a series of violent confrontations with police<\/a> and anti-Muslim hate speech incidents.<\/p>\nProtesters are due to gather at Parliament Square on Saturday, while the separate pro-Palestine Nakba Day march begins at Waterloo Place.<\/p>\n
In addition, tens of thousands of football fans are expected at Wembley Stadium for the FA Cup Final. <\/p>\n
The Met said the risks meant it had to impose the “highest degree of control”, including the first authorisation of live facial recognition cameras at a demonstration – specifically at the Unite the Kingdom rally.<\/p>\n
“We’re expecting significant public attendance and intelligence indicates there is likely to be a threat to public safety at this specific protest,” the force’s head of facial recognition, Lindsey Chiswick, told BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme.<\/p>\n
“To be clear, we’re not deploying this at the protest, we’re not deploying in the middle of the march, it’s very much on the outskirts.”<\/p>\n
She added that the use of the technology will also help protect peaceful protesters because it is able “to spot the people there to cause violent harm”.<\/p>\n
Other measures include deploying drones to identify suspects, putting armoured vehicles on standby, and equipping all officers with riot gear.<\/p>\n
Specialist officers are also primed to take swift decisions to arrest and charge hate speech crimes, which may include arrests for chants referring to “intifada” at the pro-Palestinian march.<\/p>\n
New guidance, issued by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), also pushes prosecutors to consider whether protest placards, banners and chants viewed on social media may amount to offences of stirring up hatred.<\/p>\n
Director of public prosecutions (DPP) Stephen Parkinson said: “This is not about restricting free speech. It is about preventing hate crime and protecting the public, particularly at a time of heightened tensions.<\/p>\n
“Where the line into criminality is crossed, we will not hesitate to prosecute.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a statement on Friday, Sir Keir said: “We’re in a fight for the soul of this country,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":585757,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-585756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/585757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}