In response to Laura Perrins: Sleeping with the enemy – the police, the tree-huggers and a gross abuse of power, Owen_Morgan wrote:

Meanwhile, the number of murders in London this year (or ‘alleged murders’, as the Telegraph hack put it) has passed sixty. It’s not that easy to find the exact numbers of crimes from the Metropolitan Police, since they wrap up murders in an absurdly inclusive ‘violence against the person’ bracket, which includes non-violent offences, and they combine 2018 crimes with 2017 ones. Anybody might think they don’t want people to know how bad things are.

The increased murder rate is partly a legacy of Theresa May’s stint as Home Secretary, but the police seem all too happy to concentrate on just about anything else. If a crime doesn’t exist, they will eagerly invent one. ‘Hate crime’ legislation makes this easy for them. They sit in the office all day long, reading Facebook, deciding which posts to criminalise. Infiltrating bunches of crackpot hippies sounds a bit more complicated, but is still a convoluted way to avoid doing any actual policing.