What were the police doing with their heavy-handed arrest of an autistic child in Leeds? - Bill Carmichael

The video shows the girl, apparently aged 16, backed into a corner of the home, screaming and so distressed that she starts punching herself in the face.

Her mother tells the officers that the girl is autistic and cannot stand anyone touching her, to which one officer, shaking with anger and clearly intent on inflaming the situation rather than calming it down, shouts: “I don’t care. She is getting arrested.”

She was eventually held in police custody for 19 hours on suspicion of what the police called “a homophobic public order offence”.

There is so much wrong here, it is hard to know where to begin. First of all the arrest and invasion of the family’s home was unlawful, because clearly no crime had been committed, as West Yorkshire Police were later forced to admit in a statement that said no further action would be taken against the girl and the case was closed.

As the mother told the officers, she had done nothing wrong and the comment that the officer looked like her nana, who is married to another woman, was an observation, not an insult.

I am told that many autistic children have “no filter” and will on occasion blurt out inappropriate truths such as: ‘That man is fat.’ A bit embarrassing perhaps, but it isn’t a crime and certainly not a police matter.

Equally disturbing is the total absence of the most valuable attribute police officers can possess – plain common sense.

The officer at the centre of this drama had clearly lost her temper and behaved in a totally unprofessional manner. She should have been told to remove herself from the situation and calm down.

But what of the other five or six officers? Did not one of them pause to think if a heavy-handed arrest of a distressed child was in proportion to any alleged offence? Did no one think: ‘Isn’t this way over the top?’

Apparently not, and the only reasonable conclusion is that every one of them decided that the hurt feelings of their thin-skinned colleague were more important than their duty to the public. Utterly disgraceful.

Also the numbers of officers involved is quite remarkable. We are constantly told by the police that they “don’t have the resources” to investigate actual real crimes.

For example Home Office figures show that in 2022/23 more than 11,400 burglaries in West Yorkshire were closed without a suspect being identified, accounting for 80 per cent of cases.

Yet resources never seem to be a problem when it comes to investigating imaginary crimes and hurt feelings in the name of fashionable political causes.

I am normally a big supporter of the police. They do a difficult and sometimes dangerous job, and sometimes they put their lives on the line to protect the public. I remember vividly the deaths of Special Constable Glenn Goodman, shot and killed by an IRA gunman on the A64 in 1992; PC Ian Broadhurst, murdered by an American gangster in Leeds in 2003, and PC Sharon Beshenivsky, shot and killed while responding to a robbery in Bradford in 2005. There have been many more.

But despite the bravery and dedication of individual officers something has gone badly wrong with modern policing, and the rot goes right to the very top, and is caused by a total obsession with trendy identity politics.

Gay and trans people deserve protection under the law, to be treated fairly by the police and to live their lives free from abuse and violence, but the police’s fixation on LGBT issues to the exclusion of everything else isn’t helping.

How about a bit of police support for other disadvantaged groups? Disabled people, perhaps, or the elderly, or indeed the biggest disadvantaged group of the lot – women and girls who are the victims of violence overwhelmingly carried out by men, however they identify?

Perhaps one day we’ll see police officers turn up for a women’s rights march decked out in Suffragette colours to show their support? Dream on.