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A total of 890 arrests were made at a demonstration in central London on Saturday against the banning of the protest group Palestine Action.
Police arrested 857 people under the Terrorism Act for showing support for a proscribed group, while 33 people were arrested for other offences, including 17 for assaults on police officers, the Metropolitan police said.
The force said those arrested were processed at a prisoner reception point in the Westminster area and those whose details could be confirmed were released on bail to appear at a police station at a future date. Those who refused to provide their details, or were found to have been arrested while already on bail, were taken to custody suites.
The 857 people arrested under the Terrorism Act will be investigated by the Met’s counter-terrorism command.
An estimated 1,500 people took part in the protest in Parliament Square in Westminster on Saturday. The Met condemned as “intolerable” the abuse it said its officers had suffered, saying they had “been punched, kicked, spat on and had objects thrown at them by protesters”.
The deputy assistant commissioner Claire Smart, who led the policing operation, said on Sunday: “I’d like to thank all officers involved in yesterday’s operation for their professionalism and tireless work despite the level of abuse that they faced.
“The violence we encountered during the operation was coordinated and carried out by a group of people, many wearing masks to conceal their identity, intent on creating as much disorder as possible. Many of those individuals have now been arrested and we have begun securing charges.
“The contrast between this demonstration and the other protests we policed yesterday, including the Palestine Coalition march attended by around 20,000 people, was stark. You can express your support for a cause without committing an offence under the Terrorism Act or descending into violence and disorder, and many thousands of people do that in London every week.
“We have a duty to enforce the law without fear or favour. If you advertise that you are intending to commit a crime, we have no option but to respond accordingly.”
The protest’s organisers, the campaign group Defend Our Juries (DOJ), said the rally was peaceful and called on the new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, to drop the “unenforceable” ban.
A spokesperson said: “Fifteen hundred people entirely peacefully defying the ban, holding cardboard signs in quiet dignity, sends a clear and powerful message to the new home secretary as she takes up her position: such an unjust law which the public will not accept will inevitably have to be abandoned. These mass acts of defiance will continue until the ban is lifted.”
On Sunday, the defence secretary, John Healey, said Mahmood would be “just as tough” on Palestine Action as her predecessor, Yvette Cooper, who moved to the Foreign Office as part of Keir Starmer’s cabinet reshuffle on Friday.
“If we want to avoid a two-tier policing and justice system in this country, when people break the law, there have to be consequences,” Healey told Sky News’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips. “That’s what was happening yesterday, and I, we, almost everybody shares the agony when we see the images from Gaza, the anguish when we see the man-made starvation, and for people who want to voice their concern and protest, I applaud them. But that does not require them to link it to support for Palestine Action, a proscribed group.”
Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in July after the group claimed responsibility for an action in which two Voyager planes were damaged at RAF Brize Norton on 20 June.
