UK The UK Police Megathread - They may need to check your thinking - A butter knife to the chest will kill as surely as a Bayonet

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The UK Police a fine body of men and women, that for various reasons seem addicted to being an international laughing stock. Poor judgement, self pity, angry bouts of rage, interspaced with cravenly rolling over when challenged. Much of which they document themselves on their social media of choice, Twitter. Like so many lolcows, they have no ability to analyse or modify their behavior and instead when criticised will double down.

Yes I realise sections of the Police do a good job, serious crime is investigated by the grown ups. However this thread mainly concerns the day to day public policing, and the highly politicized hierarchy of the Police,

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Outside the UK the Police are most infamous for their handling of various Muslim child grooming gangs. Books could be written on the subject so I'll just leave this here.

Then there's the police love of hate crimes. There are a few different reasons for this, partly it's to compensate for their handling of the Stephen Lawrence murder. However the police have discovered that investigating (particularly online) hate crimes, has significant advantages. Unlike the typical burglar, often suspects in hate crimes have jobs, families and something to lose, also the complainants are typically well motivated and often get support from various organisation such as Hope Not Hate ,Tell Mama or Stonewall.

Due to legal Aid cuts, and the reluctance of UK solicitors to take cases like this, people will often accept a caution at the first opportunity. If they don't the police have other tactics, such as turning up at your workplace, just to ask Questions such as in the case of Harry Miller a guy who got in a twitter row with Suzy Green of the Trans children's charity Mermaids

Also at one point there weren't getting enough complaints rolling in, which was a problem as an actual complaint is a legal requirement before they can investigate. However Liverpool police found a way around this with the assistance of Constable Dominique Walker, It's PC Walker's job to be offended and make complaints. 19 Year old Chelsea Russell was convicted of a hate crime in 2018 for posting Snoop Dogg lyrics on Facebook after her best friend died, PC Walker was on hand to make a complaint as no member of the public was petty enough to want to.

So why are they funny?

Well there's the contrast between what they'll put up with from certain sections of the community






versus how they treat other members of the public


Then there's the way they've decided to tackle the Knife Crime epidemic.
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Currently the Police are covering themselves in glory as they tackle COVID19. The police have struggled at the highest levels to tell the difference between government advice and actual law. Here's the Chief constable of Northhampton Police flat out saying that he may decide to check people's shopping baskets for non essential items.

















Even though he must have recognised the thing he was talking into was a video camera, he spent the rest of the day denying he'd said it. While at the same time retweeting Toadie underlings who defended him.

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There's so much more though, the Police's worst scandals, while serious have often tended to be quite farcical. Such as Plebgate where the Police Officers on duty at downing street decided it would be clever to leak a story to the Sun Newspaper accusing a government minister of calling them plebs, because they were all exceptional they gave overly detailed statements which ended up being contradicted by CCTV(which they had somehow forgotten that Downing street had a lot of) This ended with the Prime Minister making a statement saying the Police had issues with 'honesty'.

The Stephen Lawrence murder investigation spiraled out of control because the police decided that Lawrence's family were nobodies, (only to find out later his father was friends with the editor of the Daily Mail) . With the grooming gang scandals the only arrests they made were the fathers of two of the victims (for a public order offense, ie giving them shit) and on one occasion the victim herself. However because the police were such pedants they documented everything, and which is why they fought so hard to avoid a proper judicial inquiry.

So the previous thread on the UK Police was dispatched to Spergatory, (thanks to @mr.moon1488 , @break these cuffs for their contributions to it) . After some advice from a sympathetic staff member I'm reposting here, because in his words A&H loves to crap on the British .

There is so much stuff out there , the UK police are so shit at using social media, that a single thread to consolidate it all might be worthwhile.
 
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East_Clintwood dijo:
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GMP have already bent the knee. Unsurprising because that area of Prestwich and further down Bury Old Road into Broughton is basically little Israel.
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Why are you more pissed that the police stopped removing totally legal posters to kowtow to a violent minority than that they were removing them in the first place?
 
For those curious about the officer's ethnicity

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it's a white boy.

