Comment by Kelteseth

Or the Tennessee man held in jail for over a month for a Facebook meme post: https://www.wtae.com/article/tennessee-facebook-post-felony-...

Note: this occurred in the US and not the UK but it happens here, too.

We’re basically seeing this story through media summaries and Richelieu-Booth’s own account, which means the narrative reflects either what he says happened or brief police statements. There’s very little publicly available that allows anyone to independently confirm or contradict either side.

Stories like this are designed to provoke a reaction, but the truth could be far more mundane: he might be a completely unreasonable person who was genuinely stalking someone, and police might have had credible concerns. We simply don’t have the full picture.

For balance, West Yorkshire Police do have a reputation for being heavy handed. the same force that used drones during Covid to shame people walking alone on the moors.

My point is: this isn’t solid evidence of Orwellian decline. It’s difficult to draw sweeping conclusions about Britain from a single case built on incomplete information and media amplification.

This has a bit more info: https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/business/orwellian-nightmare...

Notably:

> with the situation causing him considerable stress at a point where he was also dealing with an inquest into the deaths of his parents, who had both died in a car crash in 2023

so for some reason, there was something going on about his parents' death two years later. The article also states:

> He said the complaint against him was linked to an ongoing business dispute.

My take is that someone used his pictures of him holding guns (illegal in the UK) as support for a claim that he is an armed and dangerous stalker. Whatever got flagged regarding the inquest into his parents' deaths probably added suspicion. Police acted quickly (as they should, but probably too quickly) and made mistakes, but it looks like they couldn't accept that they were being used, so they decided to continue pressing onwards with the investigation, hoping they were still right and wouldn't be on the hook for a false arrest.

Getting falsely arrested is always terrible, but the way the media spins this as some kind of witch hunt about a LinkedIn post is misleading at best.

In many countries you do not get charged with every possible crime if there is a larger crime involve. If someone rob a place, they don't also need to have separate charges for illegally entering the place, destroying property when they broke the window, selling stolen goods, wire fraud for using the banking system, and money laundering for concealing that it is illegal money, and tax evasion. Each step is illegal on their own, but time crime statistics won't be written like that. The prosecutor may argue that if the accused are not found guilty for the primary, then secondaries may then be used.

The strange thing is that the UK are arresting people for abusing the telecom system, and not for the more serious crime like terrorism, death threats, harassment and sexual harassment.

> How did the UK get a point where planning terrorism and making mean comments online go into the same statistic for arrests?

In most publications: because the people reporting on these statistics can get more views and clicks that way. FUD sells. If someone online can defuse the statistics, the reporters that spread them also could've, but chose not to.

As for the second half of the list, "racist abuse, hate speech, and unwanted communication" are pretty common things to incriminate. Even the extremely liberal freedom of speech laws in the USA do not permit stalking ("unwanted communication") and racist abuse is criminalized in all kinds of cases (i.e. firing someone because of their race).

This comment is getting downvoted, but another comment provide a real source for this having happened to someone: https://archive.is/bH56T

... following a police complaint about stalking, against a man involved in a business dispute, seemingly among other things. He may be innocent, but there's more to the story than the picture of the gun.