A 73-year-old woman has been questioned at her home by English police because she took a picture of a sticker. This was months after the Conservative government said it was “deeply concerned about reports of the police wrongly getting involved in lawful debate in this country”—a message that has been clearly ignored.
The pensioner, who worked as a social worker before retiring, took a picture of a sticker reading “Keep males out of women-only spaces,” according to The Daily Telegraph. The sticker had been affixed to a pro-transgender poster branding the slogan: “Stand by your trans.”
The woman in question did not write the slogan, print it onto a sticker, or attach it to a poster—not that any of these actions should be liable to punishment. Nevertheless, the act of taking that particular picture earned her a home visit, several days later, by the West Yorkshire Police, who told her she was under investigation for a “non-crime hate incident” (NCHI).
Police forces are supposed to fill law-abiding citizens with confidence, to make them feel safe. Instead, the 73-year-old chose only to tell her story on the condition she not be named because she is fearful of reprisals from activists. Talking about the involvement of officers, she told The Mail on Sunday:
I think they wanted to correct my thinking. They are getting involved in a very divided and toxic debate, but it’s not their role to arbitrate political disagreements. I felt as if they were trying to gag a dissenting voice by harassing me in my own home.
Officers, who are public servants, with salaries paid by British taxes, took time on the job to identify the woman, using CCTV footage.
Responding to the incident, Home Secretary Suella Braverman said this was yet another example of police weighing into “politically contentious matters.” But her interventions on such matters so far appear to have done very little to stop reoccurrences.
It is not as though there aren’t plenty of proper issues the police could spend their time tackling. But it looks as though it will take a far more serious home secretary than this one to kick them into gear.
