It’s time to put despotic police chiefs in the dock
We are seeing grotesque over-reach by officers – but there is a solution
Christian street preachers who recited passages from the Bible; a retired police officer who defended the principle of biological sex; the women’s rights campaigner who publicly criticised a transgender doctor who had boasted about being permitted to carry out intimate examinations of female patients; a prominent newspaper columnist who misidentified protestors as pro-Palestinian ‘Jew haters’; a former soldier who reposted a satirical meme showing the Pride flag in the arrangement of a swastika; a grandmother who called for the resignation of a local councillor; an ex-Marine who released a video accusing police and politicians of having failed to protect Britons from the threats posed by radical Islam and illegal immigration; a Cheshire mother who innocently amplified a claim that the Southport massacre had been carried out by an asylum seeker; and a lesbian who expressed gender-critical views on social media.
All the above individuals were investigated – and in some cases arrested and charged – for the actions described, usually after police had been stirred into action by a complaint from someone claiming to have been offended.
It took me just a few minutes to collate these examples of police over-reach. There are undoubtedly many more.
The growing propensity of our increasingly woke police to get involved in these sorts of incident is the backdrop to the recent story of how a Hertfordshire couple – Maxie Allen and his partner, Rosalind Levine – opened the door of their Borehamwood home to find six police officers standing there. The pair were arrested and carted off to the local police station, where they were questioned and kept in a cell for eight hours.
Their ‘crime’? They were irritated at the fact that the governors of their daughter’s school had appointed an interim head teacher without a proper recruitment process having taken place, so they fired off some critical emails and made some pointed comments in a private WhatsApp group. In other words, they were awkward parents. That really does seem to be the extent of it.
The school mobilised the local constabulary – which apparently has the lowest burglary charge rate in the country – and officers duly leapt into action.
Radio producer Mr Allen – a local councillor and plainly a measured and articulate man – explained that neither he nor Ms Levine were ever told precisely what criminal acts they were suspected of having committed. After five weeks, they were informed that police would be taking no further action.
On one level, it’s easy to feel to feel sympathy with police officers such as those who were instructed to arrest and investigate this couple. After all, they are operating in a climate in which the expression of ‘hurty’ words is deemed by many in positions of influence to be a serious transgression, where the giving of offence is itself seen as an offence, and where they are forced to navigate a web of ever more oppressive laws stipulating what the public may say or write. But even under the most liberal interpretation of those laws, it is impossible to conclude that the treatment of Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine – or any of the other individuals identified in the cases above – was justified.
These were not, for the most part, fast-moving situations in which officers needed to make a split-second decision because life or property were at risk. In such cases, we might allow some margin for error. Instead, these were cases in which officers had time to deliberate before deciding to take action. And ordinarily that action would have been sanctioned by someone of senior rank.
We know the drill when such incidents are exposed. There is usually a bit of fuss in the media; the odd politician may express concern (most will remain silent); the chief constable or police and crime commissioner may acknowledge that officers didn’t quite get it right on this occasion; and then the world moves on until the next time. Rinse and repeat.
But this state of affairs is no longer tolerable. These egregious abuses of police authority must stop. That victims may not ultimately be convicted is beside the point: the process itself is the punishment. How threatening and humiliating it must be for innocent and upstanding citizens to be dragged off by police – perhaps, as in the Hertfordshire case, in full view of watching neighbours – swabbed, incarcerated and interrogated.
Of course we need a cultural counter-revolution to restore sanity to policing and force officers to abandon the woke dogma which has driven them to act in these extreme ways. But in the meantime there is something else that can be done. We can start to get tough with those senior officers who are abusing their authority and subjecting law-abiding citizens to entirely unwarranted and degrading treatment.
The common law offence of misconduct in public office is committed when, without reasonable excuse or justification, a public officer wilfully misconducts himself to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public's trust in the office holder. In future, where it is found that a senior officer has acted in such a way when ordering the investigation or arrest of someone who has committed no crime, that officer should himself or herself be charged with the offence.
We need to hold to account police officers such as those who ordered the arrest of Mr Allen and Ms Levine and show them that they are not themselves above the law. Only then might they start to think twice before embarking on such ill-judged and tyrannical crusades against entirely innocent people.
Don’t mention the war!
Two recent stories with a similar theme show the extent to which elements of our society have become so po-faced and censorious. Last month, Hull city councillor Alan Gardiner, while joshing with opponents during a heated council meeting, declared ‘I am a fascist’ and threw a fascist salute.
The video footage showed clearly that Gardiner was having a bit of fun. Still, he found himself at the centre of a media furore. His party, Labour, said it was reviewing the incident, while a Lib Dem member of the council called his actions ‘horrific’.
Then, last week, Harry Redknapp gave the fascist salute while suggesting light-heartedly that the England national team’s new coach Thomas Tuchel was a German spy. It was a classic bit of football banter. Again, cut a media outcry.
Other than for their comedic value, neither of these stories was worthy of the slightest attention. Parodying fascists was once a fine comedy past-time. Think of Charlie Chaplin, Spike Milligan, Freddie Starr and Mel Brooks’s ‘The Producers’. I recall even the-then Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, while trying to organise his colleagues during a photo-shoot, putting on a German accent and clipping his heels together Nazi-officer-style. Nobody took offence.
But that was before the offendotrons got their way. Satire isn’t dead yet. But it seems it’s only a matter of time.
Reopen the Lucy Letby case
The case for looking again at the Lucy Letby conviction is now overwhelming. Following the publication of a detailed report by a team of international medical experts who concluded that no murders had been committed, Lord Sumption, an esteemed former supreme court judge, has expressed his view that Letby is probably innocent.
Sumption’s intervention follows that of Joshua Rozenberg, one of Britain’s best-known legal commentators, who also raised doubts about the conviction.
The likes of Sumption and Rozenberg do not get involved in individual cases unless they think something has gone awry. So when they speak, we should listen.
The task now is to force the justice system to reconsider the matter urgently, lest a potentially innocent woman continue to languish in jail for a heinous crime she very well may not have committed.
A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery
I think taking the police to court for misconduct in public office is well worth a try - although it would probably need crowd-funding and organisation to do it. However I have low confidence in the court system these days, which can be used to bring verdicts based upon politics, and which also prosecutes and punishes innocent people (as the Lucy Letby case increasingly appears to exemplify).
If such a case is brought against the police then I think it should include the policemen making the arrest. My understanding is that they can refuse to do things they consider to be misconduct. This might actually empower the rank and file policemen to stand up to their politicised bosses.
Incidents like this make the police look terrible due to the overreach in the case itself and against their now common failure to act over harmful crimes like theft.
MSM silence on a subject perhaps used to give some cover, by preventing public discussion and analysis of a record of behaviour if not stopping general suspicion.
Now, however, social media allows us to track patterns of conduct by the police, so there is little doubt about what is going on. The incredible thing is those in authority can't possibly be unaware that the public sees all this playing out now, yet still it goes on like a slow motion car crash.
What can be done?