The heavy-handed conduct of the police these days often provokes accusations of ‘Orwellian’ behaviour – and with good reason. There has been a litany of reports in recent years of people being investigated and cautioned for remarks, often made in private, that have been adjudged ‘offensive’ or ‘hurtful’. In the eyes of many, we now have a de facto thought police in this country, with their disproportionate response to people’s sentiments and words indeed warranting comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Hertfordshire Police sent six uniformed officers to arrest a couple after their child’s school objected to their emails
The latest news, that Hertfordshire Police sent six uniformed officers to arrest a couple after their child’s school objected to their emails and ‘disparaging’ comments in a parents’ WhatsApp group, will do nothing to allay these fears. The couple were put in a cell for eight hours and questioned on suspicion of harassment and malicious communications. Hertfordshire Police told the Times that the number of officers was needed to secure electronic devices and care for children at the address. After a five-week investigation, the pair have been told there will be no further action.
This episode epitomises not merely the entrenchment and normalising of the surveillance of people’s words, but the assumption that feelings and emotions are a police matter. The couple had been accused of ‘casting aspersions’ on the chair of governors, which the school claimed had become upsetting. Such language is often deemed sufficient to merit police intervention now.
As made apparent in the aftermath to the Southport riots of last year, and in the controversy following the police visitation of Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, saying ‘offensive’ or ‘hurtful’ things is today accorded the status of utmost gravity by society and state alike. If we do have a thought police, we also have a feelings police.
The thoughts and sentiments of individuals first became a matter for the state in 1998 with the Crime and Disorder Act, which introduced racially and religiously aggravated laws, or, in common parlance, hate crimes. A hate crime is defined as any ‘criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice’. In other words, crimes are deemed to be so on the basis of a subjective perception of the inner mental activity of others.
It is only logical that in the years since this definition was introduced, years in which we have witnessed a society increasingly become governed by emotion, and seen the associated proliferation of the language of ‘stress’, ‘self-esteem’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘trauma’, that feelings should have become police concern.
The word ‘intervention’ has moved from the language of psychotherapy and 12-step groups to become, literally, an act routinely carried out by the forces of law and order. Where once only shrinks offered ‘counselling’ to deal with traumatic episodes, this is also now in the remit of the police.
The inordinate importance ascribed to actions or words likely to cause ‘offence’ is inextricably linked to our oversensitivity in regards to race, but it is entwined, too, with our oversensitivity in general.
The belief that words can be as harmful as actions not only resulted in the establishment of hate-crimes, but, in 2014, to the introduction of ‘non-crime hate incidents’, to record actions or speech ‘perceived’ to demonstrate hostility to group, but which didn’t meet the threshold of criminality.
Being nasty or hurtful, or just bad-mannered, in effect became a state concern. Evidently, it is a priority. Up to 13,200 ‘hate incidents’ were reported in the 12 months leading up to June last year year. This seeming shift from prioritising physical crimes, such as burglary or shoplifting, towards policing words and opinions, has alarmed campaigners for free speech in particular and infuriated an already exasperated public in general.
This story in Hertfordshire is only the most egregious example of hurt feelings becoming a state concern. This week the Equality and Human Rights Commission said that new rules laid out in the current Employment Right Bill, requiring companies to take ‘all reasonable steps’ to prevent harassment of staff by third parties, were too broad-brushed. This reflects a concern that this proposed legislation could allow employees, in pubs for example, taking legal action for overhearing conversations that they might find ‘offensive’.
This week, an NHS nurse in Surrey was disciplined after accidentally addressing a transgender paedophile as ‘Mr’. That nurse’s experience was consequent of the now widely-accepted understanding that some words are irreparably ‘hurtful’ and ‘damaging’. Their usage, even when there is no malicious intent – such as in perceived ‘microggressions’, or in the use of such archaic words as ‘coloured’ – might land those who utter them in trouble, or in the clink.
The behaviour of Hertfordshire is shocking, but not surprising. Such a heavy-handed response may seem disproportionate, but it’s in keeping with the disproportionate gravity the law now assigns to feelings in general.
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