IN ENGLAND TODAY A CRIMINAL KNOWS IT IS VERY UNLIKELY THEY WILL BE CAUGHT, NEVER MIND PROSECUTED. The latest official statistics for reports of crime compared with figures for actual prosecutions confirm this as fact.
Because of continuing limits on resources, senior police officers are having to prioritise the most serious crime.
Head of London’s Police, Commissioner Cressida Dick told BBC radio 4 morning news on Friday 2nd November 2018 that more resources will be needed if government wants to widen the definition of hate crime to include misogyny – hatred of women.
She insisted she must prioritise her resources to meet ordinary people’s concerns about serious crime, clearly indicating that lesser issues of perceived hate cannot have priority. Herself a homosexual, she patently takes the highly professional and realistic view we would all expect.
Police are facing increasing levels of serious crime with seriously depleted resources. But instead of addressing the issue, the government is proposing to widen the scope of hate crime. Indeed an official campaign against hate crime has just been launched at a cost of £1.5 million.
This crisis of crime levels and police resources while lawmakers refuse more resources yet look to extend definitions of hate crime throws into relief the fundamental thinking at work.
Political perceptions and ideology are driving the agenda – not reality.
In the last 8 years there has been a 19% real terms reduction in financing for the police, and a loss of 20,000 police officers. Yet crime reports for the year to June 2018 show violent crime rose 19%, with a 14% increase in the murder rate and a 22% rise in robberies.
The police know the reality; the criminals know the reality; the public at large know the reality; but the government pursues another agenda.
Why ?
At the heart of government thinking are experts steeped in an ideological mindset at odds with traditional concepts of criminality.
Such experts are actively preparing to widen the scope of hate crime to include misogyny. But the government Budget for 2019 also announced this last week makes no provision to expand police resources – resources already seriously inadequate to the task, as top police officers like Sara Thornton and Cressida Dick are indicating.
There is no commitment from a supposedly right wing Conservative government to make the desperately needed increase in police resources to reverse the now evidently dangerous cuts of recent years
But there is money for establishing a totally new system of mental health checks for all school children. Not just for those identified as in need, but for all children.
Hate crime is a dangerous novelty of recent years. The concern behind such laws may well be laudable. But the cure proposed is wrong, even dangerous.
At the Crown Prosecutions official website at https://www.cps.gov.uk/hate-crime we read this:
“In 2016/17, 83% of hate crimes cases we prosecuted led to a conviction or guilty plea. Because of the serious nature of these offences, the CPS can apply to the courts for a ‘sentence uplift’ which is an increased punishment for the crime. Last year, more than half of our requests led to offenders having their sentence increased because it was motivated by hate.”
And what do they say is hate crime ? Again from the official site, link above:
The police and the CPS have agreed the following definition for identifying and flagging hate crimes:
“Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on a person’s disability or perceived disability; race or perceived race; or religion or perceived religion; or sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation or transgender identity or perceived transgender identity.”
It is to this list that experts are planning to add ‘misogyny’.
Heavier sentences will be given for crimes “perceived by the victim or any other person” to be based on hostility or prejudice to the particular social groups identified in the list.
Those groups listed become a privileged class of people in law. Crime against them is more seriously punished simply because it is perceived to be against them because of who they are.
Such a crime against anyone who does not belong to these legally privileged groups manifestly does not have the same gravity.
At one blow we have dispensed with justice as equal for all and created two tier classes of justice, of victim and of perpetrator. And it all depends on perception, not objective evidence.
We have undermined the very foundation of justice itself.
Traditionally, a crime is a crime and the punishment reflects the crime committed no matter who you are. No matter who the perpetrator; no matter who the victim. The crime itself is to be marked and the crime itself is to be punished.
But now we have the very dangerous politicisation of crime. We have the law corrupted to serve an ideological agenda, not to serve a purely moral concept called justice.
By creating a class of privileged victim, and an especially heinous category of perpetrator, we no longer seek to do justice but to mark ideological approval and disapproval.
This is pure political correctness.
The politically correct mindset has established a post reality worldview derived from Socialist ideology, and not according to the reality of what human beings are, and the reality of how justice works.
By creating a privileged victim class and an underprivileged perpetrator class they betray the propagandic nature of their worldview.
Certain people are by definition saints, and others are by definition sinners. The Christian concept that all human beings are capable of wrong is replaced by the Marxist notion that there are set categories of exploited peoples and set categories of those who exploit.
Thus we establish blatant prejudice in law …
This is entirely alien to our English tradition which technically eschews partiality. Magna Carta made the executive power subject to the law of the land, and enshrined the principle that no-one was either to be preferred in, or deprived of, justice:
TO NO-ONE WILL WE SELL, TO NO-ONE WILL WE DENY OR DELAY RIGHT OR JUSTICE.
Ray Catlin
related links
https://www.parliament.uk/business/news/2018/october/autumn-budget-2018/
copyright © 2018 Ray Catlin All rights reserved
Conservatism Institute 