An Eye from the Protestors Side - Who Threw the First Stone at The Bristol Protests

The violence of the police is consistently underestimated and the mainstream media makes sure to preserve that. With claims that protestors incited violence and created havoc in the city, I’m here to share a protestors version of events.

Sunday, the protest that has been labelled as the ‘Bristol Riots’, had begun peacefully! People were helping each other out; there was unity and you could genuinely feel the presence of peace.

The question a lot of people were asking, however, is how did it go from chanting to disorder. The answer is rather simple. It began with the police arriving from castle park and provoking a group of young protestors by arresting them in an aggressive manner. This led to people wanting to have a sit-in outside Bridewell Station, which, again, I’d like to emphasise, was peaceful.

At the beginning, there was a peaceful sit-in - until the police decided that the greatest way to deal with people pleading for their human rights is to crush them with their riot shields. There is no action without a reaction - so this sent a wave of anger through the crowd as people were having to watch their peers being brutally beaten by the police and, of course, protestors retaliated to this by trying to protect their friends. This led to many being pepper sprayed and beaten.

So to answer who threw the first stone at Bridewell... the police did. Much like with other historic events, it was the police who transgressed first. A group of people then decided the reaction to this would be to resist - which led to vans being set alight and spray painted, and the police station window being smashed. All of this is repairable and replaceable; what is not repairable or replaceable is the trauma that the police inflicted on people that day.

We saw the same tactics used on Tuesday. The police tread over flowers left at Sarah Everard’s vigil, only one week after one of their colleagues was arrested for murder. To make this all worse, we had to witness them striking women’s tents with their batons, pulling protesters by the hair, and hitting a young girl in the face with a shield.

The heavy handed police, with their unnecessary violence, never arrived with the intention of maintaining the peace. A fact that was proven again when they arrived at another protest with three times the amount of police, police dogs and vans - for a group of people all sat down on the ground.

On Friday evening, another peaceful protest turned violent. What began as a tranquil march was soon to turn violent as police began brutally arresting people for ‘obstruction’. We saw protestors being dragged against the wet concrete, some even falling during arrest to then be stomped on by police - and even a case of someone almost being trampled by a police horse as they were sat on the ground.

Even considering what we have to lose here if the bill is passed, I do believe that the actions of the protestors were simply a reaction to the police brutality. Think, for example, how the aggression and violence wasn’t just shown to protestors, but to journalists alike.

For these same police officers to then be labelled as well ‘trained’ by the current Mayor of Bristol was an insult to anyone who had been attacked at any of these protests, including journalists from local and mainstream media.

Written by Xahra Saleem

I am 21 years old, co-founder of All Black Lives and a screenwriter.

Photography by Khali Ackford

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