What is wrong with America

[hypochondriac]

6 minutes ago, Farmer Saint said:

Ok, so your first argument is similar to a policeman visiting a property because they've had a call as someone has heard a ton of shouting coming from next door. They don't believe a crime has been committed, but have visited to talk to. It's like a noise complaint.

Absolutely, house calls are not always needed, but do we have proof that house calls always take place in these situations?

That’s not really the same thing. If someone hears shouting, there’s a potential immediate risk to life or safety, so a welfare check makes sense. But in the Miller case and others, we’re talking about lawful speech online where the police already knew no crime had been committed due to the content of the tweets. Turning up at people’s homes or workplaces in those circumstances has been found by the courts in many cases to be disproportionate and unlawful.

The issue isn’t that house calls “always” happen, it’s that they happen at all in cases where no crime has been committed — and that’s exactly what the courts have rebuked even if some posters think otherwise. 

[Farmer Saint]

3 minutes ago, hypochondriac said:

That’s not really the same thing. If someone hears shouting, there’s a potential immediate risk to life or safety, so a welfare check makes sense. But in the Miller case and others, we’re talking about lawful speech online where the police already knew no crime had been committed due to the content of the tweets. Turning up at people’s homes or workplaces in those circumstances has been found by the courts in many cases to be disproportionate and unlawful.

The issue isn’t that house calls “always” happen, it’s that they happen at all in cases where no crime has been committed — and that’s exactly what the courts have rebuked even if some posters think otherwise. 

Loud music is another example. Police make house calls for that. No offence has taken place.

It's a bit odd that you are using a few examples of house calls being unnecessary to prove your point, as if you expect the police to be 100% correct. There were 150k hate crimes reported last year. To get 100% accuracy is impossible.

You're being unreasonable in my eyes.

[hypochondriac]

11 minutes ago, Farmer Saint said:

Loud music is another example. Police make house calls for that. No offence has taken place.

It's a bit odd that you are using a few examples of house calls being unnecessary to prove your point, as if you expect the police to be 100% correct. There were 150k hate crimes reported last year. To get 100% accuracy is impossible.

You're being unreasonable in my eyes.

The comparison with loud music doesn’t work though — in those cases, there is a potential offence under noise legislation, and the police or council have clear powers to intervene. That’s very different from turning up at someone’s home or workplace over lawful online speech where no offence has taken place.

Of course the police won’t get total accuracy — nobody expects that. The problem is that in some of these “hate incident” cases, the courts have already ruled the approach unlawful and disproportionate. When you’ve got people being logged, visited, or even arrested for posts that aren’t crimes, and the police end up paying compensation, that’s not just “a few mistakes.” It’s a pattern of overreach that needs to be called out. As I mentioned there's quite a large number of high profile cases.
 

[egg]

Anyways, I'm not sure what this nonsense has to do with America. It feels more like what's wrong with Hypo. 

[Farmer Saint]

15 minutes ago, hypochondriac said:

The comparison with loud music doesn’t work though — in those cases, there is a potential offence under noise legislation, and the police or council have clear powers to intervene. That’s very different from turning up at someone’s home or workplace over lawful online speech where no offence has taken place.

Of course the police won’t get total accuracy — nobody expects that. The problem is that in some of these “hate incident” cases, the courts have already ruled the approach unlawful and disproportionate. When you’ve got people being logged, visited, or even arrested for posts that aren’t crimes, and the police end up paying compensation, that’s not just “a few mistakes.” It’s a pattern of overreach that needs to be called out. As I mentioned there's quite a large number of high profile cases.
 

For an offence to be committed under the Public Order Act 1986, the language must be "threatening, abusive or insulting" and "intended to or likely in all the circumstances to stir up hatred".

Pretty much any and all threatening, abusive and insulting language could be classed as stirring up hatred as that is what Social Media platforms are used for now.

Edited 6 hours ago by Farmer Saint

[hypochondriac]

19 minutes ago, Farmer Saint said:

For an offence to be committed under the Public Order Act 1986, the language must be "threatening, abusive or insulting" and "intended to or likely in all the circumstances to stir up hatred".

Exactly — and that’s the whole point. The bar in the Public Order Act is deliberately set high: speech has to be threatening, abusive or insulting and intended or likely to stir up hatred. In most of the cases I've highlighted — Miller, Brady, Scottow — the police knew that threshold wasn’t met, yet still logged incidents or turned up at people’s homes.

So I'm not arguing against the Act itself. The issue is the gap between the law and the way it’s been applied in practice, where lawful speech has been treated as if it were criminal. That’s why the courts rebuked both the police and the guidance behind it as I said.
 

Edit: regarding your final paragraph that's not how the law works. The public order act doesn't criminalise all insulting or abusive language online. The Miller judgement even makes this explicit that lawful even deeply offensive speech is protected. The problem was that the police treated lawful yet what they deemed unpopular opinions expressed in possibly a rude way as if they were hate crimes. The line is much narrower than "pretty much any and all abusive language" because otherwise half of social media would be criminalised by default.

Edited 6 hours ago by hypochondriac