Shouldn’t British police concentrate on catching criminals rather than promoting woke agendas on social media?

Where once British police sought to reassure the public by putting officers on the street, now there’s an unhealthy focus on promoting woke causes online. Such blatant virtue signalling is a waste of time and resources.

Did you know that this week is #AceWeek? Do you even know what it is all about? Thankfully, the Police Service NI LGBT+ Network is on the case to lend a helping hand.

In a tweet, this hardy, woke group, supposedly involved in policing, explained, “It’s #AceWeek. This is a week for raising awareness about asexual identities, while also helping the #ace people within our workplaces feel more included & able to be themselves at work. We’ll be sharing resources/information throughout the week to help.”

Looking at the tweets and the retweets of the Police Service NI LGBT+ Network is a veritable education into the arcane world of the cultural politics of identity. We soon learn that, though it may be a week when we are meant to raise our awareness of ‘ace people’, October 26 is actually ‘Intersex Awareness Day’. As a helpful retweet from the Police Service NI LGBT+ Network explains, “Tomorrow is Intersex Awareness Day, but for us it is everyday. Trying to inform and educate about intersex is a constant fight against a lack of understanding and preconceptions of who we are. Of the physical and psychological issues we face each day, listen to intersex voices.”

The person reminding us to insert Intersex Awareness Day in our calendar personifies the woke turn of British policing. She describes herself as “Police LGBT Network, independent strategic adviser DCP. Police Liaison Westminster LGBT+ forum, Intersex, Queer, Jewish. She/They.”

You wonder what kind of strategy she is offering to the world.

One of the tasks of the different LGBT+ police networks is to remind the public of the hundreds of ‘awareness days’ that continue to proliferate on social media. It is so easy to forget about the need to remember all of them. I am sure that I am not the only person who required reminding that October 20 was @PronounsDay! But thankfully the National LGBT+ Police Network was there to tweet, “Today is #InternationalPronounsDay. It’s a day to help educate everyone about being more respectful & inclusive in how we use pronouns. Using the pronouns that people chose for themselves shows respect for that person’s dignity.”

Woke policing is not simply confined to tweeting. It is also about looking the part. Rainbow-coloured police cars communicate the significance which the forces of law and order attach to the promotion of LGBT+ culture. It is now possible to see police officers putting rainbows on their epaulettes, wearing rainbow shoelaces and draping rainbow flags around their shoulders.

The culture of woke policing was on full display last year, when during Black Lives Matter demonstrations, numerous cops could be seen taking the knee. Paradoxically not long after doing so, many of these officers had to flee from the protesters who violently turned on them.

Woke policing has also absorbed the narcissistic victim narrative of identity politics. Many police representatives inflate the threat facing ‘protected minorities’ and are responsible for manufacturing a hate-crime epidemic. The main justification for rainbow police cars is that, apparently, they play an essential role in raising awareness of hate crime. According to Julie Cooke, the LGBT+ lead for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, when the public sees rainbow cars whizzing by in their community, they gain confidence to come forward and report hate crimes to the police.

In reality, the obsession of the British police with hate crimes serves as a displacement activity from the far more serious challenge of tackling real crimes. This point was recently emphasised by Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police Stephen Watson, who said the police should concentrate on arresting criminals rather than “making common cause” with woke agendas, such as displaying the multi-coloured LGBT Pride flag.

Watson added, “The public are getting a little bit fed up of virtue-signalling police officers when they’d really rather we just locked up burglars.”

Unfortunately, virtue-signalling policing by British forces is here to stay. In the past, impression policing – that is the impression management of the public by the police – took the form of community policing. Instead of rainbow-coloured police cars, the public could see the occasional Bobby on the streets. That was then.

Today, the police establishment has become woke to the point of losing sight of giving priority to the real crimes faced by communities. In part, this reorientation towards wokeness is influenced by pragmatic concerns. It is much easier to tweet about ‘Pronoun Days’ than to catch real criminals. But what’s even more disturbing is that a section of the police establishment has totally absorbed woke ideology.

Many of them really do believe that ‘raising awareness’ about the needs of the asexual community is more important than catching burglars and thieves.

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