For several years now the British police forces have been severely understaffed and overworked, so much so that in many of the largest British cities if you call the police because your car or your home was burglarized, chances are that the police will not even show up. Only a microscopic fraction of all burglaries and other crimes of similar and even higher severity (such as rape) are ever solved by the police. In many cities the situation has become so bad that burglary is pretty much de facto legal because there are no consequences (in the vast, vast majority of cases the police will not even show up, much less investigate).
Yet, somehow, the British police still has the manpower to harass thousands and thousands of people every year for things they say online and elsewhere. And we really are talking about literal harassment here, not just figuratively or as an exaggeration: The police showing up to the home of someone who did nothing illegal, merely posted something "insensitive" online, being lectured and intimidated by two, sometimes even more, police officers. For a non-crime.
And if they have the manpower to harass people who have committed no crime other than being "offensive" online, you can imagine how low of a bar they have in arresting people who they deem having broken some decency law with their tweet or Facebook post.
The complete mystery is, however, why they are doing this.
The Home Secretary of the United Kingdom has publicly rebuked the British police forces several times over this, and ordered them to stop, and to go back to solving actual crimes. To stop policing speech and to stop harassing people for what they have said online.
Mind you, the Home Secretary is not just some random minor governmental position. It's the minister in charge of law enforcement in the United Kingdom. In other words, the head of the entire police forces.
Yet, for some unfathomable reason the police forces keep ignoring these commands, and they keep harassing and even incarcerating people because of their speech (while at the same time ignoring more serious crimes, like burglaries, home invasions and rapes.)
And, to my knowledge, nobody knows why, or who is telling them to do this. It's a complete mystery. Someone keeps telling them to do it, and they keep doing it, and nobody seems to know who it is, or why.
When you think about it, it's rather astonishing.
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