TRANSCRIPT OF AC MATT TWIST LBC INTERVIEW
Nick Ferrari, Presenter: We have got an Assistant Commissioner with the Met, Matt Twist, who’s Assistant Commissioner, Met Operations at the Met, overseeing the force’s organisational response to demos such as Just Stop Oil, ER, or whatever it might be. Thanks for coming in.
Matt Twist, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police: Good morning, Nick
NF: Good morning, Assistant Commissioner. What has the change of tactics been?
MT: So, I think everybody’s seen that over the two phases of this operation, we saw a lot of disruption before Christmas, where people were sitting down in the road and then in this phase, which sort of started about eight or nine weeks ago, we’ve seen all of this slow marching. We asked parliament, we asked the government to clarify the law, and a couple of weeks ago, the law was changed to define what serious disruption was. So, what we’ve been doing is looking at where people have been arriving, where activists are disrupting the road, we’ve been getting there quickly, we’ve been assessing it, which we still have to do and is really important. But then we’ve been imposing conditions on those activists that are causing serious disruption to clear the road. And in, in the majority of cases, that’s what they’re doing.
NF: What are some of those conditions, Assistant Commissioner?
MT: So usually, it’s as simple as telling them to protest on the pavement. So, what, you’ve always got to balance are human rights. In a democracy, we understand that protests can be disruptive. But here, what you’ve seen is a small number of people disrupting a very large number of members of the public in London. So actually, what is a marginal constraint in terms of telling them to protest on the pavement actually helps the public enormously. So we think we’re striking the right balance.
NF: Couldn’t we have told them that prior to Christmas?
MT: So, before Christmas, it was a bit different. We were arresting them before Christmas for a number of other offences, including highway obstruction, because they were actually sitting down in the roadway. So, the highway obstruction was clearer, and we were moving quickly to that. And also, public nuisance where they were, we had plots like the M25 plot where they were looking to disrupt significant parts of the critical roads infrastructure. We arrested over 750 people before Christmas, and those cases are now working their way through the courts. And the cost of that is enormous. I mean, we’ve got some court cases listed for 2025 now, of the people that we’ve charged as part of that sort of phase. Whereas now JSO changed their tactics and they moved to the sort of slow marching approach, which meant that proving highway obstruction was harder, the threshold was more difficult to meet. So we moved to the approach of using conditions under Section 12 of the Public Order Act.
NF: So, the slow march then now, the men and women serving under you, they can now take action, we have the bar set where they can turn up, obviously they observe, I mean, you have to observe for a few, you can’t just come pouring out of a van and nick everyone.
MT: Exactly.
NF: If you watch, you think, right, ok, I know what you’re doing, we’re going to nick you. Is it broadly, is that how it’s perceived?
MT: That’s right. And so far, since the start of this sort of phase, we’ve had 241 slow marches, we’ve imposed conditions 192 times, we’ve arrested 116 people. But I think the impact that listeners will be interested in is just the cost of this, the amount of officer hours that has to be spent doing this. So far, just in this phase, 16-and-a-half thousand officer shifts have been used to deal with Just Stop Oil. And if you want to put a monetary value on it, it’s about five-and-a-half million pounds. But the point is, that’s about 150 officers a day during the phase and from my point of view as, as someone that cares deeply about crime in London, what I could do with 150 officers, preventing robberies or some, investigating crime or supporting victims, is really significant. So, I very much hope as you say that the JSO are going to change their tactics and cause less disruption to Londoners, and we can focus more on crime and supporting victims.
NF: Well, it’s fair to say then that there is a real risk then for some Londoners that they will be victims of crime, that there will be burglaries or their cars will be stolen because the blokes and women are tied up in central London having to watch people walk slowly.
MT: Well, look we’re a resilient organisation and policing public order major events is always part of it, and we can do this, but the cumulative effect is significant. And of course these officers aren’t made up from thin air. They are officers that would be working elsewhere, were they not dealing with JSO this morning, you know.
