London’s Metropolitan Police force again attempted to downplay the criminality and violence of the multicultural Notting Hill Carnival, claiming that the street festival passed “largely without incident”, despite a record number of arrests and a man drowning to death.
According to initial estimates from Scotland Yard, there were 636 arrests over the course of the two-day Afro-Caribbean event, a figure that will likely continue to rise. People were arrested for various offences, including sexual assaults, stabbings, and attacks on emergency workers.
The 636 arrests this year easily surpassed last year’s record of 528. According to the Met, 242 arrests were made on Sunday and 394 on Monday. The record came despite the Met having banned over 300 people from attending.
Over the course of Sunday and Monday, stop and search operations resulted in 62 weapons being seized, including a handgun. This comes despite the festival organisers deploying metal detectors at the entrances and police seizing dozens of weapons such as so-called zombie knives prior to the Carnival.
Tragically, a man believed to have been in his 20s also lost his life Monday afternoon after fleeing from police. The man had entered into the water of canals near Meanwhile Gardens, where he apparently drowned despite efforts by police to perform CPR.
Regardless of the death or the record number of arrests, the Metropolitan Police declared that the Carnival had “passed largely without incident with a significant proactive policing operation ensuring the minority who posed a risk to the safety of the majority were deterred or intervened against.”
Commander Claire Smart, who led the policing operation for Notting Hill Carnival, said: “This is the second year now that we have seen a marked difference in the prevalence of serious violence at Carnival.
“This is the result of not just proactive policing and a determined effort to target our efforts on those posing the greatest risk of harm, but of a collaborative partnership approach to the delivery of the whole event.
“The progress by Notting Hill Carnival Ltd in stepping into so many of the event management and crowd safety roles previously performed by the police cannot be understated. They have delivered a challenging event well and in doing so have allowed us to focus our resources on our core role of tackling crime.”
The attempts to downplay the criminality associated with the Carnival did not go over well on social media, with many mocking the Met for its stance.
Political commentator Paul Embery said of the police’s response: “Pyongyang levels of propaganda going on here. If this had been any other event – say a football match or patriotic rally or anti-war demo – we wouldn’t have heard the last of it. The establishment would have denounced such a crime-fest full-throatedly and demanded sanctions against the organisers.”