Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the police and the CPS prosecute individuals for speech acts in London using The Public Order Act (1986). In this paper language, space and the law intersect in such a way as to criminalize wide swathes of public behavior.

Paper long abstract:

The issue of language - written and spoken - is central to understand how the police and the Crown make use of The Public Order Act to prosecute/control wide swathes of behaviour in diverse public areas. Based on fieldwork in Magistrates' Courts Across London. As Gibbons (1999: 156) has remarked: 'Law is language… it is a profoundly linguistic institution. Laws are coded in language, and the processes of the law are mediated through language.' Language - written and spoken - is central to understand how the police and the Crown use of the Act to prosecute/control wide swathes of behaviour in diverse public areas. I begin by examining 'the language of law' set out in legislation which define an offence and how it is that the police, CPS and courts prosecute this type of offence. Section (ii) looks at the way the public order offences were used by the police, the CPS and the courts in 2017/18. I conclude that the POA provides wide discretion to the authorities to interpret the Act in ways which allow them to successfully prosecute such offences (in large part because little or no independent evidence is required to convict) and because defendants face huge problems in defending their actions (a problem compounded by poor legal representation).