White lads at the Edgeware ones too, slightly tougher statement from the Met.


There is a photo being shared online of Met officers removing posters of those kidnapped in Israel from the shutters of a shop in Edgware.

We recognise why people are concerned and want an explanation. Below is what we know about what led to the officers doing what they did.

The posters were put up late on Saturday night. We received at least two calls about it from local residents.

They believed the posters were put on these specific shutters as a retaliation for comments about the conflict between Israel and Hamas that were made on social media by a person associated with the business.

It appears print outs of those comments may also have been put up next to the posters.

Both people who reported the posters to us were concerned that it would escalate an already tense situation. Officers went to the shop and acting in good faith they removed the posters in an effort to prevent any such escalation.

The removal of these posters elsewhere in London has caused anger and upset in recent weeks. We know a photo of our officers doing the same will cause further concern, particularly for anyone not aware of the full facts reported to us at the time.

We have no wish to limit the rights of anyone to protest or to raise awareness of the plight of those kidnapped and the terrible impact on their families.

But we do have a responsibility to take reasonable steps to stop issues escalating and to avoid any further increase in community tension. On this occasion, that is what officers were trying to do.

We’re in contact with local partners, community representatives and those directly involved in this incident. Officers are listening to and reflecting on any concerns raised with us.

We are also assessing the content of the comments made on social media to identify any potential offences.
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Police arrested a man for allegedly dressing as the Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi for Halloween.

North Yorkshire Police received complaints after a man shared photos of himself wearing a costume on social media.
In the pictures he could be seen with a head-dress and a T-shirt with the words "I love Ariana Grande".

He also had a backpack with the words "boom" and "TNT" written on it.

The man, in his 40s, was arrested on 1 November on suspicion of offences including using a public communication network to send offensive messages.

He has been released on police bail.

Twenty-two people died when Abedi detonated a bomb at Manchester Arena after a concert by pop star Ariana Grande on 22 May 2017.
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In a minute-long clip posted to X, Met Police officers are seen handcuffing a man and leading him outside to a police van.

A man has been arrested after a video was shared online criticising those who put up Palestinian flags in a UK neighbourhood.

In the minute-long clip posted to X, formerly Twitter, Met Police officers are seen handcuffing a man and leading him outside to a police van.

The arrest, made at 9.55pm on Tuesday, October 31 in east London, comes after a video was posted on Facebook where the person behind the camera appears to condemn the number of Palestinian flags on Bethnal Green Road.

The person filming appears to say: "Look at this cr*p here," while zooming in on a number of flags attached to lamp posts and road signs.

"You let them into the country and this the s**** they come up with," the person then adds.

The Met Police have confirmed they have arrested a man on suspicion of a racially aggravated Section 5 public order offence.

According to the force, he remains in custody at an east London police station.
A spokesperson for the force told Express.co.uk: "We are aware of a video circulating on social media that shows the arrest of a man on suspicion of a racially aggravated Section 5 public order offence.

"An initial arrest enquiry was previously made at the address. However, nobody was home and arrest enquiries were conducted at the later time of 9.55pm on Tuesday, October 31 when the arrest was made.

"The arrested man was taken to an east London police station where he remains at this time.

"More than 1,000 officers are providing high visibility patrols across London – particularly where we know communities feel vulnerable.

"We take all allegations of hate crime incredibly seriously. Where offences have taken place, our officers are attending, supporting victims and making arrests - and we will continue to do so."

This comes after hundreds of pro-Palestine protesters gathered at London Liverpool Street station on Tuesday evening following demanding a ceasfire between Israel and Hamas.

A sea of people, many of whom are holding banners and Palestinian flags, were sitting in the main foyer of the station at rush hour, connecting the centre of the capital with northeast London and East Anglia.

People can be heard chanting: "What do we want? Ceasefire. When do we want it? Now." The group staging the movement is SOAS Detainee Support (SDS) who forewarned of the planned campaign earlier today.

