British Police - Overreach and Underperformance

by Lynda Goetz

Photo: John Cameron, Unsplash

The Free Speech Union (FSU) is currently running a campaign to support the Conservative party  in their bid  to abolish (somewhat belatedly it has to be said) Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCIHs). These legally odd ‘non-crimes’ have, for the last ten or more years, been taking up a disproportionate amount of police time and resources. A NCIH, according to the definition on the government website, “means an incident or alleged incident which involves or is alleged to involve an act by a person (‘the subject’) which is perceived by a person other than the subject to be motivated - wholly or partly - by hostility or prejudice towards persons with a particular characteristic”. The origins of this bizarre and increasingly Orwellian non-crime can be traced back to the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and the response of the police to the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report. Without going into too much detail, most of which can be found on the aforementioned government website, The College of Policing issued updated guidance in 2014 and the government then legislated in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act 2022 to publish this code in order to enhance transparency surrounding the decision-making processes involved.

According to the government website the purpose of recording NCIHs is “to collect information on ‘hate incidents’ that could escalate into more serious harm or indicate heightened community tensions, but which do not constitute a criminal offence.” It goes on to state, “this data is vital for helping the police to understand where they must target resources to prevent serious crimes which may later occur.” Unfortunately, not only has it been shown that the police actually do little or nothing with the data they are recording and keeping on file, but NCIHs have become an over-used tool in the armoury of the police to target ordinary members of the public who are guilty of nothing more than giving vent on social media to increasing frustration with the state of our country. They may not be a crime, but they are flagged up on enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service checks.

This country, once renowned for leadership,  real community (as opposed to the singular communities police now try to protect and negotiate with), innovation and so much more, has become a divided nation, ashamed of its history, prey to fanciful fads and fashions and with no clear idea of who we are or even how we should behave. The word ‘respect’ is bandied around endlessly and yet there is almost no respect for anything or anyone. Shoplifting and burglaries are largely ignored by the police; car break-ins and knife-crime in cities are normalised; drug dealers and money launderers proliferate. And all the while our police forces up and down the country appear to be spending a huge proportion of their time focusing on “incidents”, “alleged to involve an act” “perceived” to be motivated, maybe only “partly”,  by “hostility or prejudice”.  This is a minefield and a total nightmare from a legal point of view.  There is no objectivity anywhere in this definition. The police appear totally unable to judge whether or not an incident is worthy of their time and resources. The overreach on so many occasions is staggering.

It has recently come to the attention of the press that in 2023 a retired Special Constable was arrested over a tweet which ‘Plod’ didn’t even have the wit to understand correctly. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they sent SIX officers to arrest him. He was handcuffed and the officers searched his house (including his wife’s underwear drawer) commenting on the fact that he had “Brexity” books in his bookcase! What sort of ‘crime’ is that? He was then held for eight hours before (erroneously and to his own detriment) agreeing to accept a caution.  Mr Foulkes is now, with the help of the FSU, suing the Kent Police for compensation for wrongful arrest.

In the last few months a number of such incidents have been reported in the national press, including a case where parents were arrested (again six officers were deemed necessary) and held for 11 hours  “on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications, and causing a nuisance on school property”. They had been emailing the school, questioning the recruitment process for a head teacher and criticising the leadership of their daughter’s school in a parents' WhatsApp group. Last November (on Remembrance Sunday) Allison Pearson, a journalist and columnist on the Daily Telegraph, was famously interviewed by two policemen on her doorstep about a post she had put up, (and fairly quickly deleted) on X (formerly Twitter) a year previously. The fallout from that incident resulted in a lot of comments from politicians and journalists alike and eventually resulted in the police withdrawing their claim that Ms Pearson was guilty, not apparently of a NCIH, which was what she had thought,  but the more serious actual crime of “stirring up racial hatred”.

In yet another example of overreach, in March of this year,  Surrey police arrested mother, Vanessa Brown, not for a NCIH, but for theft – for confiscating her daughters’ iPads in an effort to get her 16-year-old to concentrate on her GCSE revision. She too was held by police for nearly eight hours before police acknowledged their error and released her. Apart from these incidents, Freedom of Information requests by newspapers have shown that playground insults by children have also resulted in NCIHs, which according to Lord Young, founder of the FSU, do not get deleted from their records, unlike cautions for actual crimes, when they reach the age of 18.

Although a new code and guidance for NCIHs was issued in June 2023, setting out a “proportionate and common sense approach”, all the incidents given above have occurred since the new guidance was issued. Analysis of official data indicated that by the end of 2024, 133,000 incidents had been recorded, an average of 13,000 a year. This clearly represents an appalling waste of police resources. Although Statista appears to show that burglaries are falling in the UK, this may be because fewer and fewer are actually recorded. The perception of the public is, rightly or wrongly, that the police are increasingly ignoring crimes like shoplifting, burglaries and theft from cars. Many retail businesses have in fact given up bothering to even report shoplifting crimes as they do not expect the police to respond in any meaningful way.

