I don’t know about you, but I would rather our police worked on actual serious crime, says Nana Akua

I don’t know about you, but I would rather our police worked on actual serious crime.

What this whole Allison Pearson debacle has uncovered is that the police appear to have plenty of resource when it comes to tracking down high profile people who may have posted hurty words, but for you or I when we report a burglary or shoplifting or in many cases violent crime, the police are often slow to respond, if they even respond at all.

Now I am not saying bash the police because whenever I have had to deal with them, they have always been courteous and in most cases responsive, but what I am saying is should they really be getting bogged down in all of this.,

In Allison’s case and I can’t say too much because I think it may be a live investigation, but apparently it wasn’t a non crime hate incident they were pursuing her for at all but in fact an actual crime and they, the police have now apparently reported the Telegraph to the watchdog IPSO [Independent Press Standards Organisation] for inaccurate reporting. So this whole thing has escalated.

“Officers went to a residential address to arrange a time to do an interview with a woman about a complaint made by a member of the public.

“That’s why, under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, no further information was provided – this call was made by officers, who were in the area at the time, to simply set up a time to speak in the coming days.

“At no stage during the short interaction between the woman and our officers was she informed that the report being investigated was being treated as a non-crime hate incident. To suggest otherwise is wholly inaccurate and misleading.

“As the public would expect, we have body-worn video of this interaction which entirely supports our position in this respect.”

Enough already.

Stop the world! I want to get off.

There are many times where people have posted abhorrent things to me or about me on social media, I could’ve reported each and every single one of them, but the reason I didn’t was because frankly I can block them or better still ignore them.

Now i do agree that if someone breaks any law they should be held to account, but the problem with online word crime, which I do believe can go to far, is it is subjective and open to different interpretations and people often just get things wrong.

In my view, responses for all crimes need to be proportionate and I’m afraid if we are to have a truly effective police force then priority needs to be prioritised.

I get that in some of these online cases nobody wants to look bad or foolish and stand down, but let’s get a grip of this and ask whether heavy handed responses to this sort of thing are reasonable and proportionate and whether these crimes are actually a priority.

Whilst I absolutely want respect and tolerance in the way in which we communicate with each other online, I also want to feel safe on the streets and in my home and to me the latter is of greater priority.

And given the state of the crown prosecution service where a care worker can be jailed for longer for live-streaming a riot, than a machete wielding youth who has been jailed for killing someone, you’ve got to ask yourself what’s going on?

I’m just not convinced that given the limited resources and cash our police have to investigate crimes that dealing with online word crime in a heavy handed manner is the best use of their time and energy..