Lisa Townsend is the Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner for Surrey.
I will not be alone in finding it appropriate that the new Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act – the brainchild of the Scottish National Party – came into effect on April Fool’s Day.
To be clear, a person who intentionally seeks to cause real hurt to another based on their skin colour, religion, disability, or other protected characteristic deserves to have a knock on their front door from the local constabulary. As history shows us, perpetrators of such hate crimes far too frequently go beyond using words as weapons. The law provides for this type of crime.
Where it is more prone to the fads of identity politics is in the legislating for and recording of non-crime hate incidents (NCHI). I have written about NCHIs before and, in the interests of full disclosure, have myself been reported for committing this non-crime when I dared to suggest that a woman is an adult human female.
The intention behind NCHIs was a noble one. This is often the case with laws with unintended consequences. Following the horrific murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 the subsequent inquiry called for a system of reporting “all racist crimes and incidents” in a way that would allow police to detect and hopefully prevent such incidents from occurring again.
This list was later expanded to include all the protected characteristics covered by hate crime laws. This includes sexual orientation, age, and gender reassignment (a hotly debated term).
So it followed that the police would record all NCHIs – not just those that were racist. Of course, the role of police is not just to record crime (or, in this case, non-crime) but to investigate too, to determine whether a crime (or non-crime) has been committed and warrants further action.
The taking of offence is often subjective. I remember when, 8 years old and newly arrived from Ireland in a nice Hertfordshire town, I was bullied mercilessly by the other kids in my class for my thick, southern Irish accent. I grew up knowing that “…but words will never hurt me”.
Of course, they do hurt, but my parents had the sense to instill resilience and a strong sense of self in me. I’m sure it’s why I have no problem now laughing at the Twitter trolls who call me Tory scum. Bullies are bullies, regardless of how old they are. It would have been ridiculous to report the trolls or my 8-year-old tormentors to the police.
While I admire Humza Yousaf’s desire to take a “zero tolerance” approach to “stirring up hatred”, as with so many noble aims, and despite three years in the making, his new law has been not just criticised, but roundly mocked, including by JK Rowling.
So when should the police get involved and how far should they investigate? And who decides?
One of the statutory duties of a Police and Crime Commissioner is to review complaints about the police force when the complainant is unhappy with the outcome of the force’s own professional standards department finding. The complaints vary enormously, from the serious to the trivial.
One that had me reading in disbelief recently was from a gentleman who took great offence to the ‘hate’ in the Torah and the Talmud, the Jewish holy texts. Not words that had been written about the texts, about Jews or their faith, but about the texts themselves which, in the Torah’s case, date back a good few hundred years before the birth of Christ.
The officer tasked with investigating pointed out that it would not be reasonable or proportionate to investigate this as a crime. The complainant believed that a public order offence had been committed, as well as the call for the slavery and genocide of white Christians, and instead determined that the report was of a NCHI that did not warrant further police time.
When the gentleman complained that the police were not investigating his allegations it was suggested that, given he had admitted that he had specifically looked up the texts online (and found over 115 million results) he should perhaps refrain from reading content that he found offended him.
The complainant remains unhappy with the outcome, but I stand by the decision taken by officers. If only all outcomes regarding ‘offensive material’ were as sensible as this advice from Surrey Police. But it cannot be right that many hours of police time went into this.
The SNP’s new hate laws aren’t just leading to mockery on Twitter and derision from Conservatives. They have a very real-world effect on crime – and not in reducing it. Six thousand reports were made to Police Scotland under the new legislation in the first week of April.
As the head of the Scottish Police Federation said, less than 1 per cent will result in a hate crime investigation. But every one will first have to be looked at by someone who could better use their time investigating reports of anti-social behaviour, criminal damage, burglary, rape, and other crimes.
The SNP minister for communities has admitted that she didn’t know whether ‘misgendering’ would come under the Act, and that it was for police to determine. If the ministers who pushed for this law don’t know their intentions on what should constitute a crime, how do they expect the police to? I’m a huge advocate of the police, but I don’t want them determining what Parliament’s intention was when they drafted a law – that leads to a very different kind of state.
Once again, it is time to get back to the basics of what people want from their police – to investigate, detect, and solve real crimes, not hurt feelings.
The post Lisa Townsend: The SNP’s new hate crime law is a wasting police time appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Lisa Townsend
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