The Met police: Zero tolerance of antisemitism in name only

On the evening of 4 July, Jewish attendees at London’s Pride march in Soho were told to “go back to your Zionist homeland, because it won’t last much longer.” Another was asked, repeatedly, “How many babies did they kill?” A third was told simply, “F*** you, Jew.” Metropolitan Police officers were present nearby. Nobody was arrested. Days later, the force said only that it was “reviewing footage to assess and investigate.”

It is an all too familiar pattern. Seven weeks earlier, on 16 May, London hosted its biggest public order operation in years: the Nakba 78 march and Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally, held alongside the FA Cup Final, at a combined cost of some £4.5m. Days before, Deputy Assistant Commissioner James Harman promised “the most assertive possible use of our powers” — a “zero-tolerance approach” backed by Section 60 and Section 60AA of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. “We will be arresting for these offences where we see them,” he said, “and we will intervene robustly wherever possible.”

Antisemitism was not an afterthought in that briefing — if anything, it was the headline. Of the roughly 430 words in which Harman named specific communities and specific enforcement outcomes, some 300 were about Jews and antisemitism: the arson campaign “targeting Jewish Londoners,” the disclosure that 17 of the last 33 Palestine Coalition protests had required route changes specifically to protect synagogues, a passage on Jewish Londoners changing their behaviour out of fear, and the commitment made after the Bondi Beach attack to act on incitement. He cited exactly two concrete, named enforcement outcomes in the whole briefing — a charge over chants of “death to the IDF,” and arrests for calling for “intifada” — and both were cases of Jew hatred. Anti-Muslim hate got a single sentence, with no case cited at all. Whatever else can be said about the Met’s priorities that week, failing to talk about antisemitism was not one of them.

What happened on the day tells a different story.

Along the route, three static counter-protests waved Israeli flags and danced to music. On the Piccadilly stretch, footage documents incidents that plainly meet the threshold Harman had described: a man performing a full Nazi salute at the counter-protesters (crime reference 01/7598723/26); chants of “Death, death to the IDF” directed at the group (01/7599097/26); a chant of “Who protects the Nazis? Police protect the Nazis,” aimed squarely at those waving Israeli flags (01/7619500/26); sexualised abuse and the Hamas-associated inverted-triangle gesture directed at the same group (01/7622286/25); and a demonstrator wearing a red-triangle bandana as a face covering, with a T-shirt reading “Deproscribe Palestine Action” — despite the Section 60AA order empowering officers to require its removal, and the offence of supporting a proscribed organisation (01/7611237/26).

A wider log kept that day, cross-referenced against video, records 104 incidents that have been reported to police across those three points along the march route: Nazi salutes and symbolism, Holocaust inversion (Netanyahu depicted as Hitler, a coffin likened to the Warsaw Ghetto), blood-libel-adjacent chants, five further instances of “Death to the IDF,” eleven displays of the Hamas triangle, and repeated chants of “Zionism is Terrorism” and “Smash the Zionist Settler State.” Of those 104 incidents that day, one resulted in an arrest at the scene.

That gap is not explained by a lack of legal tools. It is explained by a Freedom of Information response from the Metropolitan Police (ref 01/FOI/26/052998/W), which discloses how the operation was actually divided: 3,348 officers went to Unite the Kingdom, 708 to the FA Cup Final at Wembley, and 529 — barely one in ten of the 4,585 total — to the Nakba 78 march. Robinson’s rally received six times the resourcing of the march beside it, despite the rhetoric used in the press release by DAC Harman.

That FOI total says nothing about how thinly those 529 officers were spread. Few were visible at the counter-protest points — enough to encircle the flag-wavers for safety, but reporting an incident typically drew “What do you want me to do?” or “We’re too busy to deal with that.” The unstated calculation seemed to be that intervening would expose the Israeli group, and risk disorder from a crowd defending whoever was detained.

