British journalist Allison Pearson has decided to sue Essex Police for investigating her because of a social media post.
Pearson is known as a vocal critic of the controversial “non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs)” and at first thought it was one of those reports that led to police officers being dispatched to her home last November.
Her articles about this incident provoked a heated debate about NCHIs, which revealed them to be for the most part frivolous and a waste of police time and resources.
In the meantime, it turned out that the authorities were going after Pearson for allegedly stirring up racial hatred – because she criticized two-pier policing, related to the treatment of pro-Palestine marches.
Pearson announced her lawsuit against the police, noting that she did not in fact commit any crime under the Public Order Act and that the prosecution was quick to state there was no case against her.
But even if the formal reason for investigating her had not been an NCHI, the journalist sees consistency in the way those reports are harmful to free expression, and the way her social media post was treated – compared to some others, who were supportive of Hamas.
Almost as an example of a “two-tier administration of justice,” Pearson mentioned the example of an Egyptian doctor who was found to have “glorified the terrorist attacks by Hamas” but was not deported, with her right to freedom of speech and family life cited as the reason by the judge, who went to the trouble to call those posts “short-lived and one-off.”
“My single tweet criticizing two-tier policing of Pro-Palestine marches came nowhere near the level of offensiveness of Dr. Elwan’s and was also ‘short-lived’ and a ‘one-off. Why did police officers not visit Dr. Elwan and place her under criminal investigation for inciting racial hatred?” Pearson asks.
She then wonders if it could be because she, like Helen Jones (a recent victim of policing based on NCHIs) is “white, British, law-abiding and therefore fair game for a justice system that rates diversity above freedom?”
In the same article for The Telegraph, Pearson mentioned a recent suggestion made by members of the College of Policing to, essentially, make the Orwellian NCHIs even more Orwellian – by hiding their nature via a “rebrand”, because the public allegedly finds the label – not the actual practice – “confusing.”
And since a change of name might be on the cards, Pearson had a suggestion: “Why not call them Less Obvious Oppressive Nonsense (LOONs for short)?”
