Or what was in the news? My own blog doesn’t show anything on which I felt compelled to comment.
I would be surprised if even the local press carried reports of one routine incident which took place on that day in Hackney, east London, a borough which saw a lot of action in last summer’s riots.
One group of people must remember all too clearly.
PC Challis and PCSO Mr Mcllvaney were looking for people who, the police had been informed, might be in possession of cannabis. They found one young woman and three young men … outside a block of flats. The officers decided to search the three men. One objected and said, "Fuck this man, I ain't been smoking nothing". PC Challis told him that if he continued to swear he would be arrested for an offence under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986.
No cannabis was found. The young man went on to use the F-word twice more & was duly arrested for this; there was a “scuffle” & in due course he appeared before the magistrates charged both for the swearing & for assault on a police officer in the execution of his duty.
He was found Not Guilty of assault, but Guilty of swearing & fined £50.
There is a problem however: Parliament has not made it an offence to swear in public, as such, (something for which most of us must be grateful). The prosecution must show that ”the defendant used threatening, abusive or insulting words within the hearing of someone else who was caused or was likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress by hearing them.”
And so the case finally found its way to Appeal on Thursday, 17 November 2011, whereupon the rice pudding really hit the fan, & the events of that day in March 2009 suddenly became news.
Because, according to large sections of the press, the Judge declared that ‘It’s OK to swear at policemen because they’re used to it.’
That last quote comes from a piece by Robert Crampton (a journalist I normally admire) writing in The Times last Tuesday. He lives in Hackney & wrote of a hard core of fellow residents, young males who are ‘dangerous, occasionally lethally so … a potential menace to anyone who gets in their way … ultra-sensitive to perceived slights … anything that interferes with them behaving in any way they want.’
The job of keeping the rest of the population safe from such feral beasts falls to the police & the courts, so ‘it really isn’t sensible to do anything that undermines the authority of either.’ He ends with the words ‘You couldn’t make it up’, implying that that is exactly what the judge did with the law.
If however you read the judge’s written report it is clear that he not only could not, but did not, do that.
“Such language is familiar to most courts. A search on the legal database Lexis for cases in which either the word "fuck" or the word "fucking" appear produces 2,124 results. Even allowing for duplication in the way that cases are reported and transcribed, or for cases which appear in more than one report, the total is still very large.”The judge must pay due regard to the decisions made in those cases; it has all been heard before..
Fortunately the two lawyers acting in this appeal had boiled these down, ”in their concise and helpful submissions”, to just six.
A number of cases establish that expletives such as "fuck" or "fucking" are potentially abusive words, whether uttered to a police officer or a member of the public.
But it is a question of fact, to be decided by the magistrates on the basis of the evidence presented to them, whether words and behaviour (with which police officers are indeed too wearily familiar) produced a reaction only of boredom or, in the circumstances (including the time, the place, who the police officers were), caused the harassment, alarm or distress, which are needed to turn use of such abhorrent language into a crime.
The lawyer who was in charge of the case at the magistrates court provided no such evidence – the police officers were not asked the question, nor was evidence presented to show that anybody else had complained.
Where witnesses have said nothing and been asked nothing about experiencing harassment, alarm or distress, there is no sound basis for the court to reach that conclusion for itself.
“This is particularly so in the case of police officers because … they hear such words all too frequently as part of their job.”
BUT, said the judge, this is not to say that such words can NEVER cause police officers to experience alarm, distress or harassment.
It depends … on the facts. And where a witness has been silent on the point it is wrong to draw inferences.
We can all draw our own inferences, based on such evidence as we have heard or read about in this case, together with our own experience & prejudice.
Perhaps he was one of the dangerous young males – why else would the police be searching him? In which case he should have been found guilty as an example to others of his kind.
Or perhaps it is a tale wearyingly familiar to anyone who numbers black males among their respectable friends & family, in which case he ought never to have been brought to court in the first place.
But these inferences are based on generalised belief, not evidence specific to this occasion.
We hear a lot these days about the need for ‘evidence’ in science, medicine & politics. Sometimes we may doubt the validity of such evidence & so doubt the need for anything more than ‘common sense’ in reaching decisions or taking action in those areas of life.
But surely we are all agreed on the need for evidence-based law.
So I say three cheers for Mr Justice Bean, who kept this need firmly in the front of his mind. And for the system which puts it all down in writing & makes it available for us to read at a few clicks of a mouse.
It has taken approaching three years to get this conviction overturned – a long time in the life of a young man. If he was not known to the police before, he is now.
And if there is now a widespread belief that it is OK to swear at the police, well that comes from journalists, not the judges.
Thanks to Bystander & Beneath the Wig whose blogs pointed me to the evidence in this case.
