How to ensure that policing is impartial and not political

[UKIPmember]

Hello,

I recently read about JK Rowling complaining she had “received enough threats to paper her house”. This didn’t seem particularly fair to me, it seemed like some people weren’t receiving the same level of response/protections that others would rightly expect if they reported threats online?

Is this supposed to be how the law works in practice? I don’t know. I know that people have protected characteristics and (I think) abuse motivated by hostility to those characteristics is a priority for the police and can lead to harsher sentences. Is being male or female a protected characteristic?

Is it possible to find out what the police guidelines are for dealing with abuse online made against GC feminists? If the police aren’t treating these threats as seriously as others I would be keen to know why (as I’m sure would the centre right leaning media). Is this just how the law is supposed to work or are the police political now? Or are political lobbying groups having an influence in writing guidance? How do we get this investigated and get answers to this? It just doesn’t seem right to me that when some people send abuse to people like JK Rowling they are allowed to get away with it, I’d like to know why this is happening if it indeed is what is happening.

There's a distinction between the protected characteristics listed under the 2010 Equality Act (9 in total) and the protected characteristics monitored for crime recording purposes (5 in total). Sex is not included in the latter, nor is age (which is also a travesty IMO), although a small handful of police forces internally record gender-based crime (nor necessarily just misogyny).

Really, there is no such thing as a hate crime. A crime of any type can be a hate crime if it is perceived by anyone to be motivated by hostility towards one of those 5 monitored strands.

If a crime has been committed which is proven to be motivated by hate, the CPS can apply for a sentence uplift (i.e. harsher penalty). However, if no actual crime has taken place it can't be recorded as a hate crime even if the element of hostility is there. Instead, it will be recorded as a hate incident but no action (other than recording the incident) can be taken against the allegedly hostile person.

These latter incidents are where the controversy lies as someone can be recorded as a metioned party based purely on someone's perception without an investigation taking place (and sometimes without their knowledge at all) hence no chance to defend themselves.

The second controversy is that it can skew perceptions of vulnerability to hate. As no such record is made for other characteristics (e.g. age, sex) we never get a full idea of how much discrimination these groups face. Some critics argue that it would be so expensive and culturally difficult to overcome the true scale of the problem, successive governments are deliberately ignoring calls to start recording these other characteristics.