As a member of the public it is often very hard to see or understand quite how our police forces now see their role. I remember last year coming out of Tower Hill Underground station in London to be faced with a massive police presence. There were police standing around everywhere and police cars parked all around the perimeter of a small park area. Here a smallish group of hippy-looking people of all ages were beating drums and tambourines, in a perfectly peaceful manner, in apparent protest about some unidentifiable grievance which may possibly have been climate-related*. One lady was swooping around in a black and white bird cape with a tambourine/drum and a blue flag with what might have been an egg-timer depicted on it. Around them, office workers sat eating their lunch and tourists took snapshots. The many police men and women simply stood around, occasionally chatting, seemingly not anticipating, even for a moment, that they might be required to do anything at all. Their presence seemed out of all proportion to any perceived threat. What else was going on whilst they all wasted time here?

When it comes to the weekly Palestinian protests, it is all too easy to see that that there might be a chance of clashes with counter-protestors. But why are these groups not being made to contribute to the massive cost of policing their activities? As of January last year it was estimated that the cost of policing these ongoing protests was over £25 million. In a democracy, the freedom to protest is quite rightly regarded as sacrosanct (if only freedom of speech were so well regarded). However, there should surely come a point where this right needs to be balanced with the rights of the rest of society, both in terms of peaceful existence and freedom to go about their business (which Jews in London no longer appear to have, certainly not on weekends) and the spending of our taxes on an issue of interest to a minority, many of whom are not even permanent residents of this country.

Two-tier policing may not be accepted as a reality by our politicians, or by those they put in charge of investigating if such a thing exists - the term was described as “disgraceful” in the report published by MPs at the end of last month. Nevertheless, it is definitely bothering huge numbers of British people who see daily evidence of policing which is not ‘colour-blind’, but which now actively seeks to compensate for those whose ‘cultural differences’ seem somehow to exempt them from the rules and framework which have governed law and morals in this country. Indeed this is explicitly stated in the police conduct race discrimination report published last November. This approach again goes back to the Macpherson report following the death of Stephen Lawrence, as stated by Rachel Watson, the Director General of the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) in her foreword. Baroness Lawrence, Stephen Lawrence’s mother, is apparently against the Conservative party move to abolish NCIHs. This is understandable, but it ignores how much has changed since her son was murdered.

Last summer’s Southport riots were caused in part by the government’s refusal to disclose facts about the killer who stabbed to death three young girls in a dance class. Failure to share that information with the populace was compounded by then attempting to portray the killer as he had been a number of years earlier as a schoolboy. Trying to paint all protestors as “far-right thugs” and arresting people like Lucy Connolly (sentenced to 31 months in prison for an ill-judged tweet), whilst talking to ‘community’ leaders about how they would like their areas to be policed, does not enhance public trust in the police. When, following the Supreme Court ruling on biological women last month, the trans communities and their supporters in London and Edinburgh took to the streets, the police showed further evidence of what can only be called double standards. Seven statues were defaced, placards making explicit death threats were waved, protestors were seen urinating in public. The police did little or nothing in the face of open incitements to violence and protests which amounted to public disorder. As at Southport, they were “examining footage”. How different would the reaction have been had the protestors been groups of elderly ‘Brexity’ people, readers of Douglas Murray, the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, mixed with a number of disaffected unemployed youth and proud working class whites whose jobs have disappeared and whose areas have become  overrun with ‘irregular ‘ migrants. I suspect there would have been mass arrests – necessitating the release of a few murderers and rape gang members, (should any still be in prison).

Meanwhile, PC Richard Prior, elected Chair of the Metropolitan Police Federation, who was suspended and then removed permanently from office “after warning that officers are running scared of being accused of racism when dealing with people from ethnic minorities”, is challenging his suspension and seeking a judicial review of his sacking with the help of a crowdfunding appeal by the FSU. In an interview with GB News, Mr Prior said: “There’s a striking crisis of confidence at the moment within policing in general and certainly within the Metropolitan Police, whereby officers are withdrawing from any kind of proactive policing for fear of falling foul of the IOPC [Independent Office of Police Conduct], or a vexatious or malicious complaint.”  The IOPC has also ruled earlier this month that Sgt Martyn Blake, the firearms officer cleared of murdering gangster Chris Kaba should face a gross misconduct hearing. On Sunday, the Telegraph also revealed that a Scotland Yard officer, known only as W80, who shot and killed 28 year-old criminal Jermaine Baker in 2015 as he was preparing to spring two prisoners from Wood Green Crown court, must appear before a disciplinary tribunal in October. He faces being sacked. No wonder police morale is at an all-time low and many are leaving or taking early retirement. Even from the outside the whole system sounds completely incompetent and toxic.

As our wonderful Chancellor keeps telling us, “The world has changed”. It has, but for most of us it is very hard to see any change for the better and very easy to see things getting worse. People like to imagine that in a democracy the police are independent of government. Sadly this is increasingly not the case. Police behaviour may not be at the direct behest of government, but it is clearly very closely aligned with what has come to be seen by the public as the Establishment Blob and the Uniparty. No wonder the recent local elections saw both major parties trounced. The public would like to see their police force focusing on crimes and on the general lawlessness which appears to have overtaken our country. The abolition of NCIHs would, at the very least, free up a great deal of police time and resources, allowing them to focus on real criminality. Whether or not the Reform Party could be the answer to the country’s woes remains very much to be seen. Will there be a real revolt from those who have hitherto allowed themselves to be trampled over and browbeaten into submission by various vociferous minorities or are we simply destined to see police overreach and underperformance on repeat?

*The few flags they waved were painted with a cross in a circle and the letters BR UM. If anyone can identify the group, please do inform me.