‘There Is No Such Thing as a Thought Crime,’ Watchdog Tells UK Police

Police watch an Anti Austerity demonstration at the Bank of England in London, on June 20, 2015. (Zak Kaczmarek/Getty Images)

Police forces should stop declaring certain thoughts are crimes, the UK’s police watchdog has warned, stressing that “thought crimes” do not exist in the country’s legal system.

Sir Tom Winsor, the outgoing chief inspector of constabulary, said that chief constables cannot “declare something that is not a crime to be a crime” in their force area, as “it is not illegal to think anything.”

“There is no such thing as a thought crime,” he wrote in his final annual assessment of the state of policing in England and Wales (pdf), which was published on March 10.

He said it is “not appropriate” for senior police officers to “assert a right of the police to declare anything criminal, least of all what people may think.”

“They have no legal power to create criminal offences in their police areas or anywhere else. It is important that no-one is misled: the police enforce the law, they do not make it,” he wrote.

He said that “hating someone or something is not criminal,” though hate can be an aggravating factor that should be reflected when sentencing criminals.

His comments follow reports that some police forces now treat misogyny and transphobia as hate crimes.

Sue Fish, who served as police boss in Nottinghamshire before she retired in 2017, was said to have led the trend by declaring misogyny as a hate crime in 2014.

Winsor told reporters: “From time to time, one turns on the radio and there’s [sic] retired chief constables declaring certain things to be crimes which are not crimes. I think it’s necessary for me as chief inspector of constabulary to make it perfectly clear that is no part of our legal system.”

“So for a former chief constable or for any police officer to say ‘in my police area, such and such being a thought is a crime’ is completely unsustainable,” he said.

Among his wide-ranging findings, Windsor said fraud is “indefensibly” a low priority for police and needs to be taken “far more seriously,” adding that the detection rate was “woefully low” despite a “tsunami of offending.”

His report said it was “unjustifiable for any police force to decline to attend and properly investigate crimes of a serious nature, such as burglary or domestic abuse.”

Some forces “plead inadequacies of resources and the need to prioritise more serious crimes,” he told reporters. “But domestic abuse is a serious crime” and “can be a murder in slow motion.”

PA Media contributed to this report.