https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...
> there are several reasons why an arrest may not result in a sentence, such as out-of-court resolutions, but said the “most common is “evidential difficulties””, specifically that the victim does not support taking further action.
As mentioned at the top of the above document, there was a debate in the Lords on 17th July on the topic where many of the participants were pretty scathing about the situation: https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2025-07-17/debates/F807C...
The minister was naturally defensive towards the end, albeit they did say:
> Importantly, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing, at the request of the Home Secretary, are currently undertaking a review of how non-crime hate incidents are dealt with. We expect to see some information from the police on that. It is self-evidently important that some of those incidents help us gather intelligence on potential future crime, but, equally, we do not want the police to do things that waste their time and not focus on the type of crime that the noble Lord rightly mentioned in his introduction.
Well that’s certainly a relief! People are only being _arrested_ for """offensive""" speech, not convicted!
There’s widespread recognition right up to the Lords that this is a shitty situation, dangerous/chilling, and a waste of police time. We all think it's nonsense, and it’s being called out for being nonsense in parliament. Literally no-one, AFAICT, thinks it’s a good thing that arrest numbers are rising for non-criminal speech.
TBH I would hope when the dust settles that more people will get in shit for wasting police time — either reporting non-crimes to the police, or not actually wanting any (further) action taken. Feels like in many cases the “victims” are just playing the system as it (rapidly) develops, to take an online beef offline, rather than totalitarianism. If it were totalitarianism they’d be locking folk up, or at least convicting them of something, but that’s where we came in — those numbers are falling.