Tackle violent crime instead of tweets, Starmer urges police after Allison Pearson row

PM urges forces to ‘concentrate on what matters most to their communities’

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Police should focus on tackling violent crime and burglaries instead of questioning people over their social media posts, Sir Keir Starmer has said.
The Prime Minister urged forces to “concentrate on what matters most to their communities” amid the deepening row over a police investigation into Telegraph writer Allison Pearson’s post on X a year ago.
He said chief constables who prioritised looking into complaints about allegedly offensive tweets would be “held to account for those decisions”.
Sir Keir intervened after politicians, campaigners and a former MI6 chief warned that hate crime laws were being exploited to stifle free speech.
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said that police were using hate crime laws wrongly 90 per cent of the time, while Lord Stevens, the former Met commissioner, called for forces to focus on tackling violent crime rather than policing people’s opinions online. 
Former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove suggested the investigation into Pearson was a waste of resources.
Essex Police has come under fierce scrutiny over its decision to investigate Pearson over an allegedly offensive tweet. Two officers visited her home on Remembrance Sunday and invited her for an interview over “an incident or offence of potentially inciting racial hatred online”.
The case led to uproar, with calls growing for the Government to rein in chief constables and scrap non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) altogether.
Sir Keir was asked during a trip to the G20 summit in Brazil whether police should be prioritising freedom of speech over “hurt feelings”.
He told the Telegraph: “I think that, as a general principle, the police should concentrate on what matters most to their communities.
“This is a matter for the police themselves, police force by police force, so they can make their decisions and will obviously be held to account for those decisions.”
The Prime Minister pointed to a review by Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, into the rules surrounding the logging of NCHIs. These can be registered if anybody, not necessarily the victim, tells the police they have taken offence to somebody’s remarks.
Although NCHIs do not trigger a criminal investigation, they are registered on police databases and can come up in enhanced background checks, for example if someone applies to work as a teacher.
Forces are supposed to weed out complaints that are “trivial, irrational or malicious” or relating to “the expression of lawfully held views”.
But a report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in September found many forces fail to correctly apply the guidance. It uncovered evidence that confusion over the rules meant officers were taking a risk-averse approach summed up as “if in doubt, record”.
As a result, NCHIs were too often being logged for complaints that amounted to little more than people’s “hurt feelings”.
Julie Bindel, the feminist writer, revealed in The Telegraph at the weekend how officers knocked on her door following a complaint about a tweet she sent. She said detectives refused to tell her which post the allegation referred to but that the report had been made by a “transgender man” in the Netherlands.
Tom Hunt, a former Tory MP, has also told how a NCHI was logged against him after a complaint was filed by a Labour activist. He had written in a local newspaper column raising concerns that “certain communities” were largely responsible for crime in Ipswich city centre.
Chris Philp, who tightened the rules on NCHIs as policing minister in the last government, said police should only be recording them “extremely rarely” where there was a “real risk of imminent criminality”.
He said: “If somebody, for example, appears to be about to threaten violence, or they’re expressing views that are exceptionally either racist or misogynistic, that might suggest that that could lead very imminently to a crime being committed, then I think we would want the police to keep an eye on that.
“But the majority, probably 90 per cent of these NCHIs that are being looked at don’t meet that [threshold]. The police should not be policing free speech. The police should not be policing thought.
“They should be concentrating on actual crime or behaviour that is just below the criminal threshold and might realistically and imminently lead to a crime. We want to focus on those crimes, not policing thought.”
Baron Stevens, a former Met commissioner, said forces should “prioritise things like knife crime and violence on the streets”.
Sir Richard, a former head of MI6, said it was “ridiculous” that the police were “wasting their time” investigating Pearson’s tweet.
Ms Cooper is, however, seeking to reverse the Tories’ decision to downgrade the monitoring of NCHIs, specifically in relation to anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, so they can be logged consistently by police.
She is concerned that the crackdown has prevented police recording anti-Semitic and Islamophobic abuse that could escalate into serious violence.
Ms Cooper will also announce this week that police will be given minimum standards for solving crimes, including violence against women, knife offences, robbery and theft.
She will set up a policing performance unit that will aim to end the “postcode lottery” where some forces are up to six times more likely to charge an offender for a crime such as shoplifting than other constabularies.
The new unit will monitor time spent on the front line and collect data by crime type to give a clearer picture of local performance.
It mirrors a similar initiative by Lord Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary, in 2001 and is designed to better monitor Labour’s “priority” areas such as anti-social behaviour, knife crime and violence against women and girls.
Forces will be held to account on key metrics, including call and incident response times, to ensure minimum standards are being met in every area of the country. Where necessary, turnaround teams will be sent in to drive specific improvements.
There will also be a focus on police standards, with data collected on misconduct, vetting procedures and disciplinary processes. This will be acted on to root out those who are not fit to serve while helping to restore public trust.
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