London cop Benjamin Hannam, 22, is the first British police officer to be convicted of a terrorism offence: membership of National Action, a neo-Nazi gang banned after it endorsed political assassinations and racial killings. Hannam was found guilty April 1 of joining the white supremacist group, of fraud for lying on his police application, and of "possessing documents useful to a terrorist." He was today sentenced to four years and four months imprisonment.
Judge Anthony Leonard QC said the offences were so serious that only a custodial term was appropriate.
He said the nature of anti-Semitic material held by Hannam was "horrible and deeply troubling".
Another conviction was for possessing cartoons depicting sexualized children:
Hannam pleaded guilty to one count of possessing prohibited images of children, details of which were read out during the sentencing. When his home was searched by detectives last year, his computer was found to contain a folder of "anime cartoons" of children and young people Hannam had downloaded. Prosecutor Dan Pawson-Pounds said: "Although most of the files in this folder did not show any sexual acts, there was a series of 12 drawings of the same hand-drawn girl, who appeared to be eight or nine years old, engaged in acts of intercourse."
Mr Pawson-Pounds said that aggravating features in relation to the prohibited images included the age of the child depicted, and the fact she looked distressed in some images and was wearing a school uniform.
Hannam was collared after anti-fascist activists leaked the membership of an online neo-Nazi forum.
It struck me that the things Hannam was convicted of would not likely have attracted charges in the U.S. Not far-right associations, possession of "terrorist" literature (Hannam possessed guides to knife fighting and mass-murderer Anders Breivik's manifesto) or possession of drawings depicting sexualized children. This appears to be the U.K's second "anime CP" conviction after its ban there in 2009; Robul Hoque was convicted of possessing up to 400 explicit images involving fictional children in 2014.
Lying on applications to public office is illegal in the U.S., but rarely becomes a problem for those that do it and is, apparently, difficult to prosecute.
In the U.S., though, perhaps they'd have charged Hannam with vandalism over this photo of him tagging a wall—something prosecutors in the U.K. seem to have been uninterested in—and gotten him a custodial sentence anyway.
