Look, I don’t know much about the plumbing situation over in England. I know they have a lot of old pipes, a lot of rain, and apparently a long-running problem with water companies dumping sewage into rivers while charging people for the privilege. I also know that the people who run those companies have made a lot of money while the customers boil their water and watch beaches get closed. That’s the setup.
Into that walks Susan Davy, the former CEO of South West Water. Under her watch the company had a cryptosporidium outbreak in Devon that got a bunch of people sick, plus the usual Ofwat penalties for wastewater failures. She left the job with a fat pay package and moved on to a new gig in London. Normal CEO stuff.
Then a group of activists from something called the Citizen’s Arrest Network showed up at her new office. One of them, a nearly bald woman in a bright red coat, stood there and informed Davy that she was under citizen’s arrest for “public nuisance.” They had a dossier. They were calling the police. They were filming the whole thing. They told her anything she said could be used against her.
Davy’s response was to stay in her chair and keep working.
She didn’t argue. She didn’t film them back. She didn’t give a speech about systemic whatever. She just… continued doing her job while a stranger in her office read her rights. The police eventually showed up, took the paperwork, and declined to actually arrest her. The activists left with their content. Davy presumably finished whatever email she was on.
The video of this has been making the rounds, and Collin Rugg posted it with the note that he doesn’t know exactly what she did but he’s on her side. Fair enough. There’s a real argument that water company executives have gotten away with a lot of bullshit while regular people deal with the consequences. There’s also a real argument that turning your office into a stage for a group of activists performing a legal LARP is a weird way to handle it.
Davy treated it like a bad meeting that wasn’t on her calendar. No drama. No engagement. Just the quiet refusal to play along. In an era where every confrontation is supposed to produce a viral meltdown or a tearful apology, a woman sitting there checking her laptop while someone announces she’s under arrest is kind of refreshing. She didn’t give them the scene they wanted.
Whether that makes her a villain who escaped justice or a person who correctly identified that this wasn’t a real arrest is up for debate. The police seem to have landed on the second option. The activists got their footage. And somewhere in London, Susan Davy is probably still answering emails.
Some people see a corporate criminal who got off easy. Other people see a group of activists who thought showing up and yelling “you’re under arrest” would magically make the state do what they wanted. Both things can be true at the same time. The only person who didn’t look ridiculous in the video is the one who stayed in her chair.
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