Woman told by PSCO that her thinking is wrong and she needs to educate herself.

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Woman is visited by a PSCO and told to remove an "offensive" sticker, told that her thinking is wrong and that she needs to educate herself. Also that TWAW is a fact.

FFS what the fuck is going on...

twitter.com/IXthoth/status/1558864403746922496

I am so very sorry. I hope you've been able to heal and access support elsewhere.

Is there any line more infuriatingly condescending than ‘educate yourself’?

It would be very tempting to reply: "No, you educate yourself" and then refer them to books by Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stock. Not sure I'd have the wit to do that in in the heat of the moment, though.

There are two possibilities:

This PCSO has her own personal agenda and is acting outwith the law and her appointed role.

The PCSO is acting within instructions, guidelines given to her by management.

For the sake of the police, the first possibility would be far less damaging, but I suspect she is only on the lookout for offense on certain political subjects as she's been trained to do so.

Who has 'educated' her? This is actually a far more important question than one daft PCSO going off-script.

If they did discipline or fire the PCSO I wonder if they would have an employment case legally speaking. If the force is pushing Stonewall training and a staff member follows that training enthusiastically where does the responsibility lie?

That's what I'd like to know. What has given this woman the idea that she is allowed to knock on someone's door and talk Stonewall bollocks to them?

It's the Genderhovah's Witnesses, ffs.

Lib Dem councillor in Wokingham Borough has just tweeted this:

'I am sorry for the fact that this person has had horrible things happen to them, but that does not mean the PCSO needs to be dismissed.
A bit insensitive at most.
Being the victim of traumatic events is not a licence to do what you want or be offensive.'

This is what we should really be worried about. It's not one rogue PCSO, it's the people in positions of (relative) power and responsibility that support this action.

a licence to do what you want

Is that a thing we need now? Who do we apply to? Does it need to be renewed annually?

‘I am sorry for the fact that this person has had horrible things happen to them, but that does not mean the PCSO needs to be dismissed. A bit insensitive at most.
Being the victim of traumatic events is not a licence to do what you want or be offensive.'

Article 10 of the ECHR is a licence to be offensive.

LibDem, Prim, no surprises about that reaction.

The PCSO's behaviour far exceeded 'insensitive' and she should be brought to book.

The PCSO needs educating.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Outrageous!

What a load of bullshit. That poor woman and what brave children for sticking up for their mum.

I hope this PCSO is struck off but I’m betting she will be getting lots of pats on the back from other TRA’s who will kick up a major fuss if she’s fired

A woman who needs help from a support group because of "things that happened" discovered that she cannot find that from an exclusively female group.

She has expressed her frustration and likely despair at the situation in the most anodyne way possible, by putting a sticker on her front door calling attention not to transpeople but to the ideology that erases women. And it does - so no amount of bullying rhetoric changes that.

Then she gets a visit from the police in front of her young children and is told to change her thinking.

A politician from a major UK political party says that's ok - bit insensitive.

It never f***g happens!!!

I am so livid, I don't know quite what to do right now. This needs publicising properly and investigations taking place. Any decent person, who does not outright condemn this situation in no uncertain terms is corrupt and complicit in the bullying of vulnerable women in their homes. I'm looking at you Starmer.

I believe you can apply in England with only two references - in Scotland it requires the blessing of a priest, a doctor's note and a letter from a sociology lecturer.

What’s it got to do with a Lib Dem councillor in Wokingham anyway? The council don’t run the Police. Councillors are not legal experts. Some of them I’ve met are ignorant as fuck.

This is about the Police and the law.

I hope this PCSO is struck off but I’m betting she will be getting lots of pats on the back from other TRA’s who will kick up a major fuss if she’s fired*

If it weren’t for the woman at the centre of all this I’d be inclined to say “Good.” Let there be a massive shitstorm, let everyone see what TRAs stand for. This seems like something the candidates for Prime Minister should be talking about. The police need fixing.

But not sure this woman is up for being the focal point of a massive shitstorm. I still hope that PCSO is publicly fired though. This has to stop.

