MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: Police need to help to preserve our freedoms - not shut them down

We are entitled to have the sort of police force we want. That is one of the key features of a free country. It is what 'policing by consent' means. The laws are ours because we have made them over centuries, in a free Parliament, to suit the way we live, believe and behave. The organisations which enforce them should therefore be suited to the spirit of those laws. This is, for the most part, to let free people alone unless they harm, distress or threaten their neighbours. Sometimes modern police officers complain about people 'taking the law into their own hands' but in whose hands should it be? Before Glasgow established a police force in 1800, and the London Metropolitan Police were founded in 1829, the British largely policed themselves. They agreed to police services because they were not like armed continental Gendarmes. Instead, they were unarmed servants of the law-abiding. Now something has gone wrong with this bargain. Video from one startling case where a vulnerable teenage girl was visited at home and accused of an offence, apparently for looking at a TikTok post The public has lost confidence in the police, and the police seem to have great difficulties in serving the public. Hundreds of accessible police stations have vanished. The police rarely perform regular foot patrols. They react to crime and disorder rather than discouraging them by their presence. And they show a distressing lack of interest in the sort of crime and disorder, from shoplifting to vandalism, which frighten and worry us. Now, The Mail on Sunday reports on a powerful survey by the organisation Big Brother Watch, which shows more than 60,000 people have been actually arrested over the last five years for 'communications offences', including WhatsApp group messages. In one startling case a vulnerable teenage girl was visited at home and accused of an offence, apparently for looking at a TikTok post. Famously, a Hertfordshire couple were arrested and held for 11 hours after making an online complaint about their daughter's primary school. Now, it is plainly true that wicked people do make use of modern electronic communications for harassment and worse, and the police do have a role in monitoring and curbing such things. And there is, quite reasonably, growing concern about children being exposed, far too young, to unsuitable material online. It would be foolish to say that the police have no role at all in this area of life. But there are two very clear issues. The first is the most basic one, that in deciding where to allocate scarce and expensive public resources, are the police making a correct judgment about what is most important? Views obviously differ among the police themselves, with some forces doing much more than others. Perhaps fix mobile phone thefts first, before probing their use. The second problem, once you have decided to police the electronic universe, is how far you go. The report says the law has been used to shut down or age-restrict forums on political parties, horror film posters and even advice on how to support a friend through chemotherapy. This is plainly absurd. Perhaps officers should actually have joined the internet forum on British history which they so sternly investigated. They might have learned from it that a major part of their job is to preserve and respect freedom, not to investigate what is going on inside people's minds.