In the end, it took eleven police officers to arrest a young man for a thought crime.
His name is Montgomery Toms. He's 20 years old. The arrest happened in the middle of the day, on Saturday, June 29, 2025, at a parade in central London. Monty, as his friends call him, wasn't yelling. He wasn't disruptive. He wasn't surrounded by a mob or leading a march. He was standing alone, quietly, wearing a cardboard sandwich board with a handwritten message.
Two police officers approached him. "They told me to take off the sign," he told Public. "I said no. I told them I knew my rights. I wasn't yelling. I wasn't aggressive. I wasn't there to cause trouble. Appreciating that I didn't want to come across as overly antagonistic and there to cause trouble, I decided to remove myself from the situation. I decided to walk away."
But two blocks away, nine more officers joined in. Eleven in total. They surrounded him, handcuffed him, and marched him to a police van.