Onlookers entering the station branded the action as "absolutely massive" and said there were thousands present. Those who were not a part of the action are seen zig-zagging between those sat on the floor as they navigate the crowds.
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Snekposter dijo:
Its hard to tell if the Yorkshire or London cops are the absolute worst scum
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They're as bad as each other, but the Met edges ahead of the Yorkshire forces by dint of having its huge budget and deep links to organised crime. That said, the absolute worst force is the City of London police. It's a separate entity from the Metropolitan Police that only answers to the City of London Corporation, which is the ancient government of the square mile. They're so corrupt that they make the Met look like paragons of justice and virtue. Favourite pastimes include arresting random people for literally no reason and repeatedly destroying evidence in armed robbery cases in order to profit from the takings.
 
teriyakiburns dijo:
Favourite pastimes include arresting random people for literally no reason and repeatedly destroying evidence in armed robbery cases in order to profit from the takings.
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You sound, simultaneously, like a narky teenager and a career criminal. Have you been the victim of a victimless crime perpetrated by said City of London Police, or can you not say?
 

Met Police rebuked for raid on reporter’s home over national security stories​

Archive
High Court quashes order obtained by Scotland Yard allowing it to examine journalistic material in an Official Secrets Act investigation
The Metropolitan Police has been rebuked by a senior judge for raiding the home of a journalist as part of an investigation into a suspected breach of the Official Secrets Act.

In a significant victory for press freedom, the High Court quashed an order obtained by the police in a secret hearing that had allowed them to examine “journalistic material”.

Lawyers for the journalist, who cannot be named, said the original court order issued to police “would have ridden roughshod” over the “essential protections for journalistic material and the public interest in effective criminal investigations”.
The home and office of the freelance journalist – identified only as LXP – were raided at dawn on July 12 last year, four days after police had been granted a warrant.

The homes of two suspected sources – both of them public officials – were raided on the same day. They are accused of handing “stolen material” to the journalist.

The operation involved dozens of plainclothes Counter Terror Command Officers.
Police seized from LXP a large quantity of computer equipment and notebooks. LXP protested during the raid that, as a journalist, the materials were protected and should not be searched.

‘Journalistic protection’​

Senior government sources questioned the decision by the Met to raid the journalist’s home.
The source said: “Press freedom should always be at the front and centre of our considerations. This looks like a concerning case and careful thought should be given to any next steps.”

In a long-running dispute that has cost the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds, a judge at an earlier hearing said documents suspected of being stolen did not enjoy legal protection from police examination.

But Lady Justice Macur, sitting in the High Court, quashed that decision following a judicial review brought by LXP. Lady Justice Macur said: “With respect to the learned judge, it is a bold finding” that “flies in the face of a line of binding authorities.”

She said the original warrant had failed to consider whether material being seized enjoyed “journalistic protection”, adding: “If the stable door is opened by the police conducting the search, the horse named ‘journalistic protection’ has already bolted, before the judge has considered where the balance of public interest lies.”

Lawyers for LXP said the High Court ruling on Friday was of “real public importance and particularly significant for the press because, had the order been upheld, fundamental protections applicable to journalistic material in English law would have been undermined”.

The Crown servants - known only as X and Y - were suspected of breaching Section 1 and Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act (1989), respectively. LXP was under investigation for a suspected breach of Section 5 of the same Act.

The initial police warrants were granted over the allegation that X and Y had passed information to LXP, the freelance journalist.

‘Safeguards would have been watered down’​

Metropolitan Police denies being aware that LXP was a journalist, prior to the raid on their home and office. For some months police continued to dispute LXP’s status as a journalist but have now accepted that was the case.

Lawyers for LXP said police have not specified which stories appeared in national newspapers they believe were the result of information given to the freelance journalist.

As part of Friday’s judgment, the Met police must now hand over the devices to an independent barrister and LXP is entitled to tell the barrister which material was used for journalistic purposes.

Police will then have to argue why there is an overriding public interest which would justify them being permitted to access any journalistic materials which they wish to inspect.

Katie Wheatley, of Bindmans law firm and LXP’s solicitor, said: “Parliament has established a delicate balance between essential protections for journalistic material and the public interest in effective criminal investigations. The order obtained by the Metropolitan Police would have ridden roughshod over that balance.

