“Public Order” at the Cost of Public Order

In recent years, the United Kingdom has served as a cautionary tale for what can happen when citizens don’t adequately safeguard individual rights - most notably, the right to free speech and the right to armed self-defense. This month, the Liberal Democrat party of the U.K. revealed the results of a survey in which Brits were asked their views on the responsiveness of law enforcement. The findings are quite bleak.

Almost half of the adult respondents stated they “were not confident that the police would turn up and properly investigate” if their home was burgled or their car was stolen. For those asked if the crime, instead, was being assaulted in the street, the percentage of those not certain about the police turning up and responding properly was only a slightly lower 41%.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that the same poll showed some respondents had given up on relying on police assistance, even when the circumstances warranted a law enforcement response. Eight percent said that in the past two years, they had needed to call police using 999 (the U.K.’s equivalent of 911) but didn’t do so. Almost 60% gave, as the reasons for their inaction, their belief that the “police would not have the time or the resources to take the incident seriously,” or that the police would take too long to arrive.

The most recently available statistics on “crime outcomes” (June 2024) released by the Home Office in the United Kingdom go some way towards explaining the public’s doubts and reservations about law enforcement. Almost three-quarters (73.3%) of residential burglary offense investigations were closed due to no suspect having been identified; the proportion of those offenses that resulted in a charge/summons (not a conviction) “remained low, at 4.3%.” For vehicle theft offenses (theft from a vehicle, theft of a motor vehicle, and vehicle interference), the overwhelming majority of cases “were closed with no suspect identified (83.8%) and only 2.2% resulted in a charge/summons outcome.” Over half of robbery offenses (50.3%) were closed due to no suspect having been identified, and the proportion of those that resulted in a charge/summons was 6.5%. On violence against the person crimes, those that were unrelated to domestic abuse had a charge rate of 4.9% (although there was a much higher charge/summons rate for homicide offenses).   

Commenting on these figures, a press release by the Liberal Democrats pointed out that overall, the result was that 2,156,075 crimes went unsolved across England and Wales during the year covered by those statistics, the equivalent of almost 6,000 crimes a day going unsolved. In less than 7% of all these cases was a suspect even charged or summonsed.

In this chicken-or-the-egg conundrum, crime victims are less likely to report the incident to police when it is apparent that the outcome, for whatever reason, will be next to nothing. That outcome emboldens criminals and the cycle perpetuates itself, to the detriment of other innocent citizens and at the cost of public trust in government. Worse, U.K. citizens are left with little recourse to defend themselves in the face of government inaction, as the government has long sought to curtail even nonlethal means of self-defense.

While victims of actual crime wonder whether and when police will respond, top law enforcement entities in the U.K. are warning people that some social media posting (or even just the sharing of posts) may result in arrest, criminal prosecution, and imprisonment.

Law enforcement time and resources had previously been frittered away on speech cases. Perhaps emblematic of these was the Merseyside Police campaign to “defeat hate in our community” titled, unbelievably, “Being offensive is an offence.”

British law enforcement has already been busy investigating and recording reports of so-called “non-crime hate incidents” (“an incident or alleged incident which involves or is alleged to involve an act by a person [‘the subject’] which is perceived by a person other than the subject to be motivated – wholly or partly – by hostility or prejudice towards persons with a particular characteristic”). While not treated as crimes, these are nonetheless tracked by police “to help prevent serious crimes which may later occur.” One estimate is that more than 250,000 non-crime hate incidents were recorded by police forces in England and Wales over a five-year period, averaging 66 per day. As U.K. magazine The Critic opined, “Little wonder, then, that the police don’t have time to send an officer round to your house if you report a burglary.”

The U.K. government has now made it clear that what people post online may have serious criminal consequences. Enforcement against online “misinformation” deemed to be harmful comes from the top law enforcement official. Stephen Parkinson, Director of Public Prosecutions and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service has stated that “you may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is false, threatening, or stirs up racial/religious hatred... people need to be really aware that if they retweet or share those communications, they are potentially committing criminal offences themselves… if you retweet or you reshare those communications, you will be picked up and you may expect a visit from the police.”

Law enforcement, he said, has “dedicated police officers whose sole task is to scour the internet, scour social media,” and the reach of these investigations and prosecutions could include those that are not even resident in the U.K. “There may be a practical issue in terms of getting hold of them, but I think what people need to understand is that we work very closely with other countries,” said Parkinson. “Obviously, we can extradite people. It may take longer to get them back, but there’s no issue around if we can get them back, then prosecuting them.”

One case resulted in a 25-year-old man being arrested and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment after a “joke” post on TikTok in which he claimed he was being chased by “extreme right-wing rioters.” Such “criminal actions,” said the local Assistant Chief Constable, “will be dealt with quickly and robustly. Whether it is spreading misinformation or being involved in disorder the message is clear – as a service we are ready to respond and deal with any situation robustly.”

In another, a 26-year-old man was sentenced to 38 months’ imprisonment after he copied and pasted, on X, another person’s message, who was herself arrested and bailed on suspicion of inciting racial hatred. During the posts, the man also “accused police of two-tier policing and told someone who said the screenshot and posts could land him in jail that they were delusional.” In his defense, he said, “I disagreed with [the woman] being arrested for their opinion and so I copied and pasted the tweet into X – kind of as a protest.”

In that case, too, a local law enforcement official commented that: “I hope this case sends a very clear message to people who think they can hide behind a screen… This case is not an example of preventing ‘freedom of speech’ as a small minority of people will claim. We stand with our communities and will do everything we can to help them feel safe and protected from crime.”

With the government and law enforcement preoccupied with ensuring a robust response to online lies, “misinformation,” and allegedly offensive “non-crime hate” and normal citizens prevented from obtaining adequate means of self-defense, one must wonder just how safe and protected ordinary Brits feel, having reason to fear the consequences of politically or socially unpopular online activity as well as actual violent crime.