Braverman Tells UK Police to ‘Stick to Catching the Bad Guys,’ Not ‘Pandering to Identity Politics’

Home Secretary Suella Braverman speaking during the Conservative Party annual conference at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham on Oct. 4, 2022. Jacob King/PA Media

The police should go back to “commonsense policing” instead of policing pronouns on Twitter or non-crime hate incidents, Home Secretary Suella Braverman said on Tuesday.

In her first major speech as home secretary, Braverman told the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham that public servants are distracted from “doing their real job” when the “poison [of identity politics] seeps into the public sphere.”

She rejected demands from “many on the left” to defund the police, saying she would always back police men and women. But she also said some officers had “fallen devastatingly short of the standards expected.”

It’s “wrong” for police officers to take the knee, join in with political demonstrations, and for biologically male police officers to strip search female suspects, she said, referring to officers “taking the knee” during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, dancing at a Pride march in Lincolnshire earlier this year, and a Daily Mail report in April that said female suspects could be strip-searched by biological male officers who identify as women.

“It’s not just that pandering to identity politics is a huge waste of time. They need to stick to catching the bad guys,” Braverman said.

Rejecting the claim that political correctness is a “Conservative obsession,” Braverman cited the grooming gang scandals in Rochdale and Telford, saying that is “what happens when political correctness becomes more important than criminal justice.”

“We need to get back to commonsense policing, empowering the police to tackle the issues facing the public, not policing pronouns on Twitter, or ... policing non-crime hate incidents,” Braverman said, adding that she was “very pleased” to see a number of forces promising to attend the scene of every burglary.

She said police can’t ignore neighbourhood crimes such as “drugs, car theft, vandalism, and anti-social behaviour,” and “the system needs to do better” to tackle rape.

Braverman said it’s “right” to publish league tables of forces in England and Wales—a policy proposed by Prime Minister Liz Truss during her leadership campaign—to improve transparency on the forces’ performance in tackling crime and drive up standards.

The prime minister and Braverman want to “see homicide, serious violence, and neighborhood crime fall by 20 percent,” she said.

Police officers detain a protester from Insulate Britain occupying a roundabout leading from the M25 motorway to Heathrow Airport in London on Sept. 27, 2021. Steve Parsons/PA

The home secretary also vowed to be tough on vandalism and riots as seen during some Black Lives Matters protests and “Kill the Bill” protests, and guerilla protests by climate protesters.

“You can’t just start a riot or glue yourself to the roads and get away with it,” she said, adding that the government’s Public Order Bill will empower the police to stop the “nuisance” of statue toppling.

“So whether you’re Just Stop Oil or Insulate Britain, or Extinction Rebellion, you cross the line when you break the law and that’s why we'll keep putting you behind bars,” she said.

Braverman also said the government’s National Security Bill will give law enforcement and intelligence agencies the necessary tools to counter the UK’s “ever more sophisticated adversaries.”

Saying it’s the “highest duties of [the] state” to keep British people safe and secure borders, Braverman also vowed to try to stop illegal immigration across the English Channel and reduce the overall number of immigrants.

Former Prime Minister Theresa May abolished police performance targets in 2010 when she was the home secretary, saying, “targets don’t fight crime; targets hinder the fight against crime.”

May also commissioned a report (pdf) on the use of targets in policing in 2015, which said numerical targets have some problems such as being too crude for complex systems, creating perverse incentives, and having a demoralising effect.