‘Online abusers can no longer hide behind keyboards’

INDIVIDUALS who target England players with social media abuse at Euro 2024 have been warned they cannot “hide behind their keyboards” as police will look to clamp down after holding discussions with Gareth Southgate’s squad.

Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho all suffered racist abuse online after missing penalties in the Euro 2020 final shoot-out loss to Italy at Wembley.

However, chief constable Mark Roberts, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for football policing insists improvements in the procedures means it will be easier to identify and prosecute anyone found to have posted online abuse.

“When we properly started looking at this a number of years ago, we were finding that some of the offences we were looking to prosecute are under the malicious telecommunications act and there is a six-month time limit in effect on those,” he said. “If you don’t issue a summons in six months in most circumstances it meant we couldn’t prosecute.

“At that time we were seeing instances where police were putting requests in to a social media company for the relevant data and the police were not always getting it back in the six-month deadline which frustrates and takes away opportunity for prosecution.

“We have worked with them [social media companies] since then, we are seeing replies turned around in a matter of days so it is important to get the message out that if people think they can hide behind their keyboards and racially or in other ways engage in hate crimes online then we will pursue it and we will prosecute people.”