It isn’t the police’s job to patrol opinions

There are thousands of hate speech allegations made every year, many against those who are not in Allison Pearson’s position to fire back

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Rarely has the word Kafkaesque been used in a front-page headline in The Telegraph but it was fully justified in our account of the experience of columnist Allison Pearson. She found herself confronted by the police on her doorstep on Remembrance Sunday, of all days, to be accused of what she understood to be a non-crime hate incident (NCHI).
The two officers declined to specify what it was she had written on a social media platform nor would they tell her who had made the complaint. Later, Essex police elevated the undefined potential offence to a crime under Section 17 of the Public Order Act 1986, which is incitement to racial hatred.
The purported tweet that brought this about was posted a year ago, which raises the obvious question as to why this is being pursued now. But unless we know what it is, how is anyone to judge? Are the police to be arbiters of what is right or wrong to say? This is not so much out of a Kafka novel as George Orwell’s 1984, a thought crime.
In a country that prides itself on freedom under the law it is unjust for the agencies of the state to hound people with allegations that do not even meet the threshold of criminal behaviour. The police are not capable of making such subjective judgements and nor should they be expected to. Yet there are thousands of NCHIs logged every year.
It is not just the police who are at fault here. They feel under pressure because politicians are too craven to stand up to Left-wing lobbying groups and make clear that the regulations on so-called hate speech should not be used in this way, and were not intended to be.
They were introduced after the Stephen Lawrence murder in 1993 to aid the police in reporting and recording racist incidents and crimes but are now deployed to shut down perfectly legitimate opinions on all sorts of matters, from religion to gender.
Police forces have been encouraging people to report what are essentially views that others may not agree with or find offensive. This is an abuse of the law and it should have been repealed by the Conservatives because it certainly will not be by Labour.
At a time when they need to get a grip on violent crime, and rarely solve burglaries or thefts, the country despairs of the skewed priorities of both the Government and the police. It has to stop.
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