JULIE BINDEL: At last the Met has woken from its Orwellian fever dream and given up the policing of hurt feelings – others must follow suit

The victory of common sense in the end. This was my first reaction to the news that the Metropolitan Police will no longer investigate non-criminal hate incidents (NCHIs).

It is called this because there is no such thing. Either something is a crime under English law or it is not.

But that hasn’t stopped the police (already an institution on its knees) from wasting endless time (about 60,000 hours a year, by the count of think tank Policy Exchange) and spending public money policing people’s opinions rather than breaking actual laws.

Now, finally, the Met has trashed these ridiculous investigations. Father Ted’s co-creator Graham Linehan and his tweets about trans activists were apparently the final straw.

For those lucky enough to have never had any of these things happen to them, let me explain how dire it is.

By July this year police had recorded or investigated a staggering 133,000 NCHIs; often a single anonymous complainant was said to have objected to someone’s opinion or speech.

This may mean being secretly investigated without your knowledge. This could mean the police showing up at your door and scaring you out of nowhere. This could mean that the police have a bad rap against you. All for expressing your opinion.

In 2019, Harry Miller, a former police officer, found himself under investigation after a stranger reported one of his tweets as ‘transphobic’. One of Harry’s ‘offensive’ comments was: ‘I was assigned mammal when I was born but my orientation is fish. Don’t mischaracterize me.’ It was recorded as a non-criminal hate incident against him.

Sinister

Miller challenged this in court and eventually won the case after a Court of Appeal judge condemned the police’s actions as a ‘disproportionate interference’ with freedom of expression.

But surprisingly, NCHIs were allowed to be recorded secretly.

My friend, women’s rights campaigner Helen Joyce’s experience was even worse; She was not told that a trans activist, a well-known agitator, had a criminal harassment charge on her record after she reported him to Greater Manchester Police for referring to another trans activist as a ‘man’ and a ‘fetishist’. Still trying to turn this around.

The aggressive trans lobby has found particular support from these enthusiasts’ charter, and I speak from experience. On a Sunday afternoon in 2019, two uniformed police officers showed up at my house.

They told me that a complaint had been made by a person who identifies as transgender, who doesn’t even live in the UK, who claimed she was ‘offended’ by something I said online.

The officers asked if I would attend a voluntary interview, but I declined. I told them they would have to arrest me. They let go after ‘talking to the sergeant’.

I consider myself lucky. I have a safe home, I have a partner who is a lawyer, and I know my rights. But many people don’t do this. The people I spoke to are terrified about their livelihoods because they voiced a view that the trans movement now recognizes as heresy.

We can only imagine the fear felt by school worker Helen Jones when police visited her home in Stockport last February. His ‘transgression’ was to criticize a Labor councilor for offensive comments he made about a pensioner in a WhatsApp group.

Former police officer Harry Miller (photo taken outside the Royal Courts of Justice in 2019) was investigated six years ago after a stranger reported one of his tweets as “transphobic”.

The officers at the door accepted that no crime had been committed, but said they still “had to take action”.

Whose obligation? Certainly not according to law, because the Human Rights Act not only allows the right to offend, but even allows us to abuse each other.

Sometimes the actions of these ‘thought police’ can be ridiculous. Officers arrived to investigate Enoch Powell’s display at a hardware store

in Shropshire; started a row on Snapchat after a fellow student called a female student a ‘Polish slut’; and noted that a vulgar word was written using alphabet cups in a supermarket.

victimization

The truth is that such behavior by those tasked with maintaining law and order is an authoritarian obscenity that should never be allowed in a liberal democracy.

Like many dystopian projects, NCHI’s promotion is based on virtue.

Its architects wanted to improve society, primarily to record incidents of racism that did not exceed the threshold of crime. This followed the 1999 Macpherson Report into ‘institutional racism’ over the Met Police’s mishandling of the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

But at the time, no one could have predicted the rise of social media as a vector for all kinds of victimization, whether it was inciting racial offenses, being rude to disabled people, or misgendering a transgender person.

But rather than put the brakes on this out-of-control train of victimization, non-criminal hate incidents were included in police guidance in 2014.

What followed was a descent not into institutional racism but into institutional cowardice; police showed up at people’s homes to scold them for anything someone found offensive.

The NCHI farce reached its shameful peak last month with the case of Graham Linehan, whose courageous efforts to expose transgender ideology as deeply harmful led to the ruin of his career and marriage.

Women’s rights campaigner Helen Joyce (photo taken in April this year) was reported to Manchester Police for referring to another trans activist as a ‘man’ and a ‘fetishist’.

After getting off a plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers took him to a police cell; His treatment was so exaggerated that he later said he felt he had been accused of terrorism.

Scotland Yard was convinced that it had caught the man on the grounds that he had ‘encouraged violence’ by making three posts against trans activists on social media. But following public outcry, the force downgraded a potential public order offense to NCHI level before the Crown Prosecution Service abandoned the case altogether.

As horrific as Graham’s experience was for him, it did us a favor because it revealed once again the wide gap between what the public expects the police to do and what the police actually do.

What a ridiculous and offensive waste of resources NCHI policing is at a time when we read countless reports of shoplifting and theft being ignored and the average rape case takes three years to reach court. When it comes to actual online crimes, where is the enforcement of websites that incite violence or post disgusting videos depicting child abuse?

nonsense

When it comes to real crime failures, police chiefs always complain about funding problems. This makes the mafia’s decision to send uniformed police officers to the doorsteps of people who share their opinions on social media even more ridiculous.

Perhaps the penny has finally dropped with the Met’s decision to no longer investigate NCHIs.

There are signs of the return of common sense in other areas of life; for example, the Oxford Union’s ‘celebration’ this week of the assassination of US right-wing political campaigner Charlie Kirk, a move to oust president-elect George Abaraonye, ​​who insulted the very idea of ​​a debating society.

And in April, the Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of woman is based on biological sex.

While the public has long been aware of the absurdity of policing hurt feelings, the Met is beginning to wake up from this Orwellian fever dream that has gripped them for more than a decade.

All other police forces in Britain must now follow his example and stop this disgraceful practice.