Kent Police arrested 2,063 people over the content of messages, posts and calls in five years. In the same period the force brought 261 charges, which is close to eight arrests for every one.
Kent Police arrested 2,063 people over the content of messages, social media posts and phone calls in the five years to the end of December 2025, figures released to the campaign group Big Brother Watch under freedom of information law show. In the same period the force brought 261 charges.
That is close to eight arrests for every charge. Across the UK the average was 3.4. Kent’s arrest rate per head, 10.7 arrests per 10,000 residents, is almost exactly the national figure of 10.5, so the force is not making unusually many of these arrests for the size of its population. It is turning far fewer of them into charges than most forces are.
What the figures cover
The numbers come from Britain’s Free Speech Problem, published on 6 September by Big Brother Watch, which sent freedom of information requests to all 45 territorial police forces in the UK and asked how many people they had arrested and charged for three communications offences between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2025.
The three offences are section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, which covers sending an indecent or grossly offensive letter or electronic message intended to cause distress or anxiety; section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which covers sending a grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing message over a public electronic communications network, or persistently using such a network to cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety; and section 179 of the Online Safety Act 2023, the false communications offence created in 2023. The Communications Act and Online Safety Act offences can only be heard in a magistrates’ court and carry a maximum of six months.
Kent Police answered in full for the whole five years. Police Scotland, Lancashire and West Mercia refused on cost grounds, Dyfed-Powys refused for 2021 to 2023, and three more forces held only partial data, so the UK total of at least 62,199 arrests is an undercount. Big Brother Watch estimates the real figure at around 73,000 if the missing forces arrested at the national average rate.
Nearly eight arrests for every charge
Of the 40 forces that supplied charge data and brought at least one charge, Kent has the seventh highest number of arrests for each charge. Only West Yorkshire, Sussex, Thames Valley, West Midlands, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire arrested more people per charge brought.
| Force | Arrests | Charges | Arrests per charge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kent | 2,063 | 261 | 7.9 |
| Sussex | 1,970 | 184 | 10.7 |
| Surrey | 212 | 32 | 6.6 |
| Essex | 3,776 | 1,372 | 2.8 |
| Metropolitan Police | 9,932 | 4,936 | 2.0 |
| UK total | 62,199 | 18,520 | 3.4 |
An arrest is not the only way for police to deal with an allegation. Code G of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act codes says an arrest must be necessary, and that it is not necessary where a voluntary interview is a practicable alternative. For offences that can only be tried in a magistrates’ court, the report argues, many people could be interviewed under caution instead of arrested. A high number of arrests for each charge, it says, suggests arrests that did not meet the threshold for prosecution.
The gap between forces
The report’s central finding is how differently the same three laws are used around the country. Cumbria Constabulary arrested 25.7 people per 10,000 residents over the five years, the highest rate in the UK. Northumbria, its neighbour, arrested 1.9 per 10,000, roughly a fourteenth of the rate. Lincolnshire Police recorded 590 arrests and no charges at all.
Big Brother Watch calls the pattern a postcode lottery and blames what it describes as the elasticity of vaguely defined speech offences in UK law.
What the figures do not show
The arrest and charge counts cover the same five years but they are not a matched set. Someone arrested in late 2025 may have been charged in 2026, and a charge recorded in 2021 may follow an arrest made in 2020, so the ratio describes how a force uses the two powers rather than the fate of any particular case.
The data also says nothing about the seriousness of what was alleged. Big Brother Watch accepts that a proportion of the arrests will have been necessary, including police intervening to stop threatening messages in domestic abuse cases. The three offences cover threats and sustained harassment as well as jokes and insults, and the FOI figures do not separate them.
Two claims circulating alongside the report do not survive a check against it. The report contains no case of anyone arrested for viewing a TikTok video: the TikTok case it sets out, at pages 60 to 62, concerns a teenager in the West Midlands who was not arrested. Officers attended her home, sought her phone and warned that she could be arrested, and she attended a voluntary interview the next day. The investigation ended with no further action against her.
The claim that only one in five of those arrested are convicted is also unsafe. There were 12,292 convictions for the three offences over the period, but that figure comes from Home Office court data covering England and Wales only, while the arrest figure is UK-wide and drawn from police records. The report says at page 56 that the two cannot be treated as the beginning and end of a single pipeline.
The report’s own appendix carries two slips that anyone checking the tables will hit. The arrests total is printed as 62,119 where the column adds up to 62,199, the figure used throughout the rest of the report, and Thames Valley’s rate is printed as 154.07 arrests per 10,000 where the arithmetic gives 14.07.
What the campaigners want
Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “Thousands of people are being arrested for non-violent protest, controversial speech and online jokes. People have even been arrested for holding blank pieces of paper, whilst police visited a TV presenter’s home under the Online Safety Act to urge her to take an ‘online thinking skills’ course following her posts opposing animal testing labs. Enough is enough.”
She added: “We want the Government to restore Britain’s long and proud tradition of upholding freedom of speech. That must start with a close look at how our laws are working in practice and a willingness to reform.”
The report makes a single recommendation: “The Government should commission an independent national review of laws affecting freedom of speech and the overall health of freedom of expression in the UK.”
What Kent Police say
Kent Local News put the Kent figures to Kent Police on 7 September and asked why the force records close to eight arrests for every charge, more than twice the national rate; whether it monitors how often communications-offence arrests result in a charge; and in what circumstances it arrests rather than invites a voluntary interview for an offence that can only be tried in a magistrates’ court. The force had not responded by the time of publication. Any response received will be added in full.