INTRODUCTION
One of the things that I’ve noticed about the various ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crime’ laws in the United Kingdom, apart from them being corrupting to the idea of equal justice, is how the police and Crown Prosecution Service seem to be using the process of bringing the case to court as as a way of harassing and intimidating the alleged ‘wrong thinker’. ‘The process is the punishment’ is the descriptive term for this sort of police and CPS behaviour that I believe was coined by JuliaM over at the Ambush Predator blog. This idea of the process of case preparation being used as a way of punishing ‘wrongthinkers’ is especially applicable in cases where people are accused of ‘speech crimes’, whether they are committed in the online or the offline worlds.
We saw from the case of Emma West, the woman who let rip on a tram with her opinions of immigration and the state of Britain today, how the police and CPS will let these cases drag on for years, presumably in order to put more pressure on those accused to cough up and plead guilty. In Ms West’s case the police and the CPS kept the case going and the pressure on Ms West for 19 months. This is an astonishing delay for what was in reality, when you take away the shonky ‘hate crime’ guff, a minor bit of public drunk and disorderly behaviour. The result of the West case was that the presumably exhausted defendant, who had been subjected to intense police, press and social media interest, was that Ms West pleaded guilty.
The excessive delays are also a way of punishing people before a trial has occurred or even instead of having a trial. The cat and mouse game played with some accused by the police and CPS such as constant delays, the bailing and re-bailing of he defendant by the police, the threats by the police of more serious charges, are often perceived by those subjected to this situation as a punishment in itself. In some cases the cases come before the courts and have various outcomes and in others the case are dropped by the CPS for lack of evidence, or fears that they won’t be able to make their ‘hate speech’ guff stick before a jury.
I know of one case that has not to my knowledge yet come to court and which I I have to be careful about discussing because of sub judice rules. This case was one involving minor criminal damage (flyposting), but it was the flyposting of Islam critical material. In this case the accused was arrested, their home was searched by police, they were held in a cell in a custody suite and given conditional police bail. This case dragged on for about a year and I can’t even find if it’s listed for trial yet? The accused in this and similar cases is being punished by the excessive delays in bringing to court cases that are simple criminal damage or behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace or drunk and disorderly. Without the addition of the ‘hate crime’ element in these cases they are what myself and some other court reporters used to refer to as ‘up and down’ cases, i.e. they were simple guilty pleas or short trials. Some believe that these cases are being deliberately spun out and delayed by the police and CPS in order to punish ‘wrongthinkers’ with extended uncertainty about their fate a punishment that is in addition to any punishment that the court may impose. A look at some of the shifty Islamic and left wing groups and individuals that have gained an undue and corrosive influence over the the police and prosecution authorities by way of inveiglement, may lead one to give some credibility to this idea that the authorities are using the prosecution process as a way of punishing dissidents.
As a former court reporter I can easily see that some cases are more complex than others. Cases involving drug trafficking, fraud, terrorism and other similar cases where there is a lot of evidence both written and oral that needs to be heard, often to take a lot of preparation by both prosecution and defence and these cases can be in the court system for a considerable time. But, someone having a rant on public transport or doing some flyposting or saying something nasty but true about Islam on social media should not be subject to the sort of delays that are occurring.
It makes me wonder if in addition to the phenomenon of the process being the punishment the CPS are worried that they might not be able to make this dodgy ‘hate crime’ guff stick in a court, so they spin things out in the hope that the accused will give up and plead guilty in order to get the police and the CPS off their backs. It may sound far fetched to ascribe such malevolence to the CPS, but we should remember that the CPS under the current Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders, has instituted a policy where no actual evidence is required for a ‘hate crime’ or ‘hate speech’ prosecution. Everything is down to the perception of the alleged ‘victim’ of the unpleasant words and is a policy that is extremely easy for dishonest people or people with an agenda to manipulate and abuse.
As you have seen I’ve given the background to some cases where strange delays seem to have denied or put off justice for those accused. These defendants are in the position where they cannot put their side of the case to a magistrate or a jury, but they are kept in a open ended legal limbo that affects their health, their employment and their families. I shall now examine another case where there appears to be blatant and seemingly deliberate delays and obfuscations on the part of a police force.
THE PAUL PERRIN CASE
I first came across the Paul Perrin case earlier this week via an appeal put out on the gab.ai social media platform by Mr Perrin, a UKIP supporter and Libertarian. Mr Perrin is appealing for awareness about his future legal fight back against what looks like an extremely spurious and vexatious ‘hate speech’ charge. He is also building up an email list about this and similar matters. I must admit that this case looks extremely odd and the delays in it even odder. Mr Perrin has given a time-line of the police action so far on his blog, Free People of England, of which I have reproduced a section below. As is usual policy for this blog Mr Perrin’s words are in italics whereas my comments are in plain text.
Mr Perrin said:
Saturday, 7 October 2017
Three months on, still arrested, still being investigated for a tweet…
Please join my free speech email list – only together can we protect free speech.
http://radiofreeuk.org/freespeech
OK a quick catch up (from memory, I have all the documents but this is just an overview).
It Starts (Mid/Late June)
1) A local Councillor tweeted about an event they had attended.
2) I tweeted a challenging question.
3) The Councillor didn’t answer.
4) A third party chipped in.
5) I tweeted a witty reply regarding the third parties comment.
