Pc Brigade wasting police time

Imnobody, that's what worried me. And isn't it typical that the focus wasn't on, for instance, no one should report racism as a hate crime unless actual violence has been committed; it's about women, how dare they complain about shit from men. Get back in your box.

I kind of sympathise with the problem of tying up police time with historic incidents, in that I would be more interested in stopping sexual harassment now rather than hounding individual men in a time when it was pretty common. But the idea that misogyny specifically is not a crime, even when it is headlines right next to the story of the historic murder of two young girls and another about a woman being beaten to death by a man with a record of beating up women - that is disgusting.

No I will not put up with male violence. It is sickening that that is what Britain is coming back to, telling those of us with girl children that this is what we should aspire to for them - that they should be legitimately be raped and murdered and 'just suck it up. Fuck that, fuck the police, fuck the courts, fuck any pretence of a law and justice system that chooses to abandon half of its population like this.

As a feminist this really saddens me. One step towards making misogyny a hate crime and people have to come in and shout it down.

I thought it was a fantastic move to teaching men that they can not intimidate a woman in the street, as it is an offence and am saddened a woman constable would brush it off.

It’s nothing to do with trans issues, it’s to do with woman’s issues. So sad that some feminists are no longer on board with protecting woman as they want to ensure trans people can’t get any sympathy in the process.

Richard Garside is a hero.

Belatedly, just popping in a helpful thread by Richard Garside:

There's an important kernal of truth here. The police are being asked to insert themselves into so-called hate crime situations which are bogus and a waste of their time.
Recently, for example, activists opposed to fairplaywomen called the police because the campaign group was leafleting the Green Party conference. /3
And while the police should take sexual violence, domestic violence and other forms of male violence against women seriously, policing and prosecution will not, on its own, hold back the tsunami of violence, misogyny and sexism faced daily by millions of girls and women. (continues and is well worth reading)

twitter.com/RichardJGarside/status/1057925077461856257

The problem is a lot of the things being called misogyny are actual crimes -threatening behaviour, groping etc. Whereas with the hate incidents TRAs are exploiting they are just perceptions of insult not even threat. A young woman surrounded by a group of men making sexual threats for example is not the same as someone saying they don't see a person as a woman. We need to address the creep of hate incidents.

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

One really interesting thing about the reporting of this is that much of it doesn't make sense. Sure, part of that is media outlets just doing a skim job in their reporting, but another part is that the law is such a mess, and so unclear, that it's quite hard to figure out what's going on and what's supposed to be going on. Even the police don't seem to have that much of a clue.

I think the media reporting of this story is quite off, actually. If you read her comments, she's talking about misogyny in the context of adding another group of what in policing are referred to as "non-crimes" (ie, you've said something hurtful to someone, but not actually moved into committing a criminal act) which need to be investigated, at a time when police resources are under pressure from underinvestment.

This is a story about adding to investigations and court time but not adding more money to pay for cops, really.

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

If I go out and break a window, that's criminal damage, which needs to be investigated by the police regardless of the motivation with which I did it.

The motivation becomes relevant at sentencing. If I did it as part of a political protest that will be different to doing it in a fit of drunken stupidity. And if I broke someone's windows because they were black / disabled / gay / trans then that would qualify as a hate crime and would increase the sentence. But there has to be a crime in the first place before it can be labelled as hate crime.

South Yorkshire Police relentlessly mocked after urging people to report one another for 'offensive or insulting words'

www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/south-yorkshire-police-relentlessly-mocked-after-urging-people-to-report-one-another-for-offensive-a3932131.html

yeah on six music (get me down with the yoof),they said something like 'investigating hate crime on the basis of gender is wasting police time'

at which point I nodded and said quite right

but I suspect they meant sex

I agree with Lang, hate crime should count as an aggravating factor during sentencing for sure, but let's not waste time investigating things that aren't actual crimes, for heaven's sake

They did use the phrase "gender based" in that interview on R4 - I was driving so didn't really take in who the speakers were, but it's an interesting phrasing when they are also saying "we need to free up the police to deal with violence, rape and theft" in virtually the same breath.

It’s in the times too - I guess the closest they could get to saying “trans” was “misogyny”

this reporting and collating of "hate incidents" that do not amount to crimes by the police

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?

We should not have hate crime, it's thought policing. If a crime is a crime, it's a crime.

I'm quite happy for animosity towards protected characteristics to be counted as aggravating factors when sentencing after guilty verdicts - providing that proceedings have actually evidenced this motivation by the perpetrator.

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.

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

The first I can't imagine there are much resources used on and the second is surely important? Or do the police need to wait for young boys and girls to be killed before it's deemed important?

We should not have hate crime, it's thought policing. If a crime is a crime, it's a crime.

This. Having seen what's happened to gender-critical women, my eyes are wide open as to how these laws get abused.

It’s just people being rude to each other and no actual crime has been committed.

We’ve gone off course in policing with perception of incidents rather than crimes. Hate crimes are where an actual crime has taken place not when two people have had an argument [paraphased]

On radio 4 now

As soon as misogyny came up as a hate crime aggravating factor suggestion, the responses are
1 make misandry a hate crime
2 let's stop all the hate crime nonsense

Revealing

We should not have hate crime, it's thought policing. If a crime is a crime, it's a crime.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6340001/Its-criminal-Met-Police-giving-burglars-900-anti-hate-experts.html

Think the Guardian online had it as well.

I heard that too on R5. I was willing him to say we’ve had to explore a poster saying woman = adult human female as hate crime but he didn’t.

Nicky Campbell has done no thinking about this and is pretty poor on women’s issues generally. He’s better on dogs and whales

It's being covered on Radio 4 Today now.

Again "misogyny and wolf-whistling and historic crimes of abuse". As others have said, is a very odd focus of where the problem lies.

The complaint actually seems to be that the police are "not social workers, and not mental health workers."

The story seems to be in other papers as well, and be based on a statement by the Head of the National Police Chiefs Council. She seems to say that where hate is an aggravating factor in a crime it should be taken into account, but that police time should be prioritised to focus on crimes like burglary and rape, rather than minor verbal or written abuse. She also suggests dropping the focus on historic sex crimes in favour of current crime.

The Mail only quotes her use of the word "misogyny" once, which I had thought was only being considered as a hate crime, whilst emphasising that hate is unacceptable whilst suggesting that a review of priorities is needed. Apparently the number of complaints are up by 17% in a year. I wonder how many are due to TRAs complaining about Women's Place banners, Posies posters, or tweets claiming TWANW. My guess is that the clumsy statement is because police are worried about the floodgates opening further, and eating up more resources.

A police officer on the radio 5 live discussion this morning specified ‘we know some minority groups are very good at playing the system’ and then specified transgender activists. Then they read out a message about horrendous suicide stats.