Policing in Britain is broken and Yvette Cooper hints it could make it worse | Politics | News

When children were visited by the police for calling each other names on the playground, something went fundamentally wrong with the system. Police officers now come to the door of journalists who write “wrong thing”.

Private citizens are visited at their homes after comments that some people do not like are shared on social media. Women are forcibly removed from venues because their presence disturbs trans activists. Thousands of adults and children are currently being investigated for so-called non-criminal hate incidents. How did it get to this situation?

The answer, as is often the case, is both very simple and incredibly complex. First, the easy part. Ten years ago, the Police Service produced a guide that introduced the concept of a non-criminal hate incident.

It reveals how police should collect information about “hate incidents” that are not criminal offenses but can turn into more serious problems.

An incident is classified as one that results from hostility or prejudice based on a protected characteristic such as race, religion, disability, sexuality or gender identity.

This means that the police are dragged into the fight rather than the crime, and in practice the accuser is assumed to be the victim. A quick visit to the worst parts of social media will soon lead to examples of people threatening to call the police because someone posted an obviously offensive comment.

Hugely successful author JK Rowling has become the target of such complaints for her refusal to bow to trans activists. However, defending women’s rights should never become an issue that bothers the police.

It’s not Bobby’s fault, having been sent to deal with such complaints. Officers have a tough enough job as it is; They are constantly forced to deal with the darkest corners of society, witnessing horrific sights they will never forget.

Many are stunned when they are sent knocking on someone’s door because of something they shared on X (formerly Twitter).

Visited by police on Remembrance Sunday about a social media post from a year ago, journalist Allison Pearson was told she was not allowed to know who had made the complaint against her or what it was about. He wrote in The Telegraph: “Okay, you’re here to accuse me of causing offense but I’m not allowed to know what that is. Can’t I be told who blames me? So how will I defend myself? The two police officers exchanged glances. Frankly, the Kafkaesque situation made no sense to them either.”

The problem is an institutional one and extends to the police, schools, councils, companies and more. The culture of fear has led to employees and bosses worrying that they will be blamed if things go wrong later.

Reporting insults like telling another pupil on the playground that he smells like fish is laughable, but teachers claim they are worried they will be held accountable for not taking early action if name-calling escalates. Likewise, police fear repercussions if the social media controversy turns serious. Everyone is worried that they will be the ones hung out to dry. And this fear of blame has potentially serious consequences.

Former director of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald said it was “incredible” that children were being recorded for non-criminal hate incidents. He warned there would be “real world consequences” because the record could be disclosed to future employers.

“Many of these incidents, especially those involving school children, appear to be completely trivial and should not be recorded against people’s names, especially children,” he said.

The expert said there was no real investigation into whether the allegation was valid or not, they were recorded only on the basis of the complaint.

Home Affairs Minister Yvette Cooper has suggested she could relax the system to allow more incidents to be recorded following tensions following the war in Gaza. Meanwhile, the overall prosecution rate for actual crimes is deplorable.

Rape allegations take an average of 423 days to investigate, and only 2.6% result in a man being charged. While residential burglary cases were closed after 18 days, 73.3% of them were closed because the suspect could not be identified. The charging rate is only 4.3%. Theft has one of the highest prosecution rates, but it is still only 16.4%.

Instead of making it easier for complaints to be reported, Ms Cooper needs to reverse course.

Victims of crime should no longer be secondary to those who commit the crime. Or as Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick put it: “Police the streets, not the Tweets.”