Police got it wrong

The police have made a big fuss about the impact of manpower cuts on their ability to fight crime. There are 20,000 fewer officers than 10 years ago and violence is on the increase. This correlation has been disputed by Theresa May but most people see a connection. The Government is giving more money for recruitment but in the meantime the onus must be on the police to make the best use of their resources by prioritising the serious crimes that the public expect to see either prevented or dealt with.

So how do they explain the continued harassment of people, often Christians, for making perfectly lawful statements that are decreed “hate crimes”. The author Caroline Farrow, a Roman Catholic, is being investigated by police in Surrey for allegedly “misgendering” someone in a tweet.

She is to be interviewed under caution following a television debate with a transgender activist who took exception to Mrs Farrow’s refusal to say “she” instead of “he”. This might be a point of issue between the two individuals but by what possible measure of sanity does it become a matter for a police investigation?

Moreover, what law has she broken? It is not the job of the police to dance to the tune of the aggressively militant and minuscule trans lobby but to uphold the law of the land. Whatever misgendering is, it is not an offence.

If the alleged crime is expressing hostility to someone on the grounds of their sexuality under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 then this also applies to religion. So will the police investigate the consequent online attacks on Mrs Farrow. And if they do, where does this nonsense end?

It is not just the police who are at fault here. They feel under pressure to act as arbiters of acceptable opinion because politicians are too craven to make clear that so-called hate crime laws should not be used in this way.

But so flexible have they become that the number of offences has soared, taking up more and more time of a thinning blue line. These laws were introduced to protect minority groups from abuse but are being used to shut down perfectly legitimate opinion, for instance on the rights and wrongs of gay marriage, as in the “gay cake” case in Northern Ireland.

Yet despite this, the Home Office recently launched a campaign “to help the public understand hate crime, particularly offences which often people do not recognise as criminal, such as some forms of online and verbal abuse”. There are moves afoot to widen the scope of these crimes to include misogyny and misandry – dislike of women or men. One police force, meanwhile, has encouraged people to report “non-crime hate”. We reap what we sow.