Why no one trusts the police anymore

The image of police officers light-heartedly sashaying down the local high street to the tune of the Macarena while someone gets mugged round the back of the Co-op is one most people in this country would probably regard as an accurate — and only slightly exaggerated — caricature of what's going wrong with modern policing.

But is the current crisis of public confidence in the police solely attributable to flat-footed coppers somehow managing to bungle their operational priorities? The Free Speech Union's Research Officer, Carrie Clark, thinks not. In a terrific piece for Spiked, she points out that it's also to do with an increasingly clear political bias that's been fuelled by the influence of lobby groups like Stonewall.

The willingness of the police to go after critics of transgender ideology is a case in point.

In the case of Harry Miller last year, the Court of Appeal ruled that expressing views critical of gender-identity ideology shouldn't be treated as a police matter. More recently, judges in the Maya Forstater case ruled that gender-critical beliefs are protected by the Equality Act 2010.

Yet officers still persistently trample over freedom of speech and even the law in the name of trans rights.

Just last month, an?official Sussex Police social-media account?warned users not to question the gender identity of convicted child sex offender John Stephen Dixon (now identifying as Sally Ann Dixon), who is reportedly being sent to a women’s prison. Sussex Police told critics that any ‘hateful comments’ towards the convicted child abuser would not be tolerated. They claimed that referring to Dixon as a man met the definition of a ‘hate crime’ and advised critics not to express their views. In other words, the police’s bias towards trans ideology led them to prioritise the feelings of a convicted paedophile over free speech. It took an intervention from the home secretary,?Suella Braverman, for Sussex Police to apologise.

Earlier this year, women’s rights campaigner Jennifer Swayne was arrested and detained for 10 hours by Gwent Police for allegedly causing ‘offence’. Her crime? Putting up posters saying ‘No Men in Women’s Prisons’.

In July, feminist campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen was visited by police after warning online that gender self-identification would be exploited by male sex offenders to get access to vulnerable women. Police recorded this as a ‘hate incident’.

And in August, lesbian campaigners from Get the L Out were ejected by police from Cardiff Pride for carrying signs reading ‘Lesbians don’t like penises’.

These cases are just the tip of a very large iceberg. So why is it that despite the Miller and Forstater rulings, the police still seem determined to engage in a politically motivated crusade against those holding the ‘wrong’ (i.e., gender critical) views?

Perhaps they've forgotten Robert Peel’s nine principles of policing. Issued in 1829, they form the basis of modern policing by consent. Principle five, in particular, should be required reading for all police officers from now on: "officers should seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion but by constantly demonstrating impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy".

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