If it had been a sketch in one of his many comedy shows, it would surely have been rejected as too absurd.
After landing at Heathrow on a flight from Arizona, Graham Linehan, the Irish comic who created Father Ted, was arrested by five armed police officers for tweets that he had posted five months ago. The 57-year-old was told he was being held on suspicion of a public order offence. He was taken to a police station and questioned for several hours, before being released on police bail.
The Commissioner is correct to say that police should not be ‘policing toxic culture wars’. We need them to focus on real crimes such as shoplifting, mobile phone theft, and violence against women and girls
Linehan’s arrest followed a post published on X in which he said that women who encounter men in female-only spaces should ‘make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls’. Police told him this was ‘deemed to be intended to stir up hatred and incite violence on the grounds of sexual orientation.’
Linehan has a history of anti-transgender activism. His comments and messages on the subject have got him into hot water numerous times and he’s been banned from X at least twice. Perhaps this factored into the police’s decision to detain him (we don’t know because it remains a ‘live’ investigation) but it provides no justification whatsoever for dispatching five police officers with firearms to arrest him. What did they think he was going to do? Over the top is an under-statement.
You get the sense that Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, thinks so too. Of course he hasn’t said so explicitly, but his announcement that the force will put in place a ‘more stringent triaging process to make sure only the most serious cases are taken forward in future’ is a tacit admission that hauling people into custody for posting messages that some might regard as offensive or upsetting is not what his officers should be doing.
Nevertheless, Rowley sought to deflect the blame for what was an egregious waste of police resources by singling out ‘successive governments who have given officers no choice’ but to record incidents as crimes where people threaten violence. ‘Then they are obliged to follow all lines of enquiry and take action as appropriate,’ he said in a statement. He says the law and guidance need to be ‘changed or clarified’.
Have governments really given the police ‘no choice’ in such matters? Every day, officers have to make decisions about whether certain behaviour crosses the criminal threshold and whether and how it should be investigated. Sometimes the decisions are made in the heat of the moment, for example, during a highly-charged public protest, at the scene of a pub fight or in a domestic setting where one person alleges that another individual has assaulted them.
There are multiple guidelines for dealing with such incidents, as well as official advice about how to record crimes and what the correct approach is to an investigation. In spite of the voluminous guidance, mistakes are sometimes made: officers may over-react – or not respond quickly enough; people who have done nothing wrong may be arrested and investigated; occasionally, a victim is mistaken for a perpetrator.
Online offending and hate crime also have their own laws (some of which have only just come into effect) and a raft of guidance. But ultimately, police rely on experience, judgement and common-sense to make decisions. That has always been the case – but at Heathrow Airport on Monday morning there was no sign that those human qualities had been applied.
That’s what makes what happened so disappointing. No one at the Met, it seems, could see Linehan’s tweet for what it was – even though it had been posted in April. No one said, ‘Steady on, why are we sending five officers with guns to this?’ You can draw up new guidelines, but unless police officers are trusted and encouraged to use their common-sense, without the fear that a mishap will land them in a months-long misconduct process, there’ll be more such cases.
The Commissioner is correct to say that police should not be ‘policing toxic culture wars’. We need them to focus on real crimes such as shoplifting, mobile phone theft, and violence against women and girls. Instead, it should primarily be the responsibility of those of us who use social media, particularly politicians, celebrities and influencers, to keep the debate civil. The platform providers, too, need to do more to remove posts that potentially cross the line into the incitement of racial hatred or violence, or those that appear to target individuals. There will be a need for light-touch monitoring by police where people are vulnerable, and of course there are times when it will be right for them to intervene. But a comedian’s stab at dark humour? No.
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