Hundreds protest outside Cardiff police station amid campaign for women's safety
Protestors gather outside Cardiff Bay Police Station
Hundreds of protestors have gathered outside a police station in Cardiff amid a nationwide campaign for women's safety following the death of Sarah Everard.
The 33-year-old marketing executive went missing while walking home from a friend’s flat in London on 3 March.
On Monday evening, an estimated 400 people blocked the road outside Cardiff Bay Police Station by sitting down, chanting and displaying placards.
Demonstrators were made up of several groups with different messages, including those joining the Reclaim These Streets campaign for safer streets for women.
During a press conference, Wales' education minister Kirsty Williams said society has "far to go" to keep women and girls safe.
There were also concerns raised over police behaviour after Metropolitan Police officers were accused of heavy-handed conduct when managing a vigil for Ms Everard in London on Saturday evening.
It has sparked nationwide demonstrations, including in London where hundreds of Reclaim These Streets campaigners spent Monday chanting and waving banners as they marched from Parliament Square and through the Soho area.
Road traffic in the surrounding areas was also brought to a stop.
The protest comes as Wales remains in a national lockdown, which bans gatherings.
The First Minister said he would like police forces to respond by making protests as safe as they can - "as they have done throughout".
He said: "When we had Black Lives Matter protests earlier in the summer, the police will have talked to the organisers, will have helped to make those demonstrations as safe as they can be in what is still a public health emergency, but where the actions the police take are sensitive to the feelings of people, proportionate to what is going on, and do not end up by making a difficult situation even worse.
He added that there is a contrast between Welsh police forces and the Metropolitan Police.
"People in Wales will see a contrast between the way in which police in Wales responded to vigils, which I thought was sensitive, proportionate and suitable to the occasion, and the far more disturbing scenes that we saw in London," he said.
"We know that someone has been arrested from the Metropolitan Police and here was the same police service acting in ways that cannot but lead people to feel disturbed at what they saw."
The prime minister said he was "deeply concerned" about the footage from the event, some of which showed police officers grabbing women and leading them away in handcuffs.
People in Cardiff were also protesting the right to protest itself, as MPs debated new policing legislation that would give officers more powers to crack down on protests.