I think it’s necessary for me as chief inspector of constabulary to make it perfectly clear that is no part of our legal system.” Winsor told reporters: “From time to time, one turns on the radio and there’s retired chief constables declaring certain things to be crimes which are not crimes.
Sue Fish, who served as police boss in Nottinghamshire before she retired in 2017, was said to have led the trend by declaring misogyny as a hate crime in 2014. His comments follow reports that some police forces now treat misogyny and transphobia as hate crimes. He said that “hating someone or something is not criminal,” though hate can be an aggravating factor that should be reflected when sentencing criminals. It is important that no-one is misled: the police enforce the law, they do not make it,” he wrote. “They have no legal power to create criminal offences in their police areas or anywhere else. He said it is “not appropriate” for senior police officers to “assert a right of the police to declare anything criminal, least of all what people may think.”
“There is no such thing as a thought crime,” he wrote in his final annual assessment of the state of policing in England and Wales ( pdf), which was published on March 10. Sir Tom Winsor, the outgoing chief inspector of constabulary, said that chief constables cannot “declare something that is not a crime to be a crime” in their force area, as “it is not illegal to think anything.” Police forces should stop declaring certain thoughts are crimes, the UK’s police watchdog has warned, stressing that “thought crimes” do not exist in the country’s legal system.
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