Ross Clark
most, which he said was sexual offences.
Obviously, sexual offences are extremely important – or at least those involving something more serious than accusations that a long-dead celebrity once put his hand on someone’s knee. But when did the police stop bothering with fraud?
Meanwhile, I see from their social media feeds that Devon and Cornwall Police’s Diverse Communities Team has plenty to keep it busy. It held one event in Plymouth to publicise its #zerotolerance2hate campaign, involving Romanian folk dancing and pebble painting. As it happened, I managed to get my bank to reverse the payment to the hotel. But – as I explained to the police – if they bothered to investigate a business which is systematically defrauding people they might well find a money laundering operation, a front for the drugs trade or other organised crime.
That is how zero tolerance worked to bring down violent crime in New York in the 1990s. Police started investigating minor thefts and found it often led them to criminal gangs. Instead, some police in Britain seem to have a different attitude towards zero tolerance – using it to crack down on the likes of wolf-whistlers.
Sara Thornton’s remarks are timely because the Government
THE new obsession with hate crime is about something very different. It is trying to take very minor incidents of rudeness and blow them up into serious offences.
The concept of hate crime is being used as a political tool – such as by the Oxford academic who reported the then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd for a hate crime in her 2016 speech to the Tory party conference, for proposing ways of reducing migration. West Midlands Police had to investigate and, while they concluded no crime had been committed, they nevertheless had to record it as a non-crime hate incident.
The problem is the catch-all definition used for hate crime – “any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic” – is an open invitation for anyone to report someone they don’t like as a hate criminal. Surely it should be defined as anything that a reasonable person would think of as a hate crime.
I know many police forces feel they have unfairly taken the brunt of recent financial cuts. They have a case.
Even while declaring an end to austerity in his Budget, Chancellor Philip Hammond cut the Home Office budget by £100million.
But refusing to investigate burglary, theft and fraud in order to prioritise the investigation of fashionable noncrimes, such as people being a little rude to each other, is not going to help make the country safe.
Hopefully, the Government and other police chiefs will take Sara Thornton seriously.
‘When did police stop investigating fraud?’