Heavy police presence foils dastardly bicyclists

[whoozit]

I was wandering up Bond Street just after midday, and saw a crowd of Reclaim the Streets bicyclists up ahead. I've seen them around town a few times before, and usually they'll be moving slowly but not blocking traffic. It looks to be an excellent form of passive protesting and after all, someone on a bicycle is hardly threatening, are they?

Obviously, someone in authority was concerned that these evildoers could be . . erm, well, I'm not entirely sure what they thought a group of 50 bicyclists could do that would merit following them with:

- 5 police on bicycles
- at least 10 (count 'em) bike cops
- Jam sandwich with two officers
- Van with several officers wearing body armour

Now, this struck me as being so completely excessive and disproportionate to the level of policing I've seen for any other event, I started to query whether the stories we've been hearing about the Americans dictating security might just be true.

Not the best PR exercise you've ever carried out, guys.

[whoozit]

tonyrec said:

As i left work tonight, there was sadly another Fatal on the A1........miles of tailbacks and not many Trafpols to deal with it......priorities eh?

I never meant to disagree with the fact that a bicycle mob is a pain in the arse. Just that it's less of a pain in the arse than the severe diversion of assets from normal policing duties. After all, there aren't that many bike cops in London. Having 10 of them controlling one small group would have made a material dent in resources for the rest of the capital. Multiply that by the number of other security-type operations that must have been going on at the same time and it becomes difficult to understand how that level of presence was justified - particularly as I've seen similar bicycle activist events that were much larger and had far fewer police attending. As you said, priorities were a little skewed. Who set those priorities?