seculardetective.wordpress.com/2020/02/03/sec… "When courts decree that the hate alone suffices to constitute the crime, we are talking about the infantilisation of society..grown, responsible people outsourcing the arbitration of acceptable words and the test of meanness to an authority, to the state"
"What if, instead of a transgender PCSO, it had been an overweight PCSO, at whom someone had shouted, “Fatty” several times across the street, in front of several members of the public?...
...No doubt this would have been a mean thing to shout, and it would likely have..hurt the feelings of the PCSO in question. But I submit that this should be no matter for the courts...
...I would ask you to consider how uncomfortable it would be to live in a state where the police could not be mocked, and how perilously close we seem to be to such a circumstance, given this conviction."
"police officers are generally not held to suffice as the only “victims” of an offence under s5 of the 1986 Act. The reasoning goes that officers are exposed to such language so routinely that it cannot be expected to cause them “harassment”, “alarm” or “distress”"
"The claim that it’s “not part of the job”is an attempt to have one’s cake and eat it..an expectation of appreciation from the public for something outsourced by that same public to the police, while simultaneously pretending that it somehow does not form part of the expectation"
"The individuals who together make up the police, when in front-line positions especially, must not conflate words with action..Policing isn’t for everyone, and there is no shame in that."
"Some might here argue here that Freel is distinguished from police officers as he is a PCSO, without powers of arrest..the office of PCSO still carries much of the responsibility of constable. The uniform denotes an agent to whom a community can turn when in distress."
"A subtler but important point also concerns the fact that Freel’s uniform was rainbow-clad..I have argued against this practice previously, submitting that if the rainbow merely expresses an intention to treat members of the LGBT+ community without prejudice...
...it detracts from the uniform and office itself being able to stand for these principles without supplementation. When diversity is celebrated for its own sake and as an end unto itself within the police...
..., and individual officers are counted as members of groups as their identifying features above holding the office, we again undermine the uniform. The only membership that should matter is that to the job."
