FOR many women, it was the first few seconds of the video that made their hearts beat faster.

At that moment, the scene looked relatively calm at Saturday night’s vigil for Sarah Everard on London’s Clapham Common: a group of women were standing shoulder to shoulder in the dark, a row of police officers standing behind them. But if you look closer, you see a male police officer with his gloved hand on the arm of one of the women. He is leaning forward to say something in her ear and she is turning her head away from him, clearly uncomfortable. That’s the part where you start to worry about what is going to come next.

And then it begins: a woman is grabbed from behind by a police officer and it sets off a domino effect down the row. One by one, the women are all dragged away. The police officer at the far end – the one who was talking at the red-haired woman only moments before – takes his cue from the others and she is grabbed too.

That nervous feeling women get when watching the video is anxiety about what will happen next. That red-headed woman who looked so uncomfortable had been bracing herself for it. Watching her, we all were. We later found out that her name is Patsy Stevenson. Speaking after she was released by the police she said: “I was arrested for standing there. I wasn’t doing anything. They threw me to the floor … I’m 5ft 2ins and weigh nothing and several police officers are on my back trying to arrest me.’’

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A striking image of Patsy on the ground and in handcuffs, with two male police officers holding her down, was on newspaper front pages yesterday.

It is clear from that video and the others that have emerged of heavy-handed police tactics during the vigil for Sarah Everard that the Metropolitan Police have serious questions to answer about how they managed to get their response so badly wrong.

This was a vigil for a murdered woman and all the other women who have been murdered by men. It came in a week where a serving police officer was charged with kidnap and murder. It followed days of women sharing their own experiences of harassment, abuse and violence at the hands of men.

Women were angry: but they were not there to fight or to riot. They were there to mourn and reflect. The police refused to allow that to happen in a safe, organised way. What could have been a short vigil with speeches and social-distancing – enforced by stewards – turned into the grim scenes we saw on Saturday night.

If they had done nothing and made no intervention to physically remove the women: what do the police think would have happened? Do they really think that women would have hung around for hours after it got dark? Have they not been paying attention?

This whole mess was entirely unnecessary and preventable. That the police waited until after dark – when women had already begun to disperse – to start grabbing them and dragging them to the ground speaks volumes. It didn’t look like their goal was to keep people safe from Covid or enforce public order: it looked like a demonstration of power.

Comparisons have been made between how the Met behaved towards those women gathered with flowers and candles and how Police Scotland approached the Rangers football fans who were in George Square last weekend. Different police forces, different approach, perhaps. But does anybody seriously believe that Met Police would have been as eager to run towards a crowd of men who were standing in quiet reflection?

Of course not. They would have been thanking their lucky stars that there was no trouble and keen to ensure it stayed that way.

Remember – those men who shoved, grabbed and dragged women attending the vigil are the same men that those same women are told to contact if a man harms them.

It further undermines trust when women already feel like the deck is stacked against them.

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I wonder what was going through the mind of the two officers shown in another video. It hasn’t been as widely shared as the others – but it shows a petite woman with short blonde hair being violently shoved from one officer to the next.

With each shove, she collides with an officer who then shoves her forward again. Towards the end of the video, a woman can be heard screaming: “Oh my God – what the f*** are you doing?!” The short-haired woman is pushed – with great force – by two officers at once, sending her flying forwards and out of shot.

There have been calls for Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick to resign over the police response at Clapham. This isn’t the first time she has been criticised for the way the Met have dealt with public protest.

Beyond that, we need to use this moment to demand action on men’s violence against women. Women were already angry. And after those disgraceful scenes on Saturday night, we are now even angrier than we were before.