alt Hacker News> These arrests include those arrested for terrorism (if the planning/act of terror includes any online communication in the UK), threats of violence, racist abuse, hate speech and unwanted communication
All of these attempts to "debunk" this statistic feel like they're missing the mark. How did the UK get a point where planning terrorism and making mean comments online go into the same statistic for arrests? Does it not seem strange that the second half of that list is worthy of arrest?
> If you look at convictions, only 137 people were actually sentenced in 2024.
This, again, does not help. Being arrested isn't a casual thing. It threatens everything from your job to your reputation and your relationships, even if you aren't convicted.
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> How did the UK get a point where planning terrorism and making mean comments online go into the same statistic for arrests?
In most publications: because the people reporting on these statistics can get more views and clicks that way. FUD sells. If someone online can defuse the statistics, the reporters that spread them also could've, but chose not to.
As for the second half of the list, "racist abuse, hate speech, and unwanted communication" are pretty common things to incriminate. Even the extremely liberal freedom of speech laws in the USA do not permit stalking ("unwanted communication") and racist abuse is criminalized in all kinds of cases (i.e. firing someone because of their race).
In many countries you do not get charged with every possible crime if there is a larger crime involve. If someone rob a place, they don't also need to have separate charges for illegally entering the place, destroying property when they broke the window, selling stolen goods, wire fraud for using the banking system, and money laundering for concealing that it is illegal money, and tax evasion. Each step is illegal on their own, but time crime statistics won't be written like that. The prosecutor may argue that if the accused are not found guilty for the primary, then secondaries may then be used.
The strange thing is that the UK are arresting people for abusing the telecom system, and not for the more serious crime like terrorism, death threats, harassment and sexual harassment.