Why are the police wasting time arresting Twitter transphobes when they could be tackling knife crime?

If you have wondered what it takes to get arrested these days then let me tell you about the fate of Kate Scottow, 38, a mother of two from Hitchin in Hertfordshire. On December 1 last year three police officers – three – came to her home and arrested her in front of her kids, one of whom is still a baby. They took her to the local nick and if reports are to be believed – and the Hertfordshire police have certainly not contradicted them – they detained her for seven hours in the cells. They confiscated her laptop and her mobile phone, neither of which has been returned. And what was her crime? She is said to have insulted a transgender woman. She called her a man. Over the internet. On Twitter.

Now I hold no particular brief for Kate Scottow. It appears that, like many other people on Twitter, she is unbridled in her tongue. It would seem, furthermore, that her attitude towards transgender people is antediluvian and offensive – but if, and only if, you can be bothered to read her tweets, and if and only if you can be bothered to take offence.

When they read the story of Kate Scottow, I believe most people would indeed be outraged, but not primarily at the content of her tweets. Of course we care for anyone whose feelings are bruised, but we aren’t focussing on that. We are thinking about the three police officers, the custody suite that was occupied for seven hours, the witness statements, the court proceedings – the considerable expenditure of public money on what would seem to be a silly (if nasty) Twitter spat; and we think about that peculiar abuse of manpower and police facilities when we learn that in the last couple of days the NHS has reported a 54 per cent increase in stabbings, and when there seems to be a new and tragic incident of knife crime reported virtually every day.

Is this really the right way to fight crime? Is this what our brave police officers signed up to do? Are you really telling me that it is a sensible ordering of priorities to round up Twitter-borne transphobes and chuck them in the clink, when violence on the streets would seem to be getting out of control?