IT’S refreshing to hear a senior police officer, Sara Thornton, suggest that there are some things that the police shouldn’t do. At the annual conference of the National Police Chiefs Council, which she chairs, she questioned whether forces should concentrate on recording instances of misogyny which are not themselves criminal, rather than solving burglaries and murders and getting muggers off the streets.

This, you may be surprised to learn, is controversial stuff. It flies in the face of the attitude, recently exemplified by forces such as South Yorkshire and the Greater Glasgow division of Police Scotland, that one function of policing is to issue stern warnings on Twitter to the effect that saying anything unpleasant, whether or not it is against the law, will result in a visit from the boys in blue. And furthermore that, if any general rudeness or horribleness isn’t against the law, then it bloody well ought to be.

Immediate criticism of Chief Constable Thornton took that approach. For example, the chief executive of the Fawcett Society, Sam Smethers, said that “abuse and harassment aimed at women, because they are women, should be taken seriously for what it is – a hate crime”.

The trouble is that it’s not, which is something Ms Smethers knows, because her organisation is campaigning for it to become one. As Chief Constable Thornton later told reporters: “I’m not saying that misogyny is not an issue. What I’m saying is, is recording it as a crime necessarily the best way to reduce that, to have a criminal justice solution to an issue which is about the way people behave and treat each other?”

This statement is more interesting than the focus of many of the reports of her speech, where her central point was not that misogyny was none of the police’s business, but that, as she put it, the public would prefer them to “solve more burglaries and bear down on violence before we make more records of incidents that are not crimes”.

To which the only sane response, you may think, is “duh”. Knowing that, when some members of the police and some campaigning organisations object, they don’t do so by disputing that “core” police activities should be subordinate to the focus on minor crimes, or things which aren’t crimes, but usually make different arguments.

Chief Constable Thornton made the first; that the police need to choose their priorities. But that implies that, in a perfect world, they’d tackle the other issues too. Indeed, she said that they were not “bad things to do necessarily. They just cannot be priorities for a service that is overstretched.”

That chimes with the natural tendency of the constabulary – which, to be fair, they share with most large organisations – to feel that more things ought to fall within their remit, and they ought to be given more resources to deal with them. There’s also the no-doubt-unworthy suspicion that some police officers prefer to do easy things, like arrest people for things they write online, rather than hard ones, like solve burglaries and muggings.

Another argument, that those who wish to extend the law tend to make, is either that attitudes and behaviour that are not currently criminal are intricately tied up with the causes of crime, disorder, incivilities and other undesirable social wrongs, or that they are so unpleasant in themselves that they should be outlawed.

It seems intuitively likely that people who are misogynistic or racist will be more likely to commit crimes motivated by such attitudes. But it takes us into the realm of George Orwell’s “thoughtcrime” or Philip K Dick’s “precrime”: what do we do if it turns out, as is almost certainly the case, that most people with unpleasant prejudices don’t, for example, vandalise mosques, translate abusive language into domestic violence, or beat up homosexuals in the street?

This is the question Chief Constable Thornton was raising after her speech. Is it wise to extend the criminal law to cover any and all cases of offensive speech and behaviour, from sectarian songs at football matches to jokes about the English?

And what is central in that debate is not the degree to which you think the speech or attitudes are offensive, even if that is the assumption behind some current legislation. It’s possible to dislike and indeed condemn in the strongest possible terms all kinds of speech without implying that it ought to be a matter for the courts.

It’s possible, too, to believe that the criminal justice system should not concern itself with such matters on a number of different grounds. The first is the absolutist principle that free speech necessarily entails the right to offend. Another is the related but more practical consideration that it is dangerous to give anyone, even elected governments and the police, the right to decide which forms of speech are permissible.

A yet more practical objection is the certainty – already demonstrated by the experience of Paul Chambers, who made a silly joke about blowing up Robin Hood Airport on Twitter – that quite ridiculous cases will come before the courts. And all of this before we even get to the questions of what, in practice, we would like the police to concentrate on, how much we think we can expect of them, and to what degree we would like to live in a world where every attitude of which someone disapproved were monitored by the law.

There have been substantial and welcome shifts in social attitudes towards all sorts of prejudices that were once commonplace but are now regarded as socially unacceptable. But it’s not clear that they have been driven, or even in some cases helped, by legislation – especially since offensive behaviour which most of us would regard as sufficiently serious to require police intervention could always have been dealt with under the general laws that apply to public order.

It may be a good thing if we feel that there is no place in polite society for those who express unpleasant views, but they can’t simply be any views we ourselves don’t happen to hold. And the best means of dealing with them are social – disapproval, shaming, ostracisation, and so on. They are a matter for polite society, not the police. Even when almost everybody agrees on what is offensive, it’s no kind of an argument for making it an offence.