Police should not take the knee with Black Lives Matter campaigners – The Telegraph

Police officers should not take the knee, the new Met commissioner has said.

Sir Mark Rowley, who took up the post last week, set out his position on how police officers should respond to the Black Lives Matter movement.

We should not align with any protest group, whether its a cause that everyone agrees with or a cause that only 1 per cent agrees with, he said.

At a Black Lives Matters protest over the death of George Floyd in 2020, a number of police officers were caught taking the knee with protestors.

Sir Mark told The Sunday Times: We are the police and we should operate without fear or favour. We get lost trying to please all of the people all of the time.

A Cambridge graduate who planned to join the police as a forensic scientist, Sir Mark said a formative experience in Birmingham as a young officer taught him a lesson about his own resilience.

Just 18 months into the job Sir Mark was attacked by a group of men as he tried to arrest a man who threw a beer bottle at a car window. They beat him unconscious as well as breaking his nose. It was a really important experience for me in my life, he said.

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Police should not take the knee with Black Lives Matter campaigners - The Telegraph