17 Nov POLICE SHOULD BE CONCENTRATING ON FIGHTING CRIME AND NOT OPINIONS, SAYS SHADOW HOME SECRETARY
POLICE forces should concentrate on investigating “genuine crime” and not people who are expressing opinions, according to the Shadow Home Secretary.
Chris Philp told GB News: “It is ridiculous that public figures, journalists, but actually members of the public as well are getting police attention for essentially expressing opinions. The police should concentrate on crime, genuine crime, not on policing thought.
“If they are going to pay attention to anything that doesn’t meet the criminal threshold, that should be an extremely high bar. It should be behaviour which is very likely to lead to imminent criminality, but they should not be policing thought.”
He added: “Things should only be illegal where they cause demonstrable harm, like serious harm, to others. I’m concerned about the non-crime, hate incident category.
“In fact, when I was policing minister, I actually tightened the rules quite considerably just a few months ago, and had plans to tighten them a lot further.
“I’m very concerned to hear that Yvette Cooper, the new Home Secretary, is planning or is thinking about scrapping the changes that we introduced a few months ago that effectively raised the threshold for those non-crime hate incidents.
“People, journalists in particular, but the public as well, should not be getting visits from the police in relation to expressing opinions. And sometimes those opinions might be offensive, but we need to be very careful where that criminal line is drawn.
“The police, as I say, should be concentrating on acts that are criminal, or if they’re not criminal, then very close to the criminal threshold, and they should be realistic and immediate chance of criminal behaviour following before the police take action that is a very high threshold.”
Asked about the Government planning migrant deals with Vietnam and Kurdistan, he said: “The Rwanda bill could have been probably strengthened a bit, but I think it would have had a very good chance of being effective.
“If we get back into government, I think one of the components of our plan, not the only component, but one of the components of our plan will be a removal deterrence scheme, because we have seen it work elsewhere.
“Even the European Commission are thinking about it, Ursula von der Leyen, even the commission president was urging member states, European Union member states, to do offshore processing outside the European Union, so even the European Union are looking at doing it, it’s just a Labour government here that are too scared to.”
