In the hours immediately after the Woolwich attack, Kent police arrested, handcuffed and charged an 85-year-old woman alleged to have made abusive remarks near a mosque. At the same time, police in Bristol arrested two men in their 20s alleged to have made offensive comments of a racial or religious nature on social media.....
....The police seem only too happy to arrest people for making offensive remarks on Twitter. For example, in 2010 they even arrested a trainee accountant frustrated over delays at Robin Hood airport in Doncaster, for joking on Twitter that he was going to blow the airport ‘sky high’. And then, of course, there were those two men in their 20s arrested in Bristol following Drummer Rigby’s death, accused of making offensive comments.
The police also seem unbounded in their enthusiasm for arresting celebrities in Operation Yewtree, set up to investigate the Jimmy Savile scandal.
Accusations of sexual misdemeanours stretching back decades have resulted a flurry of high-profile, heavy-handed arrests of individuals such as Dave Lee Travis and Rolf Harris in what increasingly appears to be a witch-hunt.
Following the hacking scandal at the News of The World, dozens of journalists of national newspapers have been arrested in dawn raids on their homes, with their children’s bedrooms being turned upside down in search of ‘evidence’ against them. Only a handful have been charged, yet they are treated as if they are terrorist suspects.....
Read more: Don't 'monitor' him. Lock him up and throw away the key
