Forces in England and Wales risk being seen as the ‘thought police’ without stronger guidance from ministers, says Head of the Police Inspectorate Sir Andy Cooke.
Speaking to the Financial Times, Cooke said that there needs to be a clearer difference between criminal social media content and social media content that is merely in bad taste.
“The Public Order Act 1986 was for issues happening in the street, but now it’s used for online issues … and police have limited discretion about recording those issues,” he said.
“The police aren’t the thought police . . . the whole legislation needs to be looked at. Separating the criminal from the offense, the bad taste is really important.”
The current Labour government has received backlash online for what has been seen as a heavy-handed response to online comments and potentially harmful content.
This has been exacerbated by genuinely harmful speech drummed up in response to concerns about the country’s growing migration crisis and an increasing wave of populism.
Notably, this week, the UK government took urgent action to toughen the Online Safety Act, putting stricter legal requirements on tech companies to remove harmful material.
This amendment to the existing act, announced on Monday, 8 September, is focused on tackling content that encourages or assists serious self-harm.
Under the new regulations, this type of material will be treated as a priority offence for all users and trigger the strongest possible legal protections.
Platforms that host this material will be compelled to actively seek out and eliminate this content before it can reach users and potentially cause irreparable harm.
The government argued that, although it acknowledged platforms have already taken steps to protect children from this dangerous self-harm content, stricter requirements are needed to prevent potentially terrible consequences for families in the UK.
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