West Yorkshire Police arrested a British business owner over a picture he posted on social media of himself holding a gun in the United States.
IT contractor Jon Richelieu-Booth told the Yorkshire Post that in August, he posted a picture on the networking site LinkedIn of himself holding a shotgun at a friend’s homestead in Florida. He was visited by local police, who warned him about the post and told him to be “careful” about what he says online and “how it makes people feel.”
Eleven days after the post, West Yorkshire Police officers returned and arrested Richelieu-Booth over allegedly possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence and a charge of alleged stalking over another picture of a house on his profile.
Unlike in the United States, where gun ownership is protected by the Second Amendment, Britain has some of the strictest gun control laws in the Western world, with outright bans on many types of firearms and rigorous licensing requirements for those permitted.
When he attempted to show the police force the geolocation data of the picture with the firearm to prove that it was taken in the United States, police reportedly replied that it was “not necessary”.
Richelieu-Booth said that over the next four months, he was visited multiple times by police, before the Crown Prosecution Service ultimately dropped the case over a lack of “enough evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction”.
“I’ve always believed in truth and justice and stood up for the police and believed they are doing an important job of keeping order. Now I have no faith in the police,” he said. “I see a lot of parallels with the Graham Linehan case. This is 1984 writ large.”
According to The Telegraph, Mr Richelieu-Booth has been charged with a public order offence over another post on social media. However, he said hat he has yet to be told what the contents of the post were.
He said that he plans on filing a case against the police force for the “13 weeks of hell” they put him through and said that he plans on “seeking quite a lot of damages.”
Commenting on the case, a West Yorkshire Police spokesman said: “Police received a complaint of stalking involving serious alarm or distress, relating partly to social media posts, several of which included pictures of a male posing with a variety of firearms which the complainant took to be a threat.
“Police investigated and charged a man with a public order offence but the case was then discontinued by the CPS.”
The Times of London reported in April that police are making around 12,000 arrests per year over supposedly offensive posts made online, or an average of 30 per day.
Earlier this month, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said that police should not be spending their time arresting people over social media posts, in the wake of the arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan in London over posts critical of transgenderism.
“Clearly there have been egregious examples of disproportionate arrests. When necessary, we will legislate to clarify what is inside and outside the law. But we must also be honest: some of these recent arrests raise questions around police decision-making,” Mahmood said.
“The public rightly expects that we police our streets. There is most certainly criminality online. Some things cannot be legally tweeted just as they cannot be legally said. But we should not be policing perfectly legal language in any individual’s tweets.”
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