The Irish comedian, Graham Linehan, was arrested on the tarmac at Heathrow on 1 September for three tweets criticising trans activism. The outrage at police overreach was almost universal, the blame largely placed on laws that crimp freedom of expression and tie police officers’ hands.
But that’s not the real story. The arrest was the inevitable consequence of a shadow crime-recording system that has been created over the past quarter-century with almost nobody noticing, with the accuser’s word believed without question provided they belong to a “protected group”. Linehan is just the highest-profile victim. I’m another.
Watson, a former police officer, had been sacked for gross misconduct in 2023 after a campaign of online harassment against a friend of mine, Harry Miller . . . The police would soon be at my doorstep, Watson gloated. If I wasn’t prosecuted, he would drag the police to judicial review, and if that didn’t work he’d take a private prosecution.
The police didn’t come knocking, but the posts continued. In May, after he speculated that if people like him weren’t so “inherently peaceful”, people like me would have “met a grim ending a long time ago”, I reported him for criminal harassment.
From that point this story takes two very different turns, with Watson’s complaint accepted by the police and mine ignored.
My “crime”? Four tweets about Wallace at that event, reported by Watson because Wallace, the delicate flower, was “greatly upset”. In them I called Wallace a man, he/him and a fetishist — all true. I also called him “Fred”. And I cleared up online speculation about the unsightly lump of flesh hanging out of ripped fishnets under his miniskirt, which looked like an escaped testicle but was in fact bulging thigh fat.
When the police called him, Watson rounded off this rap sheet by claiming — on zero evidence, because it’s invented — that I had encouraged my social media followers to make abusive phone calls to Wallace and his workplace.
I made a subject access request, and to my astonishment discovered that they had recorded an actual crime — criminal harassment — flagged with the hate crime aggravator “transgender”. It was coded “outcome 15”, police jargon for when a crime has been committed, the suspect has been identified and the victim supports prosecution, but “evidential difficulties” make it impossible to investigate.
To borrow an adjective from Fred — what fucking evidential difficulties? The police know my address! They know my phone number, too: I gave it to them when I reported Watson! But without even getting in touch with me, they recorded me as having done everything Watson said.
I’m not the only person Watson has managed to get recorded as having committed a crime. He was instrumental in the charging decision that led to Linehan flying back from America for trial, which related to yet another trans-identifying man who wandered around a conference last autumn taking close-ups of people in the audience; Linehan knocked his phone out of his hand. Watson is also thought to have reported the tweets that got Linehan arrested in Heathrow.
The origins of this mess lie in the Macpherson Report on policing in the wake of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, published in 1999, which recommended that police should record racial incidents that fell short of crime. Over time four more monitored strands — religion, disability, sexual orientation and trans identity — were added to race, with some also granted special status in sentencing for crime via “hate crime aggravators”.
The recording of non-crime hate incidents became standardised across the country in 2014, despite no evidence it would have the desired effect, namely to enable police to spot patterns and prevent actual crimes. Now, a decade later, despite attempts to tighten up definitions, if a person from a protected group claims to have suffered a hate incident it is highly likely to be recorded as one.
All it takes to fit the criteria is to tell the police that someone has referred to a trans-identifying person as a member of their sex and say that this demonstrates “hostility” and “prejudice”.
Officers are expected to use their “common sense” — an expression that appears 13 times in the Home Office guidance. But the incentives all point the other way. In front of them is a complainant who may be threatening dire consequences if he doesn’t get what he wants, as seems to be Watson’s habit. Referral to professional standards! The Independent Office for Police Conduct! Judicial review! Who cares that somewhere out there is someone who will probably never find out they have been accused of anything?
The personal details of the subject of the report — which may appear in a DBS check if they apply for certain jobs — are supposed to be recorded only if there’s a “real risk” of “significant harm” or of a future crime being committed. But that’s easy for trans complainants to weaponise, too.
Above all, creating special categories of people who can instruct the police to credulously record their claims about others offends against two fundamental principles: that we are all innocent until proven guilty, and equal before the law.
Source: How I was secretly logged as a criminal | The Critic Magazine
