Pc Brigade wasting police time

Thanks Choochoothepanda. Yes it was hate incidents I was interested in. Maybe then, being active in dealing with these is more to do with PR and to get inclusiveness points

Nope, it's to do with HMIC. If it's not done forces fail inspections. It's all mandated.

Most sane people already knew this - just a shame it took this long for the police to realise they were wasting time on "hurt feelings" instead of focusing on actual crimes

You do realise the rank and file have known this for a very long time?

Everyone above the rank of inspector is in the "politician ranks" They keep their mouths firmly shut until they see which way the wind blows. Having opinions and integrity is known to get in the way of their QPM....

Most sane people already knew this - just a shame it took this long for the police to realise they were wasting time on "hurt feelings" instead of focusing on actual crimes

And yes, that 'lady' is a councillor and going bald....

West Midlands Police certainly didn't get the memo....

(for balance, however, Thames Valley police in recent days were utterly fantastic when I reported a sexual assault to them last year. I cannot rate their Specially Trained Officers highly enough).

"I've seen far too many stories where the police haven't bothered to look for child rape victims who went missing."

Such as in Thames Valley, where an Oxford peadophile ring ran rampant on Sara Thornton's watch?

Heard this story earlier on 5 Live and was slightly to hear the presenter mention misandry in the same breath as misogyny. Is misandry really such a problem that the police have to deal with it? It struck me as the BBC forcing 'balance' when there is really no need.

Interestingly, the Chief Officer mentioned the policing of 'gender' as being a waste of time.

I'll second that and add that it's not only a waste of time but a pretext for persecuting women.

Chief Officers nowaday have inherited a system that was put in place long before social media, and long before online reporting. Publicity material, initiatives and resources for campaigns around 'hate' and 'bullying' can be got for free from sponsors, without dipping into the police budget.

The Home Office allows them no discretion, because of the continuing suspicion around institutionalised racism and homophobia in policing.

So they are stuffed - overwhelming demand and a Home Office that digs its heels in, telling the police that 'hate' incidents are priority incidents. This is a political confrontation between the police, the government and its useless Home Office.

I agree with Chief Officers who say that there is no need for a 'hate crime' motivated by misogny. It's going to fail, because it's too nebulous a term to prove beyond reasonable doubt.

Instead, I would like to see a simple addition to sentencing guidelines for judges and magistrates. In cases where a man assaults, threatens, stalks etc a woman, there should be an automatic 'uplift' to the sentence (ie longer sentences).

That can't be too hard can it?

What I'm not keen on at all is this reporting and collating of "hate incidents" that do not amount to crimes by the police. This recording is based entirely on the perception of the victim and has nothing to do with any evidenced motive on the part of the perpetrator. It encourages vexatious reporting and it doesn't measure levels of actual hatred at all.
Agreed.
I think the timing isn't great here. Misogyny was being mooted as the next hate crime, it isn't one now but let's face it, it covers a majority group rather than minority! Probably why it was mentioned, because it's current and topical.
Harassment and stalking and assault and sexual assault etc as mentioned earlier are already treated as crimes. Nobody has suggested threats from ex partners come under the same category as being misgendered.
I think it's a positive message, she's saying to focus on crime and not hurt feelings. (I didn't consider that to be throwing women under a bus because we report actual crime).
Lazy news reporting is half the battle. You can't report on "a surge in islamophobic hate crime" and not mention all your stats come from a self reporting website that anyone could add false reports to, for example to show "a surge in islamophobic hate crime". If there is an increase in assaults, or breaches of the peace, or criminal damage and there's a hate crime element to it, that shows more clearly that we have a problem.
My preference would be for better police funding, but in the interim this is a positive message, in my opinion.

I’m just trying to work put what was meant by that - do you know anyone who logs with the police that they were whistled at by a builder? Where are those cohorts of women logging non-crimes? So what is according to the police a misogy crime?

