A few weeks ago, a story made headlines that outraged civil liberties advocates and critics of state over-reach. It revealed how much the British police have sunk into farce. A teenage girl with autism had been dragged from her home and arrested by a group of police officers after she said a female police officer looked like her lesbian grandmother. Well, the same force involved in this shocking display of state power – West Yorkshire Police – has done it again.

This time they tracked down and reprimanded an elderly woman in her own home for a crime so horrible it’ll send shivers down your spine. The woman, whose identity was protected at her request, took a photograph of a sticker that said ‘keep males out of women-only spaces’. I know, that’s despicable, isn’t it?

The offending sticker was only a few inches long and was placed on a larger poster that read ‘stand by your trans’. The lady in question didn’t even put it there. She was walking through the picturesque northern town of Hebden Bridge when she saw a small knee-high billboard celebrating transgender rights outside of Happy Valley Pride, a local pride organisation. She found it interesting, so she took a picture and continued on her way.

Four weeks later, two male policemen came knocking on her door. At first, the woman thought they were informing her about a death in the family, and she became anxious and upset. After opening, they told her they were investigating a complaint on behalf of Happy Valley Pride due to its ‘sensitivity… for members of the LGBT community’.

How did West Yorkshire police find this terrible bigot? Upon entering the house, police said her personal information was provided to them by Happy Valley Pride. For the heinous crime of photographing an inanimate object on the pavement of a public street, she was given a 30-minute lecture, warning about ‘the harassment and alarm that this sticker could potentially cause the community’.

Despite admitting no crime had been committed, the incident was recorded by West Yorkshire Police as a non-crime hate incident. A non-crime hate incident (NCHI) is defined as ‘any non-crime incident which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice’. This means that an individual can have one recorded against them if anyone decides they were offended. A mere claim is sufficient to justify police intervention. This ‘perception-based’ policy has led to an explosion in the number of NCHIs being issued by the police. More than 120,000 were recorded by the police between 2014 and 2019.

The rise in police recorded hate crime comes from a change in the law. The concept of protected characteristics serves as the cornerstone of hate crime legislation. According to the Equality Act of 2010, these identities are those that the government identifies as vulnerable. The law’s original goal was to eradicate prejudice and discrimination against marginalised groups.

As with all legislation enacted to safeguard equality, it has had a negative impact on our judicial system. It implies that the concept of equality under the law is no longer tenable. Contrary to expectations from lawmakers, the Equality Act has stifled freedom of speech.

Despite a 2021 Court of Appeal’s ruling declaring that police guidance on the recording of non-crime hate incidents is unlawful and violates the right to freedom of expression, they are still being recorded. Some of the ‘crimes’ our finest boys in blue have spent considerable time and resources investigating include an eleven-year-old boy calling another boy ‘shorty’ and a man whistling the theme tune of Bob the Builder at a neighbour.

While the police waste their time on Orwellian-style thought-policing, real crimes go unsolved. As Reduxx magazine reports, the woman claims ‘most burglaries in [the] area do not result in an in-person police visit’. Is she right? It seems that this dangerous thought criminal has exercised her capacity for free thought and inquiry, looked at the world around her, and come to a rational conclusion.

West Yorkshire has the second-highest crime rate in the country. As for violent crime, it accounts for 41.5 per cent of total crime in the area – at 141,000, this is the highest crime rate of the 54 counties of England and Wales. This number increased by 2.2 per cent between July 2022 and June 2023.

The other week, Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, had to reassure the public that all burglaries would be investigated by the police. That’s because, for years, they didn’t respond to them. According to the Home Office, 73.7 per cent of all theft cases went unsolved last year because no suspect had been identified – the highest rate of any offence. Only 3.9 per cent of residential burglaries resulted in someone being charged. A clearance rate so low that, in some parts of the country, burglary and theft have effectively been decriminalised.

As the UK Telegraph reports, in the past three years, not a single case of vehicle, bicycle or personal theft has been solved by police in between half and two-thirds of the 30,100 neighbourhoods in England and Wales. In terms of burglaries, none were solved in half of the neighbourhoods during the same period.

The British police have been institutionally captured by the far-left social justice ideology. They have become enforcers of a fashionable and controversial, state-sanctioned progressive worldview. No longer able to arrest the real criminals, our police prefer spending time dancing the Macarena at Gay Pride events or telling the public that being offensive is an offence. Tough on crime? Give me a break. The next time your home is broken into, it would be better to call the police and tell them you were misgendered. Then they may appear.

In the majority of cases, the police cannot identify the suspect, yet offend the alphabet community, and they will be on your doorstep in seconds.