested for tweeting? How can they resist arrest?
Exactly, tigger, @#7.
Women have to know that they can’t be arrested for “breaking Covid rules,” yet (1) that was the EXACT reason the police roughly shut down the Sarah Everard vigil, and (2) women (and some men) are being harassed by police, and arrested and criminally charged for the temerity of saying biological sex is real, i.e., f*ing thought crime.
Besides, he was a f*ing police officer, and he carries that authority. ANYONE resists at their personal peril.
Hail a bus? What? What for? The answer seems to be, “to throw the woman under.”
Men who like to think of themselves as being the good guys really ought to stop advising women how not to become victims of bad guys (as if we don’t already spend every waking moment, and quite a large proportion of our sleeping ones, thinking about that exact thing) and start vocally protesting the bad guys. Instead, they’re pretending the bad guys are some force of nature they can do nothing about.
tigger, that old “boys will be boys” routine is a disgrace. My mother employed it frequently because it was easier to let her daughters be abused than stop her son from abusing.
I’m so sorry, iknklast. Countless generations of women have been worn down by patriarchal attitudes which encourages the male half of the human race to behave as badly as they can get away with towards the female half. Your mother was wrong not to defend you from your brother; but she wasn’t the worst party. He was. He should not have abused you, and both your parents should have raised him to be the kind of boy and man who wouldn’t do such a thing. Having chosen to do it, he should have faced consequences. I bet he never did, though.
The only true crime, it seems, is that which causes harm to a man of higher status. Women and girls have no intrinsic value, only that which attaches to them by virtue of being connected to a high status man. We’re still chattels in so many ways. If we dare to think that we can own ourselves, that just gives men the idea that we can be attacked with impunity; no man will be offended and put the perpetrator at risk.
tigger, you’re right.
Every man knows men who are flying serious red flags. If we don’t keep as constant an eye as possible on those men, then we are absolutely part of the problem. We should always create options so that women don’t have to be alone with men like that, if they don’t want to be, for instance. We should make it clear to those men – and to all other men in situational or geographic proximity – that we’re watching them.
If we don’t do that, we certainly shouldn’t get to express shock and outrage on social media when that man does violence against women.We shouldn’t get to shrug off the blame.
By and large, we don’t do this because it is socially awkward. That’s it. The price we’d have to pay for greatly increasing the safety of women and girls is that it would be a little bit annoying and we’d feel uncomfortable admitting our share of the blame.