Opinion
As I wrote recently, New Zealand police are hot on the case when some petty vandalism sets the rainbow chickens clucking, but actual crimes? Of the robby, stabby, shooty, kind? You won’t see them for dust. In fact, most New Zealanders don’t even bother reporting crimes any more, because they know only to well that they might as well not bother.
Sadly, they’re not alone. The reluctance, indeed the sheer refusal of police to actually do any policing has become commonplace across the West.
Unless, of course, it’s policing, not crimes, but non-crimes. Non-crimes that may not be crimes, but which upset certain anointed groups.
The fact that our police do not police crime is not my view. It is a fact. Recent figures have shown that they currently fail to solve 90 per cent of reported crimes. Put into real numbers, that is 6,000 criminals every day getting away with serious offences. In 2022 that included 30,000 sexual offences, 320,000 violent crimes, 1.3 million thefts and over 310,000 cases of criminal damage and arson. Or to put it still another way, only 6.5 per cent of crimes led to a charge or court summons, while 2.2 million cases were dropped because no suspect was found.
Some areas of the country manage to beat even this record. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, in the past three years police forces have failed to solve a single burglary in half of all neighbourhoods in England and Wales. Not one. Nada. Zilch.
To their credit, though, British police are admirably forthcoming in providing proof of just how fucking useless they are. In Australia and New Zealand, though, the Plod mightn’t be much chop at nailing crooks, but they’re dab hands at throwing a veil of secrecy over their own incompetence. Official crime statistics are a Byzantine maze of material scattered across different locations, and a maze of jargon that appears almost designed to make it near-impossible to compare apples and apples.
But British police as just as zealous as their NZ counterparts at bringing the swift truncheon of the state down on the heads of those who upset the left’s sainted victim groups.
Last November, the Met arrested a man for criticising the number of Palestinian flags in his area.
Take a phrase I was introduced to only this week: ‘tragedy chanting’.
If you’re as unfamiliar as I was with this term, allow me to enlighten you: “tragedy chanting” is a subset of the British tradition of football chants and songs. Many of these are designed to mock opposing fans (C’mon an’ ‘ave a go, if yer think yer ‘ard enough!); tragedy chanting takes a new low in referencing stadium disasters or fatalities. Tawdry and nasty, perhaps: but criminal?
It is also the offence with which two Manchester United fans were charged with after an FA Cup match against Liverpool. Following the arrests, Chief Inspector Jamie Collins said that Greater Manchester police ‘will clamp down on this and arrest those who engage in such behaviour, regardless of what team they support’. You could observe that a force which fails to distinguish itself during actual tragedies might disproportionately incline to policing ‘tragedy chanting’ as some kind of recompense.
Considering that police negligence was a singular contributing factor to the Hillsborough disaster, not to mention that the same police fed the press false stories smearing the dead supporters, you’d think the rozzers would have the grace to pull their be-titted heads in on this one.
The Liverpool police have form in this area too. A few years back 19-year-old Chelsea Russell was visited by officers, issued with a community order and given an 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. curfew for two months. The offence was that Chelsea posted on Instagram a lyric which included the ‘n-word’ from Snap Dogg’s celebrated work ‘I’m Trippin’ ’. She apparently intended it as a tribute to a friend who had just died in a road crash, and whose favourite song this was. And while you or I might disagree with Chelsea’s or her late friend’s choice, I am not certain that anyone’s musical taste should be an arrestable offence. But the police in Liverpool thought otherwise.
We now have, of course, the case of Scotland making it a criminal offence to call a man in drag a “man”. Then there was the fellow jailed — and dying in prison — for the heinous crime of putting bacon on a mosque’s door handles. Perhaps he should have nailed it, a’la Martin Luther, instead.
There’s also the recent prosecution of Sam Melia, whose crimes included putting up stickers which said ‘It’s okay to be white’ and ‘Reject white guilt’. We have yet to learn whether it is a crime in Britain to put up stickers saying ‘It’s okay to be black’ or ‘Reject black guilt’. The most egregious of his stickers asked ‘Why are Jews censoring free speech?’ Yet marching at a Palestine demonstration waving a placard saying media is ‘controlled by Zionists’ does not – as with Mr Melia – result in a charge of incitement to stir up racial hatred and a two-year prison sentence.
An Iranian man with a sign declaring that “Hamas is terrorist” was arrested in London. That is: a man who had just been attacked by a mob was not helped by police, but handcuffed, merely for stating official British government policy in public.
In the US, too, we’ve seen people claiming to be FBI agents turning up on citizens’ doorsteps to grill them about political posts on social media. Infamously in Australia, pregnant Zoe Bruhler was arrested on livestream in her home, for re-posting details of a planned protest march. Kiwis, too, have found the coppers rocking up for a “chat” about things they’ve said on social media.
Recent figures show that in just one year, 3,300 people were detained and questioned about things they had said on social media. Last November, for example, the Met arrested a man for a post in which he criticised the number of Palestinian flags flying from lampposts in his area […]
The same is happening all over the West. Earlier this month a new Holocaust museum was opened in Amsterdam. A protest against it was arranged by Palestinian activists, ostensibly because the ceremony was going to be attended by Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel (and son of British second world war hero Chaim Herzog). At the service in the nearby synagogue, attendees could hear the chants of their opponents outside. Footage of the day includes images of Holocaust survivors, with their grandchildren, walking past screaming protestors.
Spectator Australia
History is repeating in the worst possible ways. Journalist-historian William Shirer recalled watching smirking police standing by while Brownshirt mobs ran amok. Now, police do anything they can to apparently prevent the “religion of peace” from erupting into wanton violence — again.
None of this will end well.