This post, authored by Paul Birch, is republished with permission from The Daily Sceptic
One would think that even when the police successfully detain a suspect who was alleged to have been conducting a marauding knife attack, the professional activists would have a day off.
But you would be wrong. Amid all the ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ cliché bingo, voices of criticism were heard. Among them, the blue-tick career race-baiter Shola Mos-Shogbamimu. She was quick to take to X following yesterday’s attack on the Jewish community in Golders Green, north London. The 45 year-old suspect, a British national of Somali origin, had reportedly stabbed two Jewish men at random. The suspect – depressingly, inevitably – had previously been referred to the Government’s counter radicalisation programme, Prevent.
Shola Mos-Shogbamimu criticised police officers who are shown kicking the suspect in the head while he is on the ground. She opined:
Contemptible abuse of police power. Why kick him in the head several times when he’s already Tasered and in your control? Should he not be alive to be brought to justice in a court of law for stabbing two Jews??!! Disgusting.
Also, Green Party leader Zack Polanski, still playing at politics, was quick to condemn the actions of the arresting officers, using a retweet to maintain that:
Essentially his (Commissioner Mark Rowley’s) officers were reportedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head when he was already incapacitated by taser.
What Shola, Zack and other commentators do not understand – because they have never been in a life-or-death situation – is that force is not judged by how it looks in a six-second clip. It is judged by necessity in the moment. These keyboard warriors have no idea what it’s like to face immediate and possibly lethal violence armed with often nothing more than some irritant spray and a stick. Your priority is to keep members of the public safe, followed by yourselves as much as possible.
These officers would have had no idea in such a fast moving situation whether the suspect was acting alone or as part of a cell. He needed to be neutralised as soon as possible in order to keep people safe. He wasn’t showing his hands; he was still holding a bloodied weapon that he had just used to attack Jewish members of the public; he had been moving rapidly towards them, and they would have had no idea if he was wearing an explosive vest (wearing a coat on a warm day is never a good sign).
Policing is not theatre. It is not performed for social media approval. It is messy, fast and often brutal. Because the people officers deal with are messy, fast and often brutal. A man armed with a knife who has already stabbed two people, who refuses repeated commands to disarm and who continues to pose a threat even after being tasered, is not “under control”. He is an active danger until the weapon is removed. That is the reality, no matter how uncomfortable it makes Left-leaning commentators feel.
The idea that officers should politely wait or somehow apply ‘gentler’ tactics while a suspect still has the capacity to kill is not just naïve in the extreme, it is dangerous. It puts officers’ lives at risk. It puts the public at risk. And it reveals a complete detachment from reality (I am reminded of the occasion when then Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, declared that Islamic State murderer Mohammed ‘Jihadi John’ Emwazi should have been arrested in war-torn Syria rather than killed.)
This is the gap at the heart of modern public debate on policing. One side deals in real-world consequences. The other deals in optics. The officers in Golders Green had seconds to act. Not minutes. Not the luxury of hindsight, slow-motion replays or viral commentary. Seconds. In those seconds they made unquestionably the right decision: remove the threat as quickly as possible, by whatever means necessary short of lethal force. And that point matters. Because the same voices now condemning ‘excessive force’ would be the first to demand answers if those officers had hesitated and others had been stabbed.
There is also an uncomfortable truth that many would rather avoid: this attack was not just violent, it was targeted. Two visibly Jewish men were attacked in broad daylight in a part of London with a large Jewish community. That context matters. It should matter. It’s part of an ever growing pattern of antisemitic attacks carried out by people holding extreme Islamist ideologies.
Yet instead of sustained outrage about antisemitic violence, the conversation was almost immediately derailed, redirected toward the conduct of the officers who stopped it. That inversion of priorities is telling.
It reflects a culture where the instinct is no longer to back those who confront violence but to scrutinise them first, and often most harshly. Where the benefit of the doubt is extended to offenders, those enforcing the law are expected to meet an impossible standard of perfection under extreme pressure – often from their own senior management.
And it is precisely this culture that erodes effective policing. If every split-second decision is second guessed by people with no operational understanding, officers will become more hesitant. More risk-averse. Less pro-active. That is not compassion. It is a recipe for more victims.
None of this means police should be beyond scrutiny. Of course they shouldn’t be. But scrutiny requires context. It requires full evidence. It requires intellectual honesty. A selectively edited clip on social media is not scrutiny. It is propaganda. That is the real issue here.
Not just one commentator getting it wrong, but an entire ecosystem that rewards outrage over accuracy, speed over truth and narrative over fact. The Metropolitan Police, to their credit, did something increasingly necessary: they put out the full body-worn footage. They showed the public what actually happened. And when people saw the complete picture, the narrative collapsed. Because reality is stubborn like that.
In the end, strip away the noise and the incentives of social media and the situation becomes very simple. A violent attacker stabbed two innocent men. Two unarmed officers confronted him. They stopped him. They went home alive, and so did everyone else.
That is not a scandal. That is policing working exactly as it should.
Paul Birch is a former police officer and counter-terrorism specialist. You can read his Substack here.
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