I honestly think the logging, reporting and publicising of hate incidents is just the police version of virtue signalling. Look at the amount of time forces spend on social media with it. It takes up time and resources that could be better spent elsewhere (like on risk factors associated with stalking by ex partners) - but it's simultaneously a lot cheaper than investigating and prosecuting actual crime.

The police are having a dig at the civil servants in the Home office, who took away their discretion and said that ALL reports, no matter how senseless, perverse, vexatious and malignant had to be investigated.

Women reporting risk from ex-partners is not the same thing as woman logging a wolf whistling incident by a complete stranger or a trans person logging a misgendering incident by a complete stranger.

No, exactly.

It's a pity the emphasis wasn't 'police should focus on domestic violence not verbal misogyny' - something like that. Or violent crime vs 'thoughtcrime'.

Garside seems to have been interviewed on a fair number of news outlets about this story but it seems that none of us caught him.

I see he RT'd Joan Smith's useful comment:

The police need more resources, no argument about that. What’s extraordinary is that we appear to be debating whether they should investigate men who harass & threaten half the population - often a first sign of more dangerous behaviour.

twitter.com/polblonde/status/1058269704798826496

In her responses is a New Statesman link to an on-point article: Overstretched police? The answer is more funding, not downplaying misogynistic hate crime
The problem is, when you decide which crimes are less worthy of resources, it seems to be women and the vulnerable who lose out

www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2018/11/overstretched-police-answer-more-funding-not-downplaying-misogynistic-hate

Thanks Choochoothepanda. Yes it was hate incidents I was interested in. Maybe then, being active in dealing with these is more to do with PR and to get inclusiveness points.

Women reporting risk from ex-partners is not the same thing as woman logging a wolf whistling incident by a complete stranger or a trans person logging a misgendering incident by a complete stranger.

The thing is that there's no such thing as a hate crime, unless a crime has been committed in the first place.

Exactly. And making the police responsible for collating and reporting - indeed to prioritise collating and reporting over investigating actual crime - minor incidents, which also encourages vexatious narcissistic reporting of non-incidents, is not a good use of police time.

Wherever you stand on societal misogyny or what constitutes transphobia, wasting police time on non-crime is just a big PR exercise diverting attention from the levels of actual crime.

It was in the paper metro. Was so odd to see wolf whistling and missing persons in the same category as time wasting.

Will see if I can find it.

I wonder if by "missing persons cases" they mean things like looking for elderly folk with dementia, or the mentally ill, who've gone walkabout because of poor social care? Because that must eat a lot of police time right now - the social care system is in a desperate state and the number of ill elderly people is going up as more live longer. Some dementia patients are "frequent flyers", too - I had a distant relative that wandered off a number of times when he was supposedly "too well" and living by himself. There was no choice but to ask the police for help to search.

I can't honestly think that searching for missing children is what's meant here, surely?

Woman beaten to death had warned police
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ea4a7866-de1e-11e8-8469-be4fc9fcee5f

I wonder if that’s what she means - women reporting threats from ex-partners. After all no crime had happened so why deal with it

Does anyone know how these are treated statistically? If a policeman or woman goes round and makes sympathetic noises does this get closed as "resolved" and thus helps to improve the overall statistics of the police force?

It depends. Hate crimes are treated the same as a crime with a non aggravating factor, the only real difference for your average officer is that the control room would likely prioritise a hate crime and there's more supervisory overview.

Hate incidents are not really dealt with in the same way. Officers still deploy and offer some there there cream, but since there's not been a crime committed, there's fuck all else to do with it.

Wolf whistling and looking for missing persons seems to be her big examples.

Looking for missing persons is her example of a waste of time? I don't see that in the report so I'm hoping there are crossed wires somewhere.

In the context of a country where gangs of child rapists are apparently free to kidnap and abuse young girls without consequences, combining speaking out against misogyny as a hate crime and complaining about having to look for missing persons in the same speech would be.. a bad look.

I've seen far too many stories where the police haven't bothered to look for child rape victims who went missing.