Lost property no longer a matter for the modern police officer

I have a lovely old watch given to me by my Dad. It comes out on special occasions, has an oldfashioned clockwork mechanism and needs to be wound up every day. Like licking the back of a stamp or collecting the foil tops from milk bottles, winding a watch is something few people under 30 have ever done. It did not cost my Dad a lot of money. Truth is, he found it.

It was years ago, outside the country churchyard where my Granny is buried and, like the good citizen he is, he took it to the police station where they recorded the details and put it in a locked drawer. Dad thought no more about it – but popped back six months or so later and found, to his delight, no one had claimed it. Under the rules at the time, it was his! He took it to a local jewellers, who sent it away to be refurbished – for more than the price of a very nice modern digital watch, as it happens – and passed it on to me one Christmas. I now wear it whenever I am invited to a posh do. It will outlive me and probably my children too... unless I were to lose it.

But the problem is, if it did drop from my wrist, as it did for a previous owner, I would have very little chance of getting it back. If another finder took it to the local police station, always may not be hate crimes directed at old people and men. Yesterday, the Home Office asked the Law Commission to look into whether crimes driven by hate and purely based on the gender or age of those they are directed at, ought to be reclassified. Hate crimes, in case you are hazy on the details, are those motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a personal characteristic. As part of the crackdown, taxi drivers and door staff are being given guidance on how to spot such offences being committed, presumably to assist the police in their inquiries, should a complaint be made.

I am certainly not going to argue that being unable to visit the police station in the hope that someone has found your lost watch is as important as tackling severe prejudice that results in anyone feeling bullied, threatened or at risk of harm because of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or disability. That is clearly wrong. It always has been and the law may have been slow to catch up.

But how far does it need to go? And how much time do we want our police officers to spend sorting between the throwaway remark and the genuinely hateful? If the review classifies “men” and “old people” as groups capable of being victims of hate crime on the basis on their gender or age, watch out for other basic police services disappearing through lack of time and resources. Oh, and hang on to your watch.

Should ‘men’ and ‘old people’ be groups that can be hate crime victims?