What do you do if you can’t solve crime? For the police in this country – as in many other western countries – the answer is obvious. You police non-crime.

The fact that our police do not police crime is not my view. It is a fact. Recent figures have shown that they currently fail to solve 90 per cent of reported crimes. Put into real numbers, that is 6,000 criminals every day getting away with serious offences. In 2022 that included 30,000 sexual offences, 320,000 violent crimes, 1.3 million thefts and over 310,000 cases of criminal damage and arson. Or to put it still another way, only 6.5 per cent of crimes led to a charge or court summons, while 2.2 million cases were dropped because no suspect was found.

Some areas of the country manage to beat even this record. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, in the past three years police forces have failed to solve a single burglary in half of all neighbourhoods in England and Wales. Not one. Nada. Zilch.

So what are they reduced to doing? Why, policing language of course. As the great Mark Steyn has said, our societies in the West have ended up policing everything except crime. As he knows.

Last November, the Met arrested a man for criticising the number of Palestinian flags in his area 

Take a phrase I was introduced to only this week: ‘tragedy chanting’. This is one of those new phrases used as though they are familiar terms. It is also the offence with which two Manchester United fans were charged with after an FA Cup match against Liverpool. Following the arrests, Chief Inspector Jamie Collins said that Greater Manchester police ‘will clamp down on this and arrest those who engage in such behaviour, regardless of what team they support’. You could observe that a force which fails to distinguish itself during actual tragedies might disproportionately incline to policing ‘tragedy chanting’ as some kind of recompense.

The Liverpool police have form in this area too. A few years back 19-year-old Chelsea Russell was visited by officers, issued with a community order and given an 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. curfew for two months. The offence was that Chelsea posted on Instagram a lyric which included the ‘n-word’ from Snap Dogg’s celebrated work ‘I’m Trippin’ ’. She apparently intended it as a tribute to a friend who had just died in a road crash, and whose favourite song this was. And while you or I might disagree with Chelsea’s or her late friend’s choice, I am not certain that anyone’s musical taste should be an arrestable offence. But the police in Liverpool thought otherwise.

So it isn’t just Scotland that’s engaged in policing these strange new offences. It is forces across the UK. Recent figures show that in just one year, 3,300 people were detained and questioned about things they had said on social media. Last November, for example, the Met arrested a man for a post in which he criticised the number of Palestinian flags flying from lampposts in his area. There’s also the recent prosecution of Sam Melia, whose crimes included putting up stickers which said ‘It’s okay to be white’ and ‘Reject white guilt’. We have yet to learn whether it is a crime in Britain to put up stickers saying ‘It’s okay to be black’ or ‘Reject black guilt’. The most egregious of his stickers asked ‘Why are Jews censoring free speech?’ Yet marching at a Palestine demonstration waving a placard saying media is ‘controlled by Zionists’ does not – as with Mr Melia – result in a charge of incitement to stir up racial hatred and a two-year prison sentence.

It is a dangerous game that the police are playing: lean on one lever overzealously the better to keep the peace. This is why the brave Iranian man who turns up to Palestinian demonstrations in London with a sign saying ‘Hamas is terrorist’ is terrorised not only by the peaceful attendees of the peaceful marches, but by the police too. It doesn’t do to state British government policy amid a peaceful march, does it? It might inflame opinion among the peaceful attendees.

The same is happening all over the West. Earlier this month a new Holocaust museum was opened in Amsterdam. A protest against it was arranged by Palestinian activists, ostensibly because the ceremony was going to be attended by Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel (and son of British second world war hero Chaim Herzog). At the service in the nearby synagogue, attendees could hear the chants of their opponents outside. Footage of the day includes images of Holocaust survivors, with their grandchildren, walking past screaming protestors.

Most popular

Lucy Hunter Blackburn

Scotland’s new Hate Crime Act is fraught with danger

In response, the Dutch comedian Hans Teeuwen made a video which he posted on social media lampooning the mayor of Amsterdam for allowing such scenes to happen in the city. Wearing a funny wig, he did a biting impression of her saying that sometimes you have to break a few eggs and Jewish hearts in order to make a nice diverse and inclusive omelette. At the end of the sketch, as the camera pulled away, there was an air gun on the table, a satirical reference to the fact that the mayor’s son was found a few years ago with a disabled firearm belonging to his father.

Within two hours, six police turned up at Teeuwen’s door claiming they were investigating reports of a firearm. The idea that he was posing any kind of risk to the public was preposterous, and Teeuwen treated it as such, telling the police that they could take the toy gun and give it to the mayor’s son as a reminder of the shame she’d brought on Amsterdam by refusing to let the opening of a Holocaust museum proceed with dignity. The police suggested that he was lucky that they hadn’t broken his door down. ‘Aren’t you just a little bit ashamed of this?’ Teeuwen asked them when they finally left.

But that’s the state of things in the West. If you can’t control the mobs and you can’t control the criminals, why not try to control everybody else?/>