The policing watchdog has claimed that Britain leaving the European Union next year will trigger a rise in “hate crimes”, and that officers should be responding to any report of a hate crime within one hour of reporting.
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services’ (HMICFRS) report released Thursday also said that police must “prioritise the service to victims” of hate crime, after the watchdog found that half of so-called ‘hate crimes’ were “inadequately” responded to.
The HMICFRS’s projection that hate crimes will spike after Brexit has been given significant coverage in the mainstream media — as allegedly it did after the referendum and other “trigger” events such as Islamist terror attacks — with the report noting: “There is a real possibility that there will be a similar increase in reports in 2019 if, as is anticipated by the government, the United Kingdom formally leaves the European Union.
“Police forces should prepare for this eventuality and make sure that the recommendations in this report are used in the future to improve the police response to hate crime victims.”
However, days after the vote to leave the EU in June 2016, a senior police officer said there was no evidence to suggest hate crimes had actually been committed and Breitbart London reported that some post-Brexit alleged hate crimes had even included people calling the police to complain that they did not like former UKIP leader Nigel Farage.
A hate crime can be anything perceived as motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a personal characteristic such as race, religion, or sexual orientation. However, the the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) confirmed that no evidence is needed to bring a criminal complaint against someone for a “hate crime”, as “reporting … is subjective and is based on the perception of the victim”.
The HMICFRS and its lead inspector Wendy Williams also criticised forces for their response times, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The first contact is what we focused on and that is the golden opportunity for police forces to get it right.
“And when a victim makes a report of a hate crime… that should mean that there is a priority afforded that crime and victims should receive a quick response,” she said, quoting College of Policing guidance which says that victims of hate crimes “should receive a response within an hour of making the report”.
Though the report bemoaned some forces took five days to respond to hate crimes, other crimes are not treated with such an urgency. Breitbart London reported in May that some police forces are sometimes taking several days to respond to emergency calls which put “vulnerable” victims at risk, and earlier in the year, it was found that police are dropping investigations into ‘minor’ crimes and are ignoring certain crimes such as vandalism and vehicle crime altogether.
The report’s findings were released on the same day that figures from “police recorded crime” were released which revealed a 16 percent increase in knife crime, 12 percent rise in homicide, and a staggering 31 percent increase in reported rapes across England and Wales.
While the policing watchdog’s figures on hate crime reporting failures is expected to be taken as accurate and must be acted upon, the government’s position is that these statistics on rising crime violent are less reliable than the Crime Survey — which did not record a change in overall violent offences in the year to March 2018.