A Jewish woman who had volunteered with British police in the Birmingham area has accused the local West Midlands Police of ignoring antisemitic crimes and of firing her when she protested against that, The Telegraph newspaper reported on Friday.
The report coincided with the early retirement of West Midlands Police chief constable, Craig Guildford, over a scandal around his decision to ban Israeli Maccabi fans from a soccer match in November, and the force’s alleged cover-up to justify the move.
Documents that Marina Kaplan shared with The Telegraph, she told the newspaper, show the force had failed to act after a 12-year-old Jewish girl was attacked in June 2024 by a classmate shouting “free Palestine,” leaving her in need of medical attention.
In another case, police declined to intervene after a student in a WhatsApp group chat said he wished Adolf Hitler had done more to kill “the little rats [Jews]”.
Within two months of the alleged attack on the 12-year-old, the family left Birmingham, having lost faith in the school and the police, according to The Telegraph.
“It cost a lot of money. It took a lot of nerves. But we had to leave the town,” The Telegraph quoted the girl’s mother as saying. She declined to be quoted by name.
The incident involving the WhatsApp messages was from May 16, 2021. The mother of a Jewish boy reported comments she had read in a student WhatsApp chat to police, the newspaper reported. He also said he wanted to “miss school” to “go to Palestine” and “f---ing ruin em [the Jews]”, while warning his friends that Instagram is “owned by Jews”.
Kaplan, a former police associate staff recruit who volunteered at West Midlands police between May 2021 and June 2024, urged police to take action but the Prevent unit responded that “policing has no role to play” as it was a school matter, the report said.
In 2024, Kaplan flagged rhetoric in a far-left publication she said amounted to justifying Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel. Doing so is illegal in the United Kingdom, where Hamas is considered a terrorist organization. But, she said, police did nothing.
In recent years, police and prosecutors in the United Kingdom have cracked down on what they consider hate speech, including against transsexuals.
Kaplan told The Telegraph that she was dismissed from her voluntary role in July 2024. “No reason was provided for my discharge,” she said.
A spokesman for West Midlands Police disputed this narrative, stating that Kaplan had left “by mutual agreement.”
A spokesman for West Midlands Police told The Telegraph that the force will “never tolerate any form of hate crime.” Staff “treat everyone equally whatever their race, sexual orientation, disability, faith, age or gender,” the spokesperson said.
A Home Office spokesman told the newspaper: “There is no place for anti-Semitism in our country and we expect police to thoroughly investigate all threats to Jewish communities.”
