Pc Brigade wasting police time

[RedToothBrush]

Now the story focuses on misogyny as a hate crime. But it talks a lot about thought crime and vexatious reports.

It's an interesting in to the front page

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Richard Garside is a hero.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.