Why won’t the police leave street preachers alone?
by Andrew Tettenborn, spiked:
British police are constantly arresting Christians for expressing their beliefs in public.
In the UK, it has become depressingly common for the police to try to silence people who express unpopular opinions – even when it is perfectly legal to do so. Thankfully, a recent legal victory offers some good news. Last week, a Christian street preacher successfully won compensation from Police Scotland for being wrongfully arrested for a homophobic ‘hate crime’.
[…] Sadly, not all speakers have the resources or perseverance to take the police or prosecutors to court. Cameron had his case taken up by a pressure group, the Christian Institute. But many speakers without such luck will probably end up doing as they are told by the police.
It’s not just street preachers who are at risk of being silenced by police. Last October, during a pro-Palestine rally in London, protesters surrounded a van belonging to the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which was displaying images of the people taken hostage by Hamas. Instead of dispersing the hostile protesters, police instead ordered the driver of the van to turn off the display and leave town. Of course, what the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism was doing was perfectly lawful. It had merely offended the sensibilities of anti-Israel protesters.
You can see why this kind of thing happens. For the copper on the ground, it’s always much easier to tell a speaker to stop expressing an unpopular opinion than to tell an aggressive complainant to pipe down. Similarly, while prosecutors might enjoy a great deal of kudos for bringing supposed ‘hate criminals’ to heel, they are unlikely to be rewarded for taking a principled stand for free speech.
All this amounts to a worrying use of state power to enforce a de facto heckler’s veto. It also sends the disconcerting message that if someone wants to shut you up, then all they have to do is tell the police they are offended. This problem is only set to get much worse if a future Labour government follows through on its threats to strengthen hate-crime laws and crack down on supposedly transphobic acts, like ‘misgendering’ someone with the wrong pronouns.
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