A story that seemed troubling enough when it emerged over the weekend is turning out to be even worse than it first appeared, with the strange willingness of Hertfordshire Police to intervene in a debate at a primary school proving ever stranger.
On Saturday, the Times reported that in late January six uniformed officers in three marked cars and a van had been sent to arrest Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine after their child’s school, Cowley Hill Primary, objected to a series of emails and “disparaging” comments in a parents’ WhatsApp group. As the police carried out a search of the house, the couple were detained in front of their three year-old daughter, before being held in cells for eight hours. And all this for querying the recruitment process for a new headteacher.
Accused of “casting aspersions” on the chair of governors in an “upsetting” way, they were then questioned on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property.
Following a five-week investigation the police concluded there was insufficient evidence and took no further action – although the knock at the door, the squad vehicles and the highly public arrest by half a dozen officers must have felt like quite a punishment already.
No wonder that Mr Allen, a producer at Times Radio, said the couple’s treatment represented “massive overreach” by Hertfordshire Police. He told the Times: “It was absolutely nightmarish. I couldn’t believe this was happening, that a public authority could use the police to close down a legitimate inquiry. Yet we have never even been told what these communications were that were supposedly criminal, which is completely Kafkaesque.”
But it now transpires that the force’s intervention wasn’t restricted to Mr Allen and Ms Levine. Hertfordshire Police also warned Michelle Vince, a local county councillor, to stop helping the family by sending emails to the school on their behalf – or risk being investigated herself.
Prior to the arrests, one officer wrote Ms Vince an email saying: “I ask that your communication (with the school) ceases from this point onwards as you may find yourself liable to being recorded as a suspect in a harassment investigation.”
“In effect,” Ms Vince commented, “the police are taking away my democratic rights as a councillor. I think what that family has been through is traumatic. I’m terrified now that they’re going to come for me and knock on my door at any time. Maxie and Ros did nothing wrong. They only dared to ask the question of the school and that was enough to have them arrested.”
And still there’s more. The email to Ms Vince asked her to forward the warning to anyone she’d cc’ed when contacting the school. This included the local Conservative MP, and former Deputy Prime Minister, Sir Oliver Dowden.
Ms Vince said she felt “uncomfortable” passing on the warning to Sir Oliver. For his part, he was “astonished that a situation could have arisen where any police officer could think it would be remotely acceptable to suggest that an MP should be curtailed in carrying out their democratic duties”.
Sir Oliver added that the case has “seriously undermined confidence in police” among residents: “I have constituents getting in contact with me saying that their house has been burgled and the police have not turned up, or they have watched shoplifters come in and take things off the shelf, and police will not come. Now it appears Hertfordshire Police were able to send six officers for parents’ comments on a WhatsApp group and emails to the school.”
Jonathan Ash-Edwards, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Hertfordshire, announced at the weekend that a rapid review of the case would be conducted by Chief Constable Andy Prophet. Yet while Mr Prophet’s review was certainly rapid, it, too, was pretty strange.
After declaring “my priorities are to fight crime, arrest criminals and build public trust and confidence”, he insisted on Tuesday that there was “a lawful reason to arrest” Mr Allen and Ms Levine – although he did concede that “I understand why a member of the public would look at [the footage] and think that feels a bit over the top. With the benefit of hindsight we could have achieved the same ends in a different way.”
The whole case has, of course, caused widespread concern about how police treat free speech issues – although not in a way that comes as a great surprise here at the FSU. A couple of years ago, we used Freedom of Information requests to assess how well police forces in England and Wales understand such issues. The answer was a firm “hardly at all”.
We found that while a disproportionate amount of police time is devoted to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) training, the vast majority of forces offer little or no training on freedom of speech.
Thirty-two police forces (out of 43) responded to our request for any policies or training materials relating to their duty to uphold Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of expression. Seven declined to answer on cost grounds. Of the remaining 25, nearly half claimed to hold no information at all; eight submitted irrelevant EDI policies, suggesting that some forces may not even know what Article 10 is.
Taken together, our research meant that of those 32 forces, 78 per cent were providing either no training or wholly inadequate training on Article 10, with the remainder declining to answer.
Primed by partisan EDI training to view dissent from orthodoxy as inherently ‘hateful’, and lacking any serious grounding in the legal protections for free expression – is it any wonder that British police officers are so quick to criminalise lawful speech?
You can read our research briefing here.
