6 May—In advance of Charles III’s coronation in London today, anti-monarchists belonging to a group called Republic have been arrested in Trafalgar Square and along the parade route for doing nothing more than protesting peacefully and wearing shirts emblazoned with “#NotMyKing” and “Abolish the Monarchy.” For all the good it did, the anti-monarchists made it clear from the start that they had “no intention of actually disrupting” any of the pomp and absurdity.

“We will be very visible, we will be loud,” Republic’s CEO Graham Smith assured the press, public, and police. “We will be hard to miss, but the procession and the plans for the coronation will go ahead uninterrupted by us.”

Matt Turnbull, another Republic demonstrator, however, before being led away in handcuffs, told the press, “To be honest we were never going to be allowed to be a visible force here—they knew we were coming, and they were going to find a way to stop this.”

And so they did. The Metropolitan Police, a.k.a. rozzers, even confiscated hundreds of NOT MY KING placards. Earlier in the week, the rozzers had warned that they’d have an “extremely low threshold” for protests during coronation events and that demonstrators should expect “swift action.”

So even though peaceful protests are supposed to be entirely lawful in the UK, it’s not at all surprising or even unexpected that a number of proudly conspicuous anti-monarchists should have been “detained on suspicion” of conveniently vague misdemeanors like breaching the peace, conspiracy to cause public nuisance, and possessing articles to cause criminal damage. That’s all the rozzers would volunteer. And it’s all they had to volunteer, because in the UK, just like over here, police have virtual carte blanche to break the law in the name of the law.

It must be noted, too, that just in time for the coronation the Tory government granted police new powers to deal with protesters of any sort.

By the time you read this, the anti-monarchists likely will have been released from custody and the rozzers, believing—or claiming, at any rate—that they’ve averted dire mayhem, will dismiss all criticism and insist they were merely doing their job and doing it well.

As the UK director of Human Rights Watch said, the arrests were “something you would expect to see in Moscow, not London.” What about Washington, D.C.?