A British police force, already under investigation for long-term failures to protect people, has admitted that officers did not act “wholly proportionate” manner when they visited a feminist campaigner at home for being “untoward about paedophiles.”
British YouTuber and feminist campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen, also known as Posie Parker, said two Wiltshire police officers came to her house to inform her that a complaint had been lodged against her for one of her videos, saying: “Somebody’s phoned up because one of your videos you’re being unseemly about paedophiles.”
The officer admitted that he had not even watched the video in question, but they recorded it as a “hate crime” because someone was offended. Keen claimed that the officer was unable to tell her whether the incident was classified as a crime or the contentious “non-crime hate incident.”
The video in question was reportedly Mermaids, Drag, and Grooming, in which Keen slammed an LGBT pride event for having a 12-year-old boy dance on stage in drag, which she called exploitation.
After condemnation on social media, Wiltshire Police issued a statement, tacitly admitting that officers’ behaviour was inappropriate and that they no longer adhered to the recently updated advice from the College of Policing, which told officers last week that being offensive is not a crime in and of itself and that police should not engage in “debates on Twitter.”
Ms Keen, the founder of the organisation Standing For Women, mocked the police statement on Wednesday, saying sarcastically that the officers “were just following orders.”
“I just want to be a fly on the wall when they had that meeting and realised what on earth they were doing,” she said.
The revision to the College of Policing’s guidelines on non-crime hate incidents — of which 120,000 were recorded by police over the last five years — comes as rapes, sexual assaults, and violent crimes have reached all-time highs. Simultaneously, the number of cases actually solved by police has dropped dramatically, with only 1.3% of rape cases resulting in a criminal charge.