Thread by @sturdyAlex

By DM, wants to be anonymous:

"I think I'd prefer to stay anonymous on this one as I still feel a huge amount of guilt for not doing more to help the woman I mention below. I was just so scared at the time and they said one of them was a policeman." 1/ #STFUSaturday

"I phoned up a couple of days later to ask the police what the outcome had been but they said the notes hadn't been written up. I always wondered what happened as I never saw the lady and her family again and they only lived down the road." 2/ #STFUSaturday

"In May 2019 I heard screaming outside my house in the middle of the night so I went to find out what it was. When I got to the other end of the road I found 2 men pinning down a black women and there were 2 other women with them." 3/ #STFUSaturday

"I think it's important to mention she was black as I don't think this would have happened had she been white. This was in Portsmouth. The woman lived across the road from them and her mother was frantically on the phone to someone trying to get help." 4/ #STFUSaturday

"The woman's small child was watching from across the road in his little romper suit. I ask the men what they're doing and one said he was a policeman and the other guy said that he was just helping him and they have this woman on the pavement in a headlock." #STFUSaturday 5/

"There was no proof that the man was a policeman as he was in plain clothes and offered no ID. I didn't really know what to do so I called the police and said these guys have this woman in a headlock and they're saying they're the police." 6/ #STFUSaturday

"All this time they still had her in a head lock. I see that her small child is very freaked out and watching at the side of the road so I ran over and hugged him and asked if he was OK. He said 'I want my mummy, I'm worried about my mummy'." 7/ #STFUSaturday

"I just told him 'Don't worry, she's ok. I'm on the phone and the police will come soon,' which is probably, now in hindsight, the most stupid thing that I could have said. I should've got the men off her but they said one of them was a policeman." 8/ #STFUSaturday

"They were so aggressive I didn't know how to get between them and the woman. Eventually they did let her sit up on the curb. She must have been known to them because they lived on the same street. I went over and knocked on the door to speak to the woman's mum." 9/ #STFUSaturday

"She was on the phone trying to get help. I told her that I'd called the police. And as I'm talking to the woman's mother, the guy that was supposedly a police officer came over started shouting that her daughter was under arrest and she was under arrest too." 10/ #STFUSaturday

"Ultimately the police arrived and we were dispersed but I have no idea how that ended and whether that guy was even a policeman. It shows how vulnerable women are - especially if you're a black woman - when it comes to the police." 11/ #STFUSaturday

"You just feel powerless and they can do these horrific things. They had this woman on the floor and they were doing this in front of a small child. For the police to say you can run if you feel unsafe or call the police or flag down a bus is stupid." 12/ #STFUSaturday

"My aunt is in her seventies and she was on her own in the West country on a bus and the driver pulled over the bus and came up next to her and started putting his hands all over her and she just had to talk him down from whatever he was thinking of doing." 13/ #STFUSaturday

"She was the only person on the bus and he was saying 'maybe we should go somewhere else' and stuff like that. She had to be very firm but not aggravate him and get him to drive her to where she needed to go as she was in the middle of nowhere." 14/ #STFUSaturday

"You're just as vulnerable as a woman with some random bus driver as you are with policemen. Nowhere is safe." 15/15 #STFUSaturday