Well, yes, but councillors carry more clout than a general member of the public. So it is symptomatic of a dangerous ideological capture that one of them feels justified in dismissing this obvious harassment of a woman in her own home.

I’ve followed this on Twitter and seen that the woman had two different police officers come a few days earlier and say to her that someone (that she thinks from speaking to her neighbours was a pcso) had reported her stick as offensive. Are we to assume this latest pcso was the same one, returning to speak to her when she saw the sticker wasn’t taken down?

I heard on the news that police are only attending something like a quarter of house burglaries , how does any police force have the time for this??

i think the most upsetting part of this is it’s obvious from the voice recording that this woman was really upset but the pcso kept going.

the “do some reading”/ “educate yourself” is so bloody frustrating. Most people I know who are GC are because they DID the reading!m

Wokingham, though. 😂

My question here would be: what is going wrong in police and PCSO training that these types of individuals are not being weeded out in the early recruitment stage? Or are they being encouraged to police in this way?

Let's imagine the sticker was hideously offensive and used a racial epithet about an ethnic group. In that case, the PCSO should have attended the address, and 1) told the occupier that there had been a complaint about the sticker, 2) then advised the occupier that it was unlawful under whatever section of whatever act, 3) recommended that the sticker be removed, 4) said that if the sticker was not removed, then X action would be taken.

And that's pretty much it. There should be no scope for argument, for the PCSO to express personal feelings, for debate. If something is unlawful, it is unlawful and all that PCSO must do is inform the individual of that and warn them of possible action taken.

This is not what has happened here. What we have here is a PCSO attending an address where nothing unlawful has occurred, attempting to tell an individual that something they have done is unlawful.

I'd need to think about this some more, but it strikes me that, in doing this, in making these arguments to Bella about this issue, this PCSO has strayed into the realm of a legislator. And we don't make law like that in Britain. We don't interpret law like that in Britain.

There's a bad bleed going on here between the fields of legislation and enforcement. And it needs stopping.

God, that poor woman. Bella if you ever get to read this, you were magnificent. Upset, shaken, having to reveal your trauma, and you stood your bloody ground. Along with your superb daughters.

That PCSO has been utterly brainwashed by Stonewall training, and this should light a bloody fire under Truss, Braverman etc. I know they are on the right track with the issues, but they need to stop all the police training, immediately. And replace it. They are allowing their police force to freely intimidate the general public.

But yes, that particular PCSO is a bully and it wouldn't surprise me at all if she hadn't made the initial complaint.

She needs to be asked exactly where she has acquired her belief in not only in what she was talking about, but her belief that she can freely intimidate female members of the general public like that.

Fucking hell. This has to be the end of Stonewall, surely.

Some people are really getting this wrong. It’s not whether she has a licence to be offensive (for any reason). It’s that she doesn’t need one. Unless there is a law that prohibits or mandates something, the state has no power to enforce it. She can be offensive (in the eyes of some) because nobody has passed any law against being offensive. Even if they did, her rights are then guaranteed by the HRA (so the law would be illegal). But there isn’t a law anyway so she doesn’t need to rely on any guarantor of her rights - she simply has them. The PCSO is expressing her own political opinion, and expecting that for reason this can be substituted for law. It can’t.

Bloody hell. Another one who needs reminding of the bloody law.

I also think having volunteers working in the police is dangerous. They aren’t motivated by the desire to make a living, so that means they are more vulnerable to being politically motivated and to not moderating their behaviour surrounding that political motivation. Get rid of them.

Yes.

I see that we x-posted because we are both thinking along the same lines.

My gut says that this has been received as a "community cohesion" complaint and for want of an outcome for the system (a tick, if you like), this PCSO has been despatched to follow it up, and it's all gone very wrong because that PCSO has not been trained correctly in any way.

I have to say: I'm seeing similar kinds of issues all over state systems -- people who don't know, or refuse to accept, what they are legally allowed to do; people who overstep their jurisdiction constantly; people who are operating on misunderstood legislation ... it's a real problem.

Agree. Nothing worse than a pompous, uneducated, useful idiot with a mandate to 'sortof' police.