There is a second distortion at work, and it matters more than any single day’s arrest count: crime recording itself. Under national counting rules, an incident only becomes a recorded crime once an officer is free to take the report, assess it and log it — a process that assumes time to stop, listen and write. Where officers are absorbed entirely in keeping groups apart and preventing disorder, that assumption fails. Abuse that isn’t recorded in real time does not become a delayed statistic; in practice, much of it is never recorded at all. Under-resourcing the policing of flashpoints involving Jews, Israelis and Zionists therefore does more than reduce arrests on the day — it quietly depresses the official record of antisemitic hate crime, because the incidents that would have produced that record were never captured to begin with.

That undercount is compounded by a second problem: officers appear to treat what counts as antisemitic or anti-Israeli abuse as far more contestable than comparable racial hatred. Abuse directed at a British Pakistani community reads unambiguously as a race-hate offence. That clarity is so engrained that people default to euphemisms — “the P-word,” “the N-word” — for terms of abuse whose meaning is well understood by everyone, including officers.

A chant of “Smash the Zionist Settler State” directed at Jews waving Israeli flags requires an officer to work out, in real time, that it means Israel, and that the chant calls for a nation’s violent destruction — steps other protected characteristics rarely demand. Picture the same inaction if protesters had instead chanted “Smash the P*ki state” at a group of Pakistanis; it is hard to imagine officers walking past it. That extra threshold gives officers a ready-made reason to walk past what would, for almost any other group, already be recorded.

This is not about march organisers; it is about a public order plan colliding with its own resourcing, and policing’s grasp of the threat it faced. The Metropolitan Police Federation put it plainly on the day, after cancelling leave and rest days to staff the operation: “There are not enough of us.” With 529 officers covering a march of that size, “zero tolerance” meant holding lines and keeping groups apart. The six Nakba Day crime reports above exist not because an officer intervened, but because someone filmed the incident and reported it days later.

Pride showed the same mechanism in miniature, minus the resourcing excuse: the parade had finished, there was no rival protest to manage, and only around 200 Jews and allies remained in a far smaller, more contained space than Piccadilly. The outcome was identical: officers “aware of videos circulating online,” a review promised after the fact, no arrests at the scene. If under-resourcing explains the gap at a march assigned barely 500 officers, it does not explain the same gap with no comparable strain. What connects the two is where hate crime against Jews sits within policing — downstream of public order management, and harder to classify than almost any other kind.

None of this requires a change in the law. The Met already had an arsenal of powers — Section 60AA face-covering removal, Public Order Act conditions making organisers liable for incitement, the existing offence of displaying support for a proscribed organisation — all announced at length in mid-May. What was missing was not law but capacity: the officers who might have used it were outnumbered six to one by their counterparts next door.

That resourcing gap is not simply an accident, and it is not for lack of Harman finding the words — his own briefing shows he understood the antisemitism threat in granular detail. It reflects, instead, where the operational machinery of policing directs its vigilance once the press conference is over. British policing has spent a decade building a confident operational model of far-right racism it knows how to act on: live facial recognition was deployed in Camden specifically for the Unite the Kingdom crowd, and the Home Office barred eleven foreign nationals it called “far-right agitators” before the march began. No equivalent operational measure was aimed at the antisemitism Harman had just spent longer describing. Racism voiced through anti-Zionist politics still arrives, on the ground, in a vocabulary — “Zionist,” “the resistance,” “intifada” — officers are visibly less confident acting on than a Nazi salute or an anti-Muslim chant, whatever their commanders said the week before. A system can describe a threat fluently at the podium and still fail to resource or police it on the street. That is how 529 officers were judged sufficient for Nakba Day, and 3,348 were not judged excessive for Unite the Kingdom.

The test of the Met’s “zero-tolerance approach” was never the press conference, where the talk was grandiose and specific. It was Piccadilly on the afternoon of 16 May, and Soho on the evening of 4 July, where the performance was underwhelming. On both occasions, it was found wanting — not for want of law, but for want of officers free to enforce it, and a crime-recording system that counts only what someone was there, and willing, to write down.

Gill Levy is a retired police officer who served for 20 years in the Met