“If the order had been upheld, vitally important legal safeguards that protect journalistic material would have been watered down, making it easier for police to seize or obtain journalistic material, including confidential source material, no matter the public interest value of the story.”
She said LXP had asked her to thank publicly a number of organisations that had provided support, including Telegraph Media Group.
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Otterly dijo:
I hope Suella has good blood pressure medication because she’s fighting against an establishment in Whitehall who are also fully indoctrinated just like the police
Colleague at work on Friday in tears because her sister is going through a terrible divorce, he’s turned up multiple times threatening to kill her, armed as well… neighbours witnessed it and called police, police said until he actually hurts her they can’t even warn him. This is the first time she’s ever called the police and she’s really upset that they won’t help.
If he’d misgendered someone maybe they’d take it more seriously.
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Good to see the police have got better in the 20 years since this happened to me. But not.

The only thing that made them take my litany of (witnessed, reported) serious incidents seriously, and actually do something, was my great-great-grandboss finding me crying in the foyer at work one morning because I had been chased from the train station into the building yet again.

Unluckily for stalker, that individual was a government minister, so shit actually got done, and I stopped having to move every couple of months because the police wouldn’t stop him sleeping outside the door of whatever flat I was cowering in at the time. Or calling 24/7. Or sending those fucking letters, or waiting for me at the station, or the rest of the shit that went on.

The UK police do not give a single fuck about protecting people from targeted harassment. Even if you have a documented history of them having been violent to you. Even if there is a documented history of them having used weapons on you before, and them being found in possession of similar weapons at the time of later reports.

I can honestly say I am probably only still alive because my superboss was a stone cold bro and had the influence to have a stop put to this. That shouldn’t be what makes the police take your safety seriously.
 
Fareal dijo:
Good to see the police have got better in the 20 years since this happened to me. But not.

The only thing that made them take my litany of (witnessed, reported) serious incidents seriously, and actually do something, was my great-great-grandboss finding me crying in the foyer at work one morning because I had been chased from the train station into the building yet again.

Unluckily for stalker, that individual was a government minister, so shit actually got done, and I stopped having to move every couple of months because the police wouldn’t stop him sleeping outside the door of whatever flat I was cowering in at the time. Or calling 24/7. Or sending those fucking letters, or waiting for me at the station, or the rest of the shit that went on.

The UK police do not give a single fuck about protecting people from targeted harassment. Even if you have a documented history of them having been violent to you. Even if there is a documented history of them having used weapons on you before, and them being found in possession of similar weapons at the time of later reports.

I can honestly say I am probably only still alive because my superboss was a stone cold bro and had the influence to have a stop put to this. That shouldn’t be what makes the police take your safety seriously.
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More a reply to who you're replying to, but:

As of today: Suella has been sacked.
 
William Tyndale dijo:
A lesbian in the UK was questioned and threatened with arrest for tweeting that “transwomen” are men.
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Newcastle United fan has club membership suspended while police investigated tweets on trans women​

(Archive)
A gender-critical Newcastle United fan says the club have suspended her membership because police investigated her for tweeting that “trans women are men”.

The 34-year-old, who asked not to be identified, was interviewed under caution by police after a complaint over tweets in which she also said that gender-affirming surgery was “mutilating children”. The investigation has now been dropped.
The woman was told by the club that her account had been “temporarily suspended” while Northumbria Police investigated her for online posts.

The lifelong Magpies supporter said the club had still not reinstated her membership. “I have been in shock about the whole thing,” she told the Telegraph. “I’ve missed some big games. It’s been a bit of a nightmare.”
Newcastle United were approached for comment but did not respond.

The woman, who lives a stone’s throw from St James’ Park, the club’s home ground, pays £37 a year for membership, which means she can enter the ticket ballot before general sale.

‘Standard practice’​

She had already been to several games this year, including home victories against Aston Villa, Crystal Palace, and Paris Saint-Germain, by the time she received an email from the club’s security complaints team on October 31 about her membership.

The club said it was “standard practice” to suspend anyone under police investigation and that her alleged offence “contravenes our ground regulations”.

