Police Crackdown

A few days ago I mentioned the case of 60 year old shopkeeper Fred Brown, who was arrested and charged over a slap he gave to a young thug, and subjected to a seven month ordeal before being acquitted. Now, police in Cheshire have taken action over an even more vile offence. Yes, that's right, it's a "hate crime":

A father criticised police yesterday for launching an investigation after his 10-year-old son allegedly called a schoolfriend 'gay' in an email.

Alan Rawlinson said he was astounded after two officers arrived at his home in Bold Heath, Cheshire, to speak to his son, George. 'I could not believe what I was hearing,' Rawlinson, aged 41, said. 'They told me they considered it a very serious offence. I thought they were joking at first.

'I run a construction company and have to deal with problems of theft and the like every day. My wife is a magistrate and sees serious crimes all the time so this just seemed a huge waste of resources for something so trivial. I am furious about what has happened, it just seems the politically correct brigade are taking over.'

Rawlinson said that George, a pupil at Farnworth primary school in Widnes, was terrified when police arrived. 'My son is not anti anybody, he is too young to have made judgments about people and we have always taught him to judge people as he finds them. There is no evidence he sent this email, but even if he did I'm sure the words have been taken the wrong way. If somebody had called the police about something like this in my day they would have laughed.'

Inspector Nick Bailey, of Cheshire Constabulary, said: 'We were obliged to record the matter as a crime. Going to the boy's house was a reasonable course of action to take. We do not feel this is something that should be pursued.

'My understanding is that this message was part of some behaviour that has been ongoing. The use of the word gay would imply this is homophobic, but we would be hard-pushed to say this is a homophobic crime. This boy has not been treated as an offender.'

Yet if a crime happens to you, the likelihood is that the police won't even send a full officer round. Rather a community support officer (who has no powers of arrest beyond those held by the average citizen) might show up the next day. But in this case no fewer than two uniformed officers went round to intimidate this poor child.

I do increasingly feel that the police are, for the most part, just scum. Decent officers, like DC Stephen Oake, are increasingly rare, it seems, while the majority of policemen are little more than politically-correct public sector jobsworths; social workers in uniform. In the towns of Calne and Corsham in Wiltshire, BNP members now patrol the streets keeping order, because the police refuse to. In many more places, residents hire private security patrols, because the police can't guarantee their protection. What we are witnessing is nothing less than methods for the enforcement of law and order reverting to the situation we had 300 years ago, when citizens' militias or privately-hired watchmen patrolled the streets, and there was no regular police force. And it is the incompetence of the police that has brought us back to this stage.