The Chief Constable Who “Wrecked” Essex Police—Exclusive FOI Stats on Speech Crime

JJ STARKEY

Ben-Julian Harrington has served as Chief Constable of Essex Police since 2018, following previous roles as the force’s Deputy Chief and as a senior officer with the Metropolitan Police Service.

On the force’s website, he is described as a “champion” of diversity, equality, and inclusion, and a “firm ally for LGBTQ+ communities.”

Unsurprisingly, under his stewardship, Essex Police appears to have aligned itself closely with progressive ideals—both culturally and operationally. And its record reflects that shift in all the expected ways.

A new FOI request submitted last month by The Brief revealed that Essex Police have made 1,570 arrests under the Online Safety Act alone, since it received Royal Assent in October 2023.

.
That works out to well over one arrest per day—1.4, to be exact—for either knowingly sending “false” or “threatening” communications with the “intent” to cause “non-trivial psychological or physical harm”.

A false communications offence carries a maximum sentence of 51 weeks in prison, a fine, or both. More significantly, it is a summary-only offence—which means the accused loses the right to a jury trial, leaving them at the mercy of possible activist judges and magistrates.

By contrast, a threatening communications offence can result in up to five years in prison, but it does come with the right to a jury trial.

What these figures don’t include, however, is equally revealing.

They exclude arrests under other speech laws—such as Section 19 of the Public Order Act (used against Lucy Connolly), the Malicious Communications Act, and Section 127 of the Communications Act.

In a FOI response from 2021, Essex Police confirmed they made an average of 149 annual arrests under the Malicious Communications Act—a figure they linked in their FOI response.

.
Taken together, the real number of speech-related arrests, whether online or in person, is likely far, far higher than 1.4 per day.

This number far outweighs other forces The Brief has submitted identical FOI requests to over the past few months.

Essex Police is the same police force that, last year, notoriously launched an investigation into Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson over a year-old X post in which she reportedly labelled a group of pro-Palestine protestors as “Jew Haters”.

When officers turned up at Pearson’s door, they reportedly didn’t even tell her which post had triggered the investigation.

All they were said to have told her was that she was being investigated for “stirring up racial hatred” under the Public Order Act 1986—an offence that carries a maximum 7-year prison sentence.

Worse yet, following fierce public backlash, Harrington’s force then escalated the case to a “gold group” level—a designation typically reserved for major incidents like terrorism.

According to the Metropolitan Police Authority, such groups are designed to bring together “qualified stakeholders” to manage “serious incidents”.

The investigation into Pearson was dropped in November 2024. But the force didn’t stop there.

They filed a complaint with the press regulator IPSO—accusing The Telegraph and Pearson of misrepresenting their actions.

It didn’t take long for IPSO to rule their complaint was baseless.

Compare such conduct to other speech-related cases, and the apparent partisanship becomes harder to deny.

In 2022, Harrington and the Essex hierarchy allegedly ousted an employee after they expressed concerns about Black Lives Matter. In 2023, they declined to investigate an imam who called for the “punishment” of Zionists. And later that year, they failed to act after an academic publicly claimed Starmer had worked for “genocidal Jewish supremacists.”

In fact, a 2022 email revealed that the force had previously defended the same imam’s right to free expression after receiving a number of complaints. They even cited Article Nine of the Human Rights Act 1998, which protects the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.

Many would argue that was the correct stance—so long as the imam wasn’t purveying in overt incitement to violence. But when held against Pearson’s case, the double standard becomes all to clear—all to two-tier.

Such is the level of inconsistency we’ve come to expect from our police forces, which perhaps makes more sense once you realise they’ve been inviting previously rejected applicants back into the recruitment process.

Meanwhile, their recent record on material crime has deteriorated.

A 2024 inspection found that while Essex Police had hired extra officers to pursue “high-harm offences” and deployed “dedicated hate crime officers”, they were failing to answer non-emergency calls.

HM Inspectorate of Constabularies found the force had a 15% abandonment rate among callers—three times higher than the national standard of 5%.

So they’re happy policing X posts but have a problem answering the phone.

Last year, new crime data revealed that only 13.35% of offences in Essex were solved in 2023—despite a drop of more than 9,000 reported crimes compared to the previous year.

For other crimes, the solve rate dropped below 10%. For rape, it fell to just 3.5%.

Regional statistics laid bare the true scale. In Rochford, Essex, 63 rapes were reported. Just one was solved. In Brentwood, Essex, there were 69 reports—again, only one solved.

.
Ben-Julian Harrington has, of course, found ample time in recent years to publicly champion Pride campaigns and diversity drives.

In a statement issued in June 2023, he said:

“We serve a brilliant, diverse county and we’re strongest when we represent and understand the communities we serve…

We’re not complacent – we know there is more to be done and we are determined that our force fully reflects the communities we serve. That’s why it’s so important to me that we continue to take part in events like Pride and National Inclusion Week, where we proudly stand together with our colleagues and communities to remind everyone that we support and actively encourage everyone to embrace their most authentic selves.”

In 2021, Harrington ranked hate speech among the greatest threats to Essex—seemingly placing it on par with rape, knife crime, domestic abuse, and child sexual exploitation.

And just months ago, he was pleading with the Labour government for more funding—claiming Essex Police faced a £34 million shortfall for 2025.

So, alongside collapsing response and solve rates and two-tier “hate speech” enforcement, we can add financial mismanagement to the list.

Perhaps if he wasn’t so busy spending time and money on various diversity initiatives, Harrington could have solved more material crime.

Another faithful servant of the College of Policing?

• Do you believe our best days lie ahead?
• Will you keep watching as our politicians and broadcasters push for yet more surveillance, censorship, and control?
• If you want to push back—if not today, maybe someday—supporting independent journalism can (genuinely) make a real impact.
• In the past year, The Stark Naked Brief reached over 110 million people on X. Sometimes, all it takes is one post—one uncomfortable truth—to wake someone up and put another dent in the uniparty’s monopoly.

---

This article (The Chief Constable Who “Wrecked” Essex Police—Exclusive FOI Stats on Speech Crime) was created and published by JJ STARKEY and is republished here under “Fair Use”

Featured image: thurrockgazette.co.uk