It came as a shock for the loyal supporter, who was unaware she was under police investigation at all. “I didn’t have a clue what I had been accused of,” she said.

On Friday, she was asked to attend a voluntary interview at Forth Banks Police Station in relation to “malicious communications” over several posts on X, formerly known as Twitter.
One tweet read: “Just your daily reminder that trans women are men,”

Another read: “This period of time where people are mutilating children will be looked back in history with disgust. I’ll be able to say I never agreed with this.”

Investigation dropped​

Despite police dropping the investigation, the woman said the club had not yet restored her membership. While she has been suspended, she missed out on tickets for upcoming fixtures against Chelsea and Manchester United.
“They are big games that I look forward to,” she said.

The lifelong fan watched games with her grandfather growing up. One of her most treasured possessions is a Newcastle shirt signed by Alan Shearer. Aged eight, she ran onto the club’s training pitch to ask the striker for his signature.
The woman, who now works in hospitality, said she felt the club’s decision to suspend her was unfair and had made the ordeal of the police interview worse.

She said: “There’s a part of me that still feels like I’ve done something wrong. I’m a good person and the last thing in the world I would want to do is to hurt someone with my words.”

Harry Miller from WeAreFairCop, a gender-critical organisation which advised the woman, said: “There’s nothing that comes close to being criminal. The process is the punishment. They (police) do this to terrorise members of the public. They have put this woman through absolute hell.”

A Northumbria Police spokesman said: “We are aware of commentary on social media relating to a report of suspected malicious communications. As we continue to look into this matter it would be inappropriate to comment any further.”
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British Police ‘Are Giving in to the Mob’ (Archive)​

On October 17, a man posted a video on Twitter of a street in his East London neighborhood. There was a Turkish restaurant, a Dominos, graffiti—and lots of Palestinian flags.

“Look at this crap here,” the man, known only as John A, is heard saying. He has a working-class, Scottish accent. “You let them into the country, and this is the shit they come up with.”

Two weeks later, on the night of October 31, police officers showed up at John A’s apartment.

“The reason why we’re here,” one of the officers can be heard saying in a separate video, “is on the 17th of the 10th of 2023, in Bethnal Green Road, at 10:04, you were witnessed as saying, ‘Why are they over here, etc.? We let them into our country, etc.’ ”

The police then arrest John A on suspicion of a “racially aggravated offense,” a violation of the Public Order Act of 1986. (David Atherton, a journalist who spoke with John A, tweeted that John A “does not have a criminal record & was not arrested for breaking bail conditions, as some have suggested.”)

As John A is led to a police van, his wife—now battling stage 4 cancer—wails at the cops.

“Fuck you!” she screams.

It’s one of many cases that have led—among others—Suella Braverman, Britain’s home secretary, who oversees security and immigration, to accuse London’s Metropolitan Police force of a “double standard,” saying “pro-Palestinian mobs” go “largely ignored.”

Tim Cruddas, a former sergeant with the Metropolitan Police who is now at the Free Speech Union, agrees. He blames the “massive recruitment of new people” as a factor that has “weakened and diluted” the force and led to an uneven enforcement of the laws.

“They’ve recruited 20,000 police officers across the country but they’ve lost a lot of experience, officers with gravitas and old-school police officers. The young officers have also been given a lot of social justice–style training. This is not really old-fashioned, proper policing. They’re obsessed with policing the internet and policing what people are putting on Twitter and stuff.

“The average constable on the street is far less prepared than they were because they don’t even go through a training school anymore the way that we used to do. When I joined in the ’90s we would have 20 weeks training at a specific school before you went anywhere near a police station, but they don’t do that anymore. They go straight into the station, and they do their training on the job. So they have an extended probationary period where they go out with other coppers and they learn stuff. That is not sufficient.”

