A British police force which arrested a veteran for causing someone “anxiety” with a sardonic Pride flag meme has been making people not convicted of any crime attend “re-education” lessons on racism, sexism, and transphobia.
Hampshire Constabulary has been instructed to drop the communist-style re-education programme by the elected Police and Crime Commissioner for the area, Donna Jones of the Conservative (Tory) Party, from whose budget the scheme was funded.
“I have decided that this hate-crime awareness course will no longer be offered in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight by way of a community resolution option. The change needs to be planned properly but will take place in the coming weeks,” she told The Telegraph.
The move follows backlash against Hampshire Constabulary after it arrested British Army veteran Darren Brady for sharing a meme showing four Progress Pride flags arranged to form an LGBTQIA2S+ swastika on social media, which led to considerable backlash.
— Laurence Fox (@LozzaFox) July 28, 2022
“[S]omeone has been caused, obviously, anxiety based upon your social media post, and that’s the reason why you’ve been arrested,” one of multiple arresting officers had told the veteran in a viral video filmed by actor turned activist Laurence Fox after he had been handcuffed.
Harry Miller, a retired officer who previously won a court battle against the police for telling him to “check his thinking” and marking him down as responsible for a so-called “non-crime incident” over social media posts, was also arrested, allegedly for obstructing Brady’s arrest.
The emergence of the re-education course, which the veteran had been told he could to submit as an alternative to being investigated prior to his arrest, will have come as something of an embarrassment to Commissioner Jones, as she had herself criticised Hampshire Constabulary for “the proportionality and necessity of the police’s response to this incident.”
“When incidents on social media receive not one but two visits from police officers, but burglaries and non-domestic break-ins don’t always get a police response, something is wrong,” she had said.
Hampshire Constabulary is far from alone in such woke social media policing, however, with the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police having subsequently confessed that his own force had also “got ourselves involved in stuff which is just not a policing matter [and] wasted our time… [causing] people to question whether, frankly, we know what we’re doing.”
Police Commissioner Chastises Cops for Arresting People for Memes Instead of Solving Burglaries https://t.co/ncbj70ttWq
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) July 30, 2022
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