Activist Looking for Justice Over Met Police’s Handling of Sarah Everard Vigil

Activist Looking for Justice Over Met Police’s Handling of Sarah Everard Vigil

Patsy Stevenson believes the country’s largest force must be held accountable for its conduct at the event to remember the 33-year-old woman murdered by a Met Police officer

“Well pre-vigil, I trusted the police fully.”

Listening to Patsy Stevenson talk about how she had nothing but respect for the police before a vigil for Sarah Everard – who was kidnapped and murdered by a Metropolitan Police officer last year – is fascinating.

After the vigil in Clapham Common last March, she says her life changed drastically. 

“It’s not even for me, it’s for everyone who attended the vigil – I think they should have an apology,” Patsy says, explaining that she wants to hold the Met accountable for its heavy-handed conduct at Everard’s vigil.

Patsy needs to raise £230,000 by March this year through crowdfunding to take legal action against the Met over her arrest at the vigil, where she was photographed pinned to the ground. She was issued with a fixed penalty notice as a result.

“The media spun this narrative that the vigil was hijacked by these really angry protestors,” she says. “This is not the story I know. I get messages from people every day – who have been through this abuse with the police – asking ‘can you help me?’ I didn’t realise how prevalent it is until it happened to me.”

She says that being in the public eye only intensifies the harassment she receives online. “They want to carve things into my head, kidnap me, murder me,” Patsy says with a shrug of the shoulders.

It is not just men who send her death threats, but women too. “They want to curb stomp me – a woman sent me that message,” she says.

“A guy found me on Facebook, started calling me on messenger and it was really scary. When I picked up the phone and told this policewoman what had happened – part of the death threat was to do with ‘hijacking’ the vigil – the policewoman said to me: ‘did you hijack the vigil?’. I was like ‘even if I did, I am reporting a death threat’. No, I haven’t, and the female policewomen was like ‘are you sure you didn’t?’” Patsy says nothing was done after she reported the death threat.

What drives Patsy as she strives for accountability? “What affects me is the rhetoric, the story about the vigil,” she says. “These horrible people who overtook it. Maybe one day, I will be able to tell my story about it.”