‘The Police Questioning of Allison Pearson Is a Sign of the Criminal Justice System at Its Best’

Daily Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson has expressed her ‘shock, astonishment and upset’ after she was invited for a voluntary interview with police to discuss a potential crime after she posted a tweet. She has been supported by the forces of the populist right wing, who have declared that her treatment is ‘Kafkaesque’ and part of a growing ‘two tier’ system of policing. 

So, is she right? Or does her and her supporter’s vitriol actually demonstrate a worrying ignorance of the law and the jurisprudence that is designed to underpin a decent society?

According to The Guardian her tweet, which was posted in November 2023 and subsequently deleted, depicted a photograph of two police officers seemingly posing with a group of Asian protestors who were holding a flag. Ms. Pearson’s appears to have erroneously believed that the police officers were from the Metropolitan Police, they weren’t, they were Greater Manchester Police, and that the protestors were pro-Palestinian, when in actual fact that they were supporters of Imran Khan’s Pakistani political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. 

Based upon these two apparent fundamental errors of fact Ms. Pearson, tagged the Met Police into the tweet and asserted: ‘How dare they? Invited to pose for a photo with lovely peaceful Friends of Israel on Saturday police refused. Look at this lot smiling with the Jew Haters.’ 

Police Officers, journalists and protestors all have an important role to play in a democratic society: the police to serve and protect, the journalist to inform and educate, the protestor to provide a voice for those arguments and debates that impact upon our national discourse; and as well as these duties, each has a responsibility to act within the established parameters of the law. The police must abide by, amongst other things, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the protestor must comply with public order legislation and the journalist must not fall foul of the criminal and civil statutes that are there to protect both the public and themselves. 

Pearson seems to think that the decision of the police to invite her for to voluntary interview was somehow a deliberate attempt to curtail her right to free-speech – but that is clearly not right.

The CPS guidance on race crime makes clear that any decision to prosecute an individual for either incitement to insight racial hatred under the 1986 Public Order Act, or stirring up racial hatred, which became an offence under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, must be taken very carefully and that, ‘the rights of the individual to freedom of expression must be balanced against the duty of the state to act proportionately in the interest of public safety, to prevent disorder and crime and to protect the rights of others’. 

Ms. Pearson’s Tweet states clearly that the Asian men, supporting Imran Khan’s political party in a seemingly peaceful way, are in her opinion ‘Jew Haters.’  It is on any view an utterance that is completely venal, there is no apparent attempt to educate or inform, instead there is the amateurish failure to check the factual contents of the photograph followed by the contents of the tweet which clearly, whether by design or not, assert that the Asian men in the picture are antisemitic racists.  

Putting to one side Ms. Pearson’s seeming disinterest in elevating the debate about the Middle East beyond the level of crude racial tribalism, there is no doubt that the tweet has the capacity to offend. The police officers in the photo, whose professional integrity was wrongly questioned would, I’m sure have been offended by the tone of her message as would the political activists who had their perfectly proper right to support a lawful political party diminished and abused by being called racists. 

Similarly, it is quite possible that others reading that tweet – and Ms. Pearson has 190,000 followers, which is akin to the population of Newcastle – could have also picked up on the narrative proffered in the post and, just as happened in July 2024, taken action against the supposedly Jew hating Asian males.

As such, it is not entirely surprising to hear that a complaint was made about the tweet even if it was deleted. 

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‘Simply Doing Their Jobs’

What happened next appears to have been the subject of Ms. Pearson’s distress, because the police came to her door to interview her under caution about the Tweet and the potential crime of inciting racial hatred. This is the job of the police – if a complaint is made about a potential criminal act, they are under a duty to investigate. The idea that the police would refuse to investigate because the potential perpetrator was a journalist with the Daily Telegraph is abhorrent and goes against the principle that the legal justice system operates without fear or favour. 

The test for the police as defined by the code of conduct set out in the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996 is that an investigation should be carried out to ascertain whether a crime has been committed. In this case they have simply carried out their role to the letter and if the journalist had been left leaning or liberal then society would expect them to take similar action.

Of course, we do not know what passed between Ms. Pearson and the police during that interview, nor do we have access to all the evidence obtained by the police and it is not clear if any file was passed to the CPS to consider a charge – but, if Ms. Pearson were to be charged with the offence of inciting racial hatred then the Crown would have to prove that she acted in a way that was ‘threatening, abusive or insulting’ and that it is intended or in all likelihood to stir up racial hatred. 

I’m not going to proffer my professional view as to whether Ms. Pearson’s Tweet, would or wouldn’t constitute an offence in law, however, without doubt, the decision by the police to investigate it is beyond reproach. 

She does not have an unfettered right to say what she likes, free speech is rightly subject to proper legal limitations such as defamation and incitement and the hyperbole that has surrounded this case and the assertion that it undermines free speech is fatuous. In reality, the opposite is true, free speech thrives in a society where its citizens are protected by a fair and open criminal justice system and the protection of the police is not in any way affected by an individual’s political persuasion or social status. 

The Police were simply doing their job as officers of the law in a professional and proper way. 

For most of us, if we were told that we had posted something on social media that had been deemed offensive by others, especially if we knew that it had been based upon an entirely incorrect factual premise, then we would feel a degree of embarrassment and shame, particularly if we held ourselves out as an experienced journalist. Sadly, Ms. Pearson’s reaction suggests that rather than shame, empathy or an understanding of what she did, her reaction is to try to set herself up as a victim and turn her crass stupidity into a political cause. 

This is not an example of ‘two tier policing’ it is an example of policing at its best, nor is it an indication of a ‘crumbling Britain,’ but instead demonstrates the Britain has at its heart a criminal justice system that is designed to fairly and properly strive towards racial and cultural harmony.