Critics claim this modern approach to policing has led cops to make unwise decisions in London and elsewhere in Britain in recent weeks, including:

  • Police forcing a Jewish nonprofit to stop showing digital images of Israeli children who had been taken hostage by Hamas and were being displayed on vans driving through central London. Police said the images were “breaching the peace.”
  • A Manchester police officer tearing down posters of Israeli children who had been taken hostage. (Manchester’s chief constable later said police officers had responded to complaints about the posters, but “got it wrong.”)
  • A leadership coordinator, Amina Ahmed, at Scotland Yard—the headquarters of the London police department, or Metropolitan Police—posting on her LinkedIn: “if anyone openly agrees with the war in Gaza, they should be called out as Islamophobic and inciting hatred against Muslims.” (The message was copied and pasted into a tweet; the LinkedIn account has since been deleted.)
  • Pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Trafalgar Square roughing up Arul Velusamy, a Christian preacher and journalist in London, and “the cops just stood there—they did nothing,” Velusamy told me.
  • A huddle of aging veterans being told by police to remove their Union Jack flags from barriers meant to maintain crowd control. “And yet,” one of the veterans says in a video, “when they march down with hundreds of Palestinian flags, you won’t say a word.” “We can try,” a police officer replies, “but there’s way more of them.” The veterans seemed mystified—and angry.
They were angry not only because they couldn’t wave their flags the way they wanted to, but because for the past four weeks, all over the UK, police have stood by in the face of agitated and sometimes violent protests led by people chanting “Intifada” and “From the river to the sea”—and, in at least one case, punching and kicking a 78-year-old veteran in Edinburgh selling poppies, the symbol of Remembrance Day.

Remembrance Day, Britain’s version of Memorial Day, the anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended World War I, is on Saturday—the same day that pro-Palestinian marchers have called for a “million man march.” The head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, has signed off on the march—much to the chagrin of countless Britons.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Rowley have openly quarreled over what to do about the march. On Wednesday, Sunak said the pro-Palestinian protest could go ahead as scheduled, but added that it is “disrespectful” and “offends our heartfelt gratitude.”

It is not much of a surprise—to Britons, at least—that the police can arrest people for expressing the wrong opinion. The Public Order Act of 1986, a response to the race riots of the 1970s and 1980s, has given cops extensive powers to bring protesters under control. The Public Order Act of 2023, which targeted far-left climate change activists who had taken to blocking traffic in central London, gave police even broader powers to reinstate order. And the Online Safety Bill, also adopted in 2023, was expressly designed to ferret out dangerous speech, clamping down on pornography, trafficking, animal cruelty, and terrorism, among other problems.

The question is: Why are so many cops—who comprise 43 independently run departments across the country—using these tools on behalf of an angry and sometimes violent mob that seems to hate the West? Or, at least, turning a blind eye when they could just as easily not?

There appear to be two reasons:

First, it’s a lot easier to zero in on a handful of peaceful demonstrators who have provoked the far more numerous pro-Palestinian protesters than it is to go head-to-head with the larger group.

Tim Cruddas, who retired from the force four years ago, said: “At the end of the day, there’s 100,000 protesters against probably less than 1,000 coppers, so 100 to one. So there’s only so much you can do on the day, without causing quite a lot of a disorder.

“A young and inexperienced police officer, one who’s not come across large, angry crowds before, would find it obviously very intimidating. . . . If you do step in and try and arrest someone or stop someone from doing something in that atmosphere, you will get beaten up. It’s not an irrational fear.”

What’s more, the crowds demonstrating on behalf of Gaza are not motivated by a desire for peace or justice, said Simon Myerson, the chair of the Leeds Jewish Representative Council. They celebrated the murder and raping and beheading on October 7—before Israeli forces had had time to count the bodies—and they were dangerous, he added.

“Would I walk down there with my kippah?” Myerson said. “The answer is no.”

He continued: “It feels like a group of people who are barely in control.”

Hayley Ace, a pastor outside London who had tried to organize a prayer vigil on behalf of the Israelis but was “strongly advised” by London police not to go through with it, agreed. “I feel like we were the path of least resistance,” Ace told me. “The police couldn’t keep the peace, so it was down to us.”