6) The local Labour party went bat-shit crazy and tweeted a complaint to the police.
The next day
7) Local press call ask me about police investigation.
8) I say the police haven’t contacted me so I don’t know that there is any investigation.
9) I phone the police and ask if there is an investigation, they say they can find no trace.
The next day
10) A different local press call and ask me about the investigation.
11) I say the police told me they have no record.
The next day
12) The local paper runs a story saying I am being investigated by the police for a hate crime.
13) I phone the police and ask if this is true and whether they identified me to the press
14) The police again say they have no record, but if it is true I will be called in the next few days.
15) I complain to the police (in case they did breach data protection with my identity).
16) I complain to the press complaints (in case the paper have run with out having facts).
The next day
17) I am arrested at home during dinner, my phone and a tablet are taken.
18) I am processed (DNA, fingerprints etc) and thrown in a cell.
19) I am interviewed under caution and questioned about various tweets, I confirm that I wrote them and explained each one.
20) I give a custody officer the passwords for my devices which he takes into evidence with them. (I had been told that I was legally required to do and sending devices to be cracked had a 17 week backlog)
The next day
20) I am ‘released under investigation’ and told I will get a letter in the post saying if I will be charged or not. I am told not to contact the Councillors.
Two months later(Mid/Late August)
21) I contact the police demanding my phone and tablet back as they have had them for long enough to examine/make copies, and they aren’t even relevant as my tweets are all on the twitter servers in the public domain.
A couple of days later
22) A police officer contacts me asking for the passwords for the devices. I try to remember and describe the ‘pattern’ over the phone as best I can.
Even later
23) I contact them again asking for a reply to my demand for my items back
Later
24) The investigating officer contacts me asking for the passwords and confirms that they have lost the original note of the passwords from evidence.
25) The passwords I give don’t seem to work (I may not remember the pattern after so long, or may not describe it well etc…)
26) I am told that if the items are not checked locally they will be sent off for processing. (I had been told there is a 17 week backlog on this).
Three months after my arrest (Late September)
27) I put in an official police complaint about my treatment, I am expecting the case to be dropped, my arrest to be purged, my DNA and fingerprints removed from the police national computer and financial compensation to be paid for the damage this episode has caused me.
A couple of days later
28) Twitter block my main account for a week and say four tweets must be deleted to start the count down – the tweets are two of those that the police questioned me about and two other random ones from about a month ago.
A couple of days later
29) The police contact me saying my complaint has been handed to the local station for local handling.
So now…
My twitter account is unlocked and I await the police response.
The last time I pursued a police complaint, (https://storify.com/pperrin/the-haters-call-themselves-the-anti-haters) after months of work, the officers own force engineered a derailing of the process which stopped the investigating officers completing the complaint – in a move that he himself described as Kafkaesque and unsatisfactory.
In light of my experience of police complaints I am under no illusion that it will change anything within the police force, however I am keen to get the episode expunged from my ‘record’ and to receive compensation for the damage this almighty police cock up has done to me, my family and business.
Read the source of the above story via the link below:
http://free-english-people.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/three-months-on-still-arrested-still.html
Reading this account by Mr Perrin makes me think that it is a bit of a ‘nothingburger’ case where a third party has become ‘offended’ by an opinion that they don’t like and the local Labour political establishment has pressed the police for a prosecution. The content of the original Tweet in this case is immaterial, in my view the only restriction that should ever be put on speech is against direct and credible incitement to violence or a credible threat to kill. I doubt that this case would come into that category.
Although the quoted blog post above only gives Mr Perrin’s side of the story, it’s plain for me and will be for many others, to see that Mr Perrin and his family have been put through an ordeal of harassment over what is basically a bugger all incident. What is worse is Mr Perrin is being harassed by this extension of the legal process time by the very agencies such as the police that should be defending our rights to speak freely. He and his family have been pushed from pillar to post over this matter and it is now November, eight months on from the original ‘offending’ Tweet incident and the matter has still not been resolved by the police. It looks to my own personal view very much like Mr Perrin has been deliberately pissed about with by the authorities in order to get him to give up his fight and indicate to the CPS / police that he would be willing to enter a plea of guilty and to intimidate him into silence and to punish him for holding opinions that some may think that he is not entitled to hold.
This is indeed a ‘kafkaesque’ legal nightmare that Mr Perrin and his family have been put through by the police and he has strong grounds for complaint although like Mr Perrin and others such as Crimebodge, I have little faith in the official police complaints procedure. I do hope that he can bring a legal case against the force in question in order to get compensation for what they have allegedly put this man through. It is cases like this that not only highlight the moral bankruptcy of ‘hate crime’ laws which treat people differently according to what ever race, religion, gender or sexual preference they are, something contrary to the idea of equal justice, but also bring the police into disrepute. Every time there is a case like this the amount of trust that the average citizen has in the police to deal with real and troubling crimes and to police equitably reduces considerably.
Sadly the police are not fulfilling their duties as well as they could. They have become enormously politicised and because of that are expending enormous resources on policing nonsense stuff such as ‘hate speech’ on social media whilst at the same time many of our town and cities are becoming increasingly violent and increasingly devoid of a regular police presence. If the police wake up one morning and wonder why they are distrusted and hated by the very people who used to enthusiastically support them, then it will be the police forces own fault.
