A fortnight ago on the Today programme, the national police chiefs’ lead officer on digital crime, the Essex Chief Constable, Stephen Kavanagh, admitted that an “inconsistent” approach to online abuse is undermining the confidence of victims. He said the police were determined to improve how they deal with the “explosion” of online abuse.
I hope he means it. Because I have recently had my own experience of how utterly useless the police can be.
As editor of the JC, I am an obvious target to Jew haters. Waking up every morning to antisemitic tweets directed at me, which are added to throughout the day, goes with the territory.
Some even amuse me, such as the recent claim that I “lead British Zionists with their propaganda to enable them to control UK” and one that informed the world: “Pollard is the chief protagonist of Zionist supremacism in UK. He controls MSM.”
MSM is an acronym for mainstream media — which means I apparently control all British media. Which would be great, of course, except that I can’t even control my own kids.
Some Jew-haters develop an obsession with me and bombard me with tweets. Presumably they think if they can get under the skin of a prominent media Jew then they’ve achieved something.
Much as I am loath to give any of them the publicity they obviously crave, I need to tell you about one. Not because she has anything to say of note, but because of what her case shows about the way the Metropolitan Police treat online Jew-hate.
Last April, a tweeter — let’s call her @ZioBaiter (I’ve changed the username, and have changed her real name here to “Martine Smith”) — started to send out various abusive tweets to me.
They were the standard Jew-hating drivel, and I paid them no attention. After a few of them I muted her — a very useful Twitter function — so she was spewing out her bile entirely unaware that I wasn’t seeing any of it.
But after a while, I was alerted to a series of her tweets that said I was in the habit of ringing her voicemail and leaving abusive messages. In one she said I had threatened to rape her.
I suppose I need to point out, for the record, that I have never had any form of contact with her (other than one or two tweets telling her to withdraw her ridiculous libel), have never left any messages for her anywhere and have never made any threats.
I was advised to take legal action, since this was clearly a very serious libel. But I am almost absolutist on free speech — I disagree profoundly, for example, with the idea of criminalising Holocaust denial.
And anyone who looked at her timeline could see she was clearly unhinged in her obsessive hatred of Jews, so I reasoned that I didn’t really care what she said.
However, in September she linked to a post on YouTube which purported to be a voicemail message from me. To anyone who has ever heard me speak, it’s obviously not my voice. So I wasn’t in any way worried about the contents of the audio, even though it was being retweeted by people who took her lies about me at face value.
The recording was uploaded in someone else’s name on YouTube. My guess is that she got a friend to impersonate me and then post it. I must confess that that did worry me: I was concerned about the state of mind of someone who would go to such trouble to make and post such a recording — especially in the context of her obsessive tweeting of me. So I was concerned about what she might do next. But again, I left it alone.
And then she went a stage further.
She posted a tweet suggesting that someone “pop” me off.
Not only did that seem to me to be incitement; I worried that she might herself do something. It seemed a step up from her usual tweets.
That meant, I was advised by a lawyer, that it was time to alert the police. This was not libel: it was possibly criminal.
So I called the police to report a possible crime and took them through the gist of the story. Although the call handler seemed to be entirely mystified by what I was saying, I was heartened — and surprised — to be called back and told that a police officer from the Met’s specialist unit would visit me that night.
And indeed that very night not one but two constables came to the house. I’d prepared a dossier for them with screengrabs and a statement. They listened intently, making notes as I took them through what had happened.
Then one of then asked: “What exactly is Twitter?”
They had both heard of it, they said. But neither had ever seen it, and they had no idea what it really was. So I spent the next few minutes explaining Twitter to two coppers who had been sent to deal with a case revolving around Twitter.
It did not fill me with confidence.
A few days later I had a phone call from a different policeman. There was good news.
“We’ve checked the Police National Computer and there is nothing against the name Martina Smith.”
I asked why that was good news. Because, he told me, in such cases, there’s only usually a realistic threat when someone is a repeat offender. And Martina Smith wasn’t.
It’s funny, the copper said, because there is someone called Martine Smith — and she does have previous for harassment.
I pointed out that my tweeter was Martine, not Martina.
“Oh. It’s written on the notes as Martina,” the policeman said, as if it was my fault.
So, I said, we have established that Martine Smith does have an entry on the PNC. What happens now?
“We will investigate and consider the most appropriate course of action”.
And so I waited. For days. And days. And weeks.
Then I had a call.
“We have decided to issue her with a harassment notice. But there is a problem. All we have is her Twitter name and bio, and there is no way from that of finding out her address.”
“Have you tried googling her?” I asked.
“Oh, no.”
“Well I did, and her website gives full contact details.”
“Thanks,” he said. “That’s helpful.”
I was not that encouraged that I had to suggest to the police that they use Google to find someone.
In December, the police emailed me: “I have found SMITH’s address, however it is not within the MPS boundary, and not within feasible travelling distance.”
Well, yes. As I had said, a two-second search on Google revealed her business details and that she lived in Bristol. Which I had told the constables who visited me at the start.
They would, I was told, find someone in Avon and Somerset police who would contact her and issue a harassment warning.
Two weeks later, the Met emailed me again: “Miss SMITH refused to sign it. This does not affect the issuing of the warning, all it means it that we record the fact she declined to sign it. A record of its issue is still logged on the police system (which I have just done).
“Her reason for not signing was because she feels what she said was taken out of context. She stated that in her opinion the word ‘pop’ was in relation to your weight which she perceives to be large.
“PC --------- also warned her that the contact she’s trying to make must cease and gave her a stern warning. To this she stated: ‘I do not contact him anyway and haven’t done for some time’. Because of this, the report has now been closed and all our systems have been updated. The reports will always stay on police records, so if you report something in future, the officer dealing will see the report that I have been working on.”
This completely misunderstood the point of my reporting her to the police. I was not saying she was trying to ‘contact’ me, rather that her tweets to and about me revealed a possibly dangerous woman. But wearying as this all was, I decided to see if it would make any difference to her behaviour. After all, if she did start at me again, perhaps the police would take it more seriously.
Inevitably, nothing changed. She carried on with the usual Jew-hatred directed at me. Then, last month, she upped the ante, posting this: “My harassment and bullying started with Pollard. He incites anonymous thugs to target anyone who offends him.”
On legal advice, I contacted the police again, since this could also be seen as incitement against me, on the basis that I am supposedly responsible for coordinating thugs to attack her.
I contacted the policeman who had been dealing with the case. His response: it wasn’t his case any more and I must start again with a new report to someone else.
With zero expectations of anything happening, I did just that. With a sinking heart, I went through the case to date, with the latest development. I pointed out the line above: “If you report something in future, the officer dealing will see the report that I have been working on.”
Except that turns out to be nonsense. When I gave the crime reference number, I was told they would have to go back to square one and investigate everything from the start.
Which is why I am writing this.
Because whatever their intentions, and however earnestly they may say they are keen to tackle threats made by antisemites, in any practical way that might actually deal with the issue, in my experience the police have been entirely useless.
I cannot see any point in going through the rigmarole again, only for nothing to happen at the end of it.
I am lucky. While my position makes me a target for the nutters, it also gives me a platform from which to respond — like this. But there are many out there with no such platform, who are also attacked and targeted by Jew-haters. If my experience is anything to go by, they will get next to no worthwhile help from the police in dealing with it.