The other reason police appear to be supporting the pro-Palestinian faction is they’re pro-Palestinian, said Toby Young, the founder of the Free Speech Union, which champions free expression in Britain and whose members have criticized left-wing illiberalism. “They’re not impartial,” Young told me. “They prioritize protecting the feelings of Muslims over protecting the feelings of Jews. I think that’s pretty indisputable.”

Increasingly, Young said, the police are acting as if they’re “the paramilitary wing of The Guardian.”

Young traced the bias inside Britain’s police departments to the late 1980s, when cops nationwide—responding to race riots in south London—sought to purge their ranks of “institutional racism.” (The 1993 murder of a black teenager at the hands of two white cops outraged many Britons and greatly energized that effort.)

This entailed hiring diverse cops and bringing in “activist advisers,” Young said, to forge better relations with minority communities. At the time, that meant mostly the Afro-Caribbean community, including Jamaicans and Trinidadians. Over the years, it has expanded to include any number of Muslim communities from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, and elsewhere.

Then, in 2014, the College of Policing, the quasi-governmental body that advises police departments across the country, introduced the concept of the “non-crime hate incident,” which compels cops to record, Minority Report-style, any incident deemed hateful by anyone. “The victim,” according to the guidelines, “does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception.”

In a strange twist, Harry Miller, a former cop in Humberside, in northern England, was accused of a non-crime hate incident, or NCHI, in 2018, after he posted a few tweets needling transgender activists. (These included: “I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis species me.”) Noting that he has fewer than 1,000 followers and rarely gets any likes or retweets, Miller told me he was surprised when the cops called him to say they had received a complaint. “ ‘We need to check your thinking,’ ” Miller recalled the police officer on the other end of the line telling him.

(In 2020, Britain’s high court found that police had acted unlawfully in issuing him an NCHI.)

Cruddas, 59, points out that the Metropolitan Police used to be called the Metropolitan Police Force, but now it’s called the Metropolitan Police Service. “They changed the name because they thought the word force was a little bit too aggressive,” he said. “So it’s a much softer word and it’s reflected in the fact they started to think they’re not just there to uphold the law and use force to do their job, but they’re there to provide a service and that’s when the rot started. It all started to become a bit softy, softy. They lost sight of the fact that most of the public want the police to uphold the law and arrest offenders.”

By this point, police departments, Myerson said, are basically outsourcing their decision-making to the activist-advisers counseling them on, say, how best to handle crowds of young, angry Muslims waving Palestinian flags and signs declaring “We Are All Hezbollah.”

Myerson added: “I don’t like to use the word capture, but it’s very difficult for the police to know that the people they’re dealing with are reliable. They have no reliable check. You can be infiltrated.”

Case in point: Attiq Malik, who chaired the London Muslim Communities Forum, which advises the Metropolitan Police.

On November 4, a 2021 video emerged of the Luton-based lawyer leading a crowd in the now-infamous chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Soon after, there was a public outcry, and the police severed ties with Malik.

For years, sources said, Britons have refused to push back against those whose values were diametrically opposed to their own, and they had insisted that by doing so, they were actually strengthening the cause of British democracy—British pluralism.

But viewed through the lens of late 2023, that seems absurd.

“There are a whole host of ways in which Islamist groups and Hamas supporters can be made to feel the pressure,” a senior government official told me. He said it was time, for example, to start deporting people. “I accept that some are uncomfortable with those things, but I’m not very comfortable with 100,000 people coming out in the streets and chanting in a way that would make Jewish people in this country feel unsafe, so I’m willing to accept that trade-off. We’ve been too standoffish for far too long when it comes to the clash of values question.”

He added: “I’m absolutely sure that we’re building toward something worse. It feels like a pressure cooker right now.”

Simon Myerson shared his trepidation. He said that, if his parents were not alive—they’re both 95, and they live 200 yards from his house—he and his family would move to Israel. “You can see from France that it doesn’t take too much to push it over,” Myerson said. “I think we are probably a couple really unpleasant incidents away from a shitload of people going.”

The senior government official went on: “I think that the time for hedging our bets and trying to chart some kind of middle ground that makes everybody feel comfortable and righteous is probably over. We’ve got to survive as a state. That means we’re gonna have to get in the fight.”
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