@thatdarncat
Alas that nobody is minded to employ me to share my insights with the world. Frankly am uncertain how the world copes without my incisive commentary & wit; but somehow it keeps turning…
Police Scotland’s fixation is even stranger when you look at the Hate Crime Stats for Scotland. Disability hate crime has been increasing ever since the EA was brought in. And it’s really widely known that this particular flavour of hate-crime is significantly under-reported. I don’t think the types of crimes are likely to be dramatically different from those committed in England & Wales, either, so the rise in violent crime with a targeted element of disability hate would (& should) be getting Police Scotland’s attention really, you’d think.
Naturally Police Scotland have got Stonewall’s handy “Hate Crime Guide” to help them with “protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual & trans people in Scotland”. (Rather an incomplete guide to Hate Crime, really. As a file name, putting in LGBT at the start wouldn’t have made it too long or clunky, while making it accurate - helpful for people who, unlike Stonewall, are concerned with the other protected characteristics. People like the police, for example. That said, their contortionist act does make slightly more sense when viewed through the lens of the absolute battering of all the “the LGBT community don’t trust the police in the slightest” statistics that Stonewall Guide is comprised of.
Astonishingly, the CPS haven’t made a jazzy booklet, so how could the police know that:
Many disabled people do not report crime to the police because of a lack of confidence in the criminal justice system. When offences are eventually reported, previous failures to report should not be seen as diminishing a witness's credibility.?!
I mean, As. If. anyone actually reads the prosecution guidance, right? Or reports by charities that are not about disabled people hating the police or even just media coverage.
Plus we all know that Scotland has never ever had any issues with sectarianism EVER. No.
And of course we all know that racism is over because lots of people - including famous ones - said #BLM/knelt down at all SORTS of sportsball things to protest /posted black squares on their on their instas. So no need for Police Scotland to worry about the racism. I mean, those might be the most common form of hate crime in Scotland, but now racism is totally fixed that’s bound to just sort itself out.
So Police Scotland are actively trying to solicit reports of transphobia when there is - despite what one might infer from Stonewall’s Hate Crime Guide - no evidence of that demographic being backwards in coming forwards in terms of reporting transphobia.* Was it Scotland where one of the transphobic hate incidents that was logged was someone yelling the slur for a trans person that rhymes with an abbreviation for grandmother out of a van at someone? (Wherever it is, the police service are fortunate indeed misogyny isn’t a hate crime; because they’d be totally overwhelmed by reports within, oh, minutes? Indeed, if we left aside misogyny & could instead report people for being inappropriate towards children in the same flaggy way hate incident things work we’d knock police services flat because there is so much egregious behaviour to be reported. But I digress quite massively…)
- Or rather, the subset represented by Stonewall.