By Stephen Bailey.
Just before Christmas the Court of Appeal issued a judgement that the recording of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ by the Police is an unlawful interference with freedom of expression.
The court explicitly ruled that the Police recording and storing such matters in databases is likely to have a serious ‘chilling effect on public debate’.
‘Non crime hate incidents’ are classified by the Police as occurring when a person is reported to them for incidences involving a perceived element of ‘hate’, but no actual crime under any current U.K. legislation has been broken.
This ruling was brought about after ex-police officer Harry Miller was accused of making allegedly ‘transphobic’ comments on Twitter. A complaint was made against him and in January 2019, he was interviewed by Humberside Police, who, finding he hadn’t broken any laws recoded it as a ‘non-crime hate incident’.
The judgement comes in the wake of a High Court ruling last year that the Police Force’s actions in recoding the incident despite no law having being broken, were a ‘disproportionate interference’ with Mr Miller’s right to freedom of expression. However, his challenge to the College of Police’s guidance (on recording ‘non-crime hate incidents’) was dismissed with the court finding it ‘serves legitimate purposes and is not disproportionate’.
This last statement by the court is both interesting and also considerably more chilling in its implications.
What ‘legitimate purpose’ could recording events that aren’t crimes and so have nothing to do with the Police serve, and how could they possibly be proportionate to any legitimate purpose? Furthermore, what are the implications for free speech and liberty of such actions?
There has now been a further equally sinister and unsettling development in this matter.
The Police’s official reaction to the Appeal Court ruling makes it one hundred percent clear that they are going to ignore its rulings and continue their current practices as regards the recording and storing of ‘non-crime hate incidences’.
Nowhere in their response does it say that they will now stop recording, storing and building a database of these events. They have strongly asserted that they will carry on as do now but just add the word ‘hostility’ when recording a ‘non-crime hate incident’.
As far as can be ascertained, the Police have accepted the portion of the court’s judgement on proportionality:
‘The court has found we need to make safeguards in our guidance more explicit to help police officers proportionately enforce the law. We will listen to, reflect on, and review this judgement carefully and make any changes that are necessary’.
They have, however, completely ignored the appeal, upheld by the court that recording a ‘non-crime hate incident’ unacceptably impinges the individual’s freedom of expression. In fact they have deliberately twisted it around in order to make it look as if it actually supports their current actions.
They have stated:
‘The judgement provides clarity that police have the power to record, retain and use a wide variety of data and information to keep people safe’.
Regardless, the Police have made it one hundred percent clear that they will NOT be stopping the recording of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ despite the court’s clear judgement that it’s inimical to the individual’s freedom of expression.
What does this say about the current state of the U.K.’s police?
The answer: a great deal and, by extension, it also tells us a similarly great deal the state of U.K. society.
The politicised state of affairs in U.K. politics, society, and institutions generally is very apparent in the condition of the current U.K.’s Police Forces, as clearly shown by the incident in which a Police officer was caught on camera shouting pro-Palestinian messages at a rally in London a while ago, just one among many other examples.
Most U.K. citizens’ attitudes towards the Police are largely conditioned by their experiences of them during their childhood / adolescence and when they were younger, which may have taken place some time ago.
Many people base their attitudes on how things were many years or even decades ago. It’s natural to do this, but it has become increasingly apparent that the nature, practice, and ethos of policing has changed dramatically and systematically in recent times and that subsequently it’s now no longer wise to maintain the same attitudes towards them.
Nobody who’s had any experience of the current Police Forces can possibly believe that they operate as they did in past years.
All modern U.K. Police Forces have been thoroughly re-structured and modern policing now follows an ethos that is based on left-liberal concepts which employ ultra-politically correct principles.
The reality on the ground of this shift is that the Police have become little more than the draconian paramilitary enforcers of the cultural-Marxist project and extremely antagonistic to anybody who is perceived to be against this left-liberal agenda. They see it as their purpose, even mission, to run around making certain target groups happy and secure whilst largely ignoring normal police activities like preventing or investigating crime, which is, after all, their main function in society.
This shift in police practice needs to be acknowledged and there is a need to stop still treating them as if they are operating as they did in the past, as their politicisation is consequently not effectively opposed with the effect that the virtually complete triumph of metropolitan liberalism in the U.K. Police Forces today has resulted.
The only way to defeat this politicisation of the Police is to stop living in the past and recognise the reality of the modern cultural-Marxist Police modus operandi.
Like all bullies, if you stand up for yourself, they (eventually) back down. It is unwise to keep showing them misplaced good will when they don’t reciprocate.
If their drift towards cultural-Marxist practices is successfully opposed there is a chance that the Police will drop their politicised agenda and effective policing which concentrates on preventing and solving crime can be restored.
In 2014 and ironically under David Cameron’s supposedly ‘Conservative’ Government, but without that Government’s express sanction, the College of Policing decided to instruct Police Forces to collate and store ‘non-crime hate incidents’ in a database.
From 2014 to 2019, 120,000 such incidents were recorded, a period in which the Police claimed that its manpower levels and resources were so overstretched that it failed to properly investigate millions of crimes.
In May this year, the supposedly tough Home Office Minister Priti Patel instructed the College of Policing to withdraw its injunction to record and store ‘non-crime hate incidents’ which it refused to do. Even after the Appeal Court judgement, the College of Policing still refuses to withdraw its instruction.
This is insubordination which, if continued after a reasonable warning, should result in the persons showing the insubordination losing their jobs. However, the insubordination has continued unabated, and no action has been taken against any guilty parties.
There is a deeply unsettling attempt by the Police to gather information about people and groups who hold views that don’t coincide with the cultural-Marxist project of the left-liberal establishment, something which is redolent of the kind of tactics used by the Stasi (the East German Police during the Soviet era) or even the Gestapo.
It’s completely unacceptable, repressive and amounts to a totalitarian style assault on individual liberty.
For more from Stephen Bailey please visit: https://ukunionism.wordpress.com/blog-2/
© 2021 Stephen Bailey
