Why did London police take a half-hour to respond to an antisemitic attack despite 10 phone calls for help?
Leicester Square, London. Photo by iStock
By Beth Harpaz January 23, 2024
London police are being criticized for taking nearly a half-hour to respond to an antisemitic attack in one of the city’s most touristy areas — despite 10 calls for help from the victims.
“Of course, I wish we could have come to their aid sooner,” Detective Superintendent Lucy O’Connor of the Metropolitan Police said in a social media post acknowledging that officers “arrived at the scene some 28 minutes after they were called.”
Dozens of people on the social media platform X questioned why the response to the incident in Leicester Square in the West End took so long. The square is home to theaters, nightclubs, casinos, hotels and restaurants and gets 2.5 million visitors a week.
“28 minutes!” tweeted one observer. “The density of @metpoliceuk per square mile is greatest in the centre of London. I wonder what made this a low priority.”
O’Connor said the incident was under investigation and added that “tackling antisemitic crime is a priority for the Met. There is no place for hate in our city.”
“Hard to believe tackling antisemitism is a priority when it took officers 28 minutes to respond,” another observer commented. “Maybe your call handlers need retraining on how to respond to hate crimes. The Jewish community is once again let down by @metpoliceuk.”
Targeted for speaking Hebrew
The victims, all in their 20s, were an Israeli woman who was raised in London, identified in news reports as Tehilla, along with her cousin and a friend visiting from Israel.
The three were speaking Hebrew while walking to a nightclub around 1:30 a.m. early Sunday morning when several people began harassing them. They walked away, but were again accosted around 2 a.m. by people who “heard us talking and said, ‘Are you Jewish?’” Tehilla told The Telegraph. “I said ‘yes, I’m Jewish,’ and then they started chanting ‘Free Palestine,’ and f— Jews, all this kind of swearing at us.”
At first, the Israelis were followed by a few people, but then, “all of a sudden, they called all their friends and 15 to 20 guys started attacking us physically,” Tehilla said.
The Israeli men were hit in the head; Tehilla was punched in the neck and hurt her leg. “I tried to run away and I called the police so many times, at least 10 times and I kept crying to them, ‘I’m a girl, there’s a group of guys attacking me and my friends because I’m Jewish, please can you come, I’m scared I’m going to die,’” she was quoted as saying. The police “kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, it takes some time, you are not the only one that called tonight.’”
The trio sought treatment for their injuries at a hospital. Elad Simchayoff, who interviewed them for the Israeli news station i24, posted photos of contusions on their legs and heads. “I tried to stop them and stood in front as I was sure they would never hit a woman,” Tehilla told i24, but “they couldn’t care less, they hit me as well.”
The assailants also vandalized a shop where the Israelis sought refuge, and the store owner demanded that the Israelis pay for the damage, i24 reported.
“Reaching a scene of a violent crime in one of the most populated and touristy places in London after 28 minutes is something everyone should be worried about — not only Jews,” Simchayoff tweeted.
Antisemitism up in the UK since Oct. 7
The Community Security Trust, whose self-stated mission is to protect British Jews, called the Leicester Square incident “appalling” and pledged to follow up with police and provide support to the victims.
The CST logged 2,093 antisemitic incidents in the United Kingdom in just 68 days between Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks and Dec. 13. That represents a 534% increase over the same 68 days in 2022, when the organization recorded just 330 incidents. CST said the reports from just over eight weeks in 2023 exceeded the number of antisemitic incidents in any other full year save one since the organization began tracking incidents in 1984.
“These are all instances of anti-Jewish racism, wherein offenders are targeting Jewish people, communities and institutions for their Jewishness. In many cases, these hateful comments, threats to life and physical attacks are laced with the rhetoric and iconography of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel politics,” the organization said.
CST also logged another 1,288 incidents in that 68-day period that were not classified as antisemitic but that included “criminal acts affecting Jewish people and property,” as well as “suspicious” behavior near Jewish locations and “anti-Israel activity.”
A march against antisemitism held in London in November drew 50,000 people, constituting the largest such gathering in the city since before World War II.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
