The Home Office is introducing a major reform of crime procedures to move the police away from “frivolous” social media arguments and focus time instead on investigating serious crimes such as burglary.
The plans are part of a wider set of changes to how reported incidents are recorded.
The Home Office said that police will also be able to make decisions on cases where communications, such as text messages or letters, are malicious or rude, but not threatening.
“Officers should be on our streets investigating crimes like burglary, not comments made online. As such, they will consider if such issues should be dealt with by social media companies instead,” the department wrote in a statement.
Philp said the changes which will take effect in the coming weeks.
Unnecessary Administrative Tasks
The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) said a review of productivity found 443,000 officer hours are spent filling in forms and dealing with unnecessary administrative tasks, equivalent to attending 220,000 domestic abuse incidents or 270,000 burglaries.Chairman of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, Marc Jones, said: “As the public’s representatives to policing, we have long called for changes to the way crime is recorded to ensure it is more transparent and less bureaucratic. We welcome these changes.”
Some of the changes include ending the way crimes are recorded as multiple entries on a database that effectively re-records the same incident. Now all reported crimes for a single incident will now consistently be recorded under the “principal offence.”
Another change will make it easier to cancel the recording of a crime where there’s enough evidence that none was committed.
Delivering a speech on Thursday, Philps said: “We’re going to make clear that frivolous allegations of malicious communications should not be recorded as a criminal offence unless the criminal threshold has clearly been met.
“We don’t believe that being rude or insulting is a police matter.
“Officers are not the thought police and where something is reported that does not meet the criminal threshold, we don’t want that to be investigated or reported as a crime.”
“It is why we are cutting unnecessary red tape, freeing up police hours to focus on keeping our communities safe instead,” she added.
‘Have to Keep Stepping In’
Former policeman and Fair Cop co-founder Harry Miller told The Epoch Times by email that its campaign for a “return to common sense policing is paying off.”Miller set up Fair Cop in response to what it calls “Big Brother” overreach of various police forces and other authorities in England.
“What remains a national scandal is that we, together with the Home Office, have to keep stepping in to force coppers to comply, as many seem hooked on interfering with everything from Twitter spats to golliwogs,” he said.
Appearing on LBC on Thursday, Philp was quizzed about the incident if it was necessary to have so many officers involved.
Presenter Nick Ferrari asked: “I’m just saying it took five men or women to take a collection of golly dolls away and you don’t seem to be able to answer yes or no. I find that astonishing.”
The minister replied: “I’m not going to answer yes or no because they’re operationally independent and it’s up to police to decide how they respond to incidents, not up to me to tell them what to do or to offer comments after the event.”
Braverman said the guidelines will prevent police from “wrongly getting involved in lawful debate.”
According to the new guidelines, police will only record non-crime hate incidents when it is “absolutely necessary and proportionate” and not “simply because someone is offended,” the Home Office said at the time.
