British taxpayers reportedly paid out £1.5 million to police Black Lives Matter and counter-protests on the weekend of June 13th to 14th, according to the Mail on Sunday.
The newspaper added that the far-left BLM UK is set to announce on Tuesday what it will spend its war chest on, after having raised £1.18 million to develop “strategies for the abolition of police”.
This is not the first time that vast amounts of public money has been used to pay for London’s Met to police protests.
It was reported last year that policing the Extinction Rebellion protests had cost £37 million by October of 2019. Covering the two-week-long ‘Autumn Rising’ actions cost £21 million alone. April 2019’s protests cost £16 million — more than the annual budget for the Violent Crime Taskforce, which is £15 million.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick had said at the time that policing the far-left eco-extremist events — which saw protesters glue themselves to buildings and vehicles, hold up public transport, and block London’s major roads — had come at the cost of policing other crimes.
Commissioner Dick admitted that due to officers being overworked and overstretched, “certain types of investigations would just be done more slowly, and some things won’t ever be done at all”.
Britons also had to bear the expense of policing anti-Donald Trump protests in 2017 to the tune of £290,000.
Breitbart London reported last week that England and Wales had seen a 1,700 per cent rise in violent protests in 20 years. According to the Police Federation, in 2019 some 126 protests descended into violence, compared to just seven in 2000. The increase in violence has resulted in millions of pounds’ worth of property damage and the injury of hundreds of police officers.
During three weeks of June, at the height of the BLM protests, 140 Metropolitan Police Force officers had been injured.
In notable examples, one officer was seen walking away from a protest with blood pouring down his face. On the same day in early June, dozens of unarmed officers were chased past the Houses of Parliament by BLM activists, who were hurling projectiles and yelling: “Run, piggy, run!”