What insanity by the police

Read the figures released yesterday that show more than 94,000 ‘hate crimes’ were committed over a 12month period and you might imagine they all consisted of cases such as mosques being firebombed or Orthodox Jews being attacked in the street.

Those are, of course, very serious offences that deserve to be treated in the severest way.

at first sight, the statistics seem to suggest a rapidly rising intolerance of Britons towards each other — and give succour to the Government’s proposals to extend the definition of hate crime to include acts of misogyny, contempt towards the elderly and even misandry, or hatred of men.

But I can’t read those figures without remembering the many spurious cases where jokes, rude remarks or roughand-tumble political debate have been recorded as ‘hate crimes’ or ‘hate incidents’.

Ridiculous

Take the Labour MP Barry Sheerman, who recently said that he had reported a proBrexit group to the police for including the hashtag ‘#Fascist’ in a tweet criticising Tory MP anna Soubry for wanting to overturn the Brexit vote. It may be a ridiculous exaggeration — but a hate crime?

There was the case, too, of a Somerset landlady investigated by police for using a Welsh flag as a target in a St George’s day archery competition; and the Scottish man convicted of a hate crime for teaching his pet dog to perform a Nazi salute as a (not at all funny) joke.

Meanwhile, Nottinghamshire Police have been running a pilot scheme in which they treat wolf-whistling as a hate crime. Yes, they have been branding as ‘ hate criminals’ scaffolders who whistle at female passers-by.

That might be boorish, but to try to elevate it to the same level as anti-Semitic rantings or racist abuse is ridiculous.

all it achieves is to dilute genuine hate crimes.

Notionally, we are in the midst of an epidemic of hate crime, in which reported offences have

doubled in the past six years. Yet how can we know the true picture when the figures include trivial incidents that would once have gone unrecorded?

It is hardly any wonder that reported hate crime is exploding when police forces have gone fishing for it — in fact, they even want to hear about minor incidents that don’t qualify as hate crimes.

Last month, for example, South Yorkshire Police tweeted: ‘Please report non-crime hate incidents, which can include things like offensive or insulting comments online, in person or in writing.’

In other words, police chiefs — who are forever moaning about a shortage of resources — are imploring us to ring them up and report that we have been called a ‘ twerp’, or whatever.

Frankly, the police should be spending more time trying to solve serious crimes — especially those that involve a direct physical threat to other citizens.

This week, it was reported one force has been sending letters to suspected paedophiles, politely asking that they desist from their activities. The police say this is because they don’t have enough evidence to charge these people, so they send them a warning to stop what they’re doing.

What lunacy! If the police suspect someone is likely to harm a child, surely they should be pursuing them with the full force of the law and all necessary manpower. Or are too many officers spending their time logging ‘hate crimes’?

Not only that, but this misguided new focus has had the perverse effect of exacerbating community tensions.

In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum in 2016, for example, a smashed glass door at a Spanish restaurant in London was widely quoted as an example of a wave of hatred against foreign nationals — until it was pointed out police were treating it as a burglary.

and, too often, the concept of hate crime is being used as a political tool. Former Home Secretary amber Rudd found this out to her cost two years ago, when her speech to the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham was reported to the police by an Oxford academic who objected to her proposal (soon dropped) that employers should be obliged to compile a list of foreign nationals on their staff.

The matter was investigated by West Midlands Police, who later announced that, while no criminal offence was committed, it had been recorded as a ‘non-crime hate incident’.

Liberal democrat leader Sir Vince Cable was reported to police for a speech in which he claimed that Brexiteers were mostly older people ‘driven by nostalgia for a world where passports were blue [and] faces were white’.

His charge might have been absurd — plenty of young people and ethnic minorities voted for Brexit — but surely it falls within the bounds of robust political debate.

If anyone hoped that the experiences of Rudd and other politicians would have tempered their enthusiasm for expanding the scope of hate crime, they have been bitterly disappointed.

Last month, the Government announced the Law Commission will examine proposals to extend the definition of hate crime to include misogyny and hatred based on the membership of alternative cultures such as goths and punks.

Yes, sneering at Sid Vicious wannabes could, in future, be a criminal offence.

Hostility

Yesterday, the Government went further still, saying that the Law Commission will also consider whether to include misandry, the hatred of men.

But why does the concept of hate crime need to be widened at all? What ministers should be doing is rewording its definition, which was framed by the Crown Prosecution Service and association of Chief Police Officers and identifies a hate crime as ‘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’.

The problem is the word ‘perceived’. That means anyone can interpret a comment or action as a hate crime and police officers are obliged to take it seriously — even when it is clear to the rest of us that the accuser is shouting ‘hate crime’ in order to try to silence a political opponent.

The police are not obliged to treat every insult reported to them as a hate crime, but if it does not reach the threshold of a criminal offence, it still has to be recorded as a ‘hate incident’ — giving the impression that Britain is awash with hate.

Disturbing

That was what happened with amber Rudd’s speech, as well as in the recent case of Boris Johnson’s newspaper column saying that women in burqas looked like ‘ letterboxes’. In the end, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida dick announced that the former Foreign Secretary had not committed a crime.

Naturally, the concept of hate crime does serve some purpose. If someone is caught daubing a Swastika on a synagogue — a troublingly likely event at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise in Britain — the police need to be able to charge them with an offence greater than just spraying graffiti.

Yet, in other cases, it is hard to see why a particular crime should be classified as a hate crime. Is a murder classed as a hate crime really any worse than a murder that isn’t?

The inevitable implication is that murders will end up being treated less seriously in cases where murderer and victim are both of the same race, religion or cultural group.

The promotion of hate crime as a form of offending is part of a disturbing trend in which almost everything comes to be seen through identity politics.

We have endless victims’ groups demanding their own special treatment and trying to pigeonhole us all based on ethnicity, religion, sexuality and so on.

But now that the Government is trying to extend the definition of hate crime further still, it seems, in future, we are all going to become victims.

Maybe that is the point at which the concept of hate crime will become meaningless.