SO WHY DO OUR BOBBIES HAVE TO PROBE THESE SO-CALLED CRIMES?
FIGURES released this year showed 30 forces dealt with 11,236 ‘hate incidents’ in 2015-16 – the equivalent of one every half an hour, if replicated across the country. As police vent their frustration at being unable to adequately tackle violent crime, consider the incidents they were obliged to investigate: MINISTER’S SPEECH: Amber Rudd’s address to the Tory party conference as home secretary last year was probed as a hate incident following a complaint by an academic.
Miss Rudd set out measures to reduce immigration in her conference speech in Birmingham. Joshua Silver, a physics professor at the University of Oxford, reported it as a hate crime over its antiimmigration message – although he admitted he had not actually watched it.
West Midlands Police confirmed officers had investigated but found no evidence a crime had been committed. It said it would be recorded as a ‘non-crime hate incident’ in accordance with guidelines. WOLF WHISTLES: Poppy Smart, then 23, said she was running the gauntlet of ‘disrespectful’ builders for a month on her walk to work. She compared the wolf-whistling to racial discrimination and said it made her journey in Worcester’s city centre an ‘awful experience’. She filmed the men on her mobile phone and passed the evidence to police in 2015, who investigated on the basis that an offence of harassment or public disorder may have been committed. West Mercia Police took no further action after speaking to the building firm’s boss. CHURCH’S HELL WARNING: A church was ordered to remove a poster suggesting non-Christians would burn in Hell. Police investigated after a local complained the church was trying to ‘scare’ people into attending.
Pastor John Rose, 9, had pinned the poster outside Attleborough Baptist Church in Norfolk. It featured a picture of burning flames and the slogan: ‘If you think there is no God, you’d better be right!!’ Mr Rose said he regretted that the poster could have been interpreted as inciting religious hatred. A police spokesman said the force had followed national guidelines, and recorded the poster as a ‘hate incident’ after concluding no criminal offence was committed. SUGAR’S TWEET: Lord Sugar was investigated by police after he was accused of posting a racist message on Twitter.
The tycoon posted a photograph of a crying Chinese child and joked they were ‘upset because he was told off for leaving the production line of the iPhone’.
Shop owner Nichola Szeto, from Liverpool, was offended by the reference to factories in Asia that produce Apple’s phones, and complained to police. The 2013 message was investigated by Merseyside Police’s specialist hate crime investigation team, who decided it should
be classed as a ‘hate incident’ although no crime had taken place. TRANSGENDER COMPLAINT: Five police officers, including one on horseback, confronted three campaigners handing out flyers raising concerns about transgender rights.
The activists, leafleting outside the Green Party conference in Bristol earlier this month, feared trans rights would come at the expense of those for women. They said the complaint to police was made by a transgender rights activist.
Avon and Somerset Police said officers were called following a complaint but ‘quickly established’ it was a peaceful protest and that no crime had been committed. The women were allowed to carry on.