You’re a man.
Your breasts are made of silicone
Your vagina goes nowhere
And we can tell the difference
Even when you are not there
Your hormones are synthetic
And lets just cross this bridge
What you have you stupid man
Is male privilege.
Not an especially nice poem, you may think; you may also take objection to both tone and substance (it’s addressed to a hypothetical trans woman). And even if you were to spread it around on the internet, would that be a hate incident?
According to Humberside police it is. When one of their former officers, Harry Miller, retweeted the poem (he didn’t write it), they told him that it would be recorded as a “hate incident”. He wasn’t happy and the judicial review relating to it is expected to reach its verdict very soon.
But what is a “hate incident”? What was Miller accused of? In technical jargon a hate incident is a potential though not yet proven hate crime. The Crown Prosecution Service currently defines it in terms of victim or bystander perception. Even if no evidence is subsequently found of a speaker’s hostility, the incident remains on the perpetrators’s record. These incidents can turn up on enhanced checks, independent of outcome. It may not be a conviction, but it’s a formal mark against a person’s reputation.
This sort of methodology was originally introduced following the Macpherson Inquiry into police mishandling of Stephen Lawrence’s racist murder in 1993. As Brian Cathcart’s book, The Case of Stephen Lawrence, shows, racist abuse towards ethnic minorities in Lawrence’s borough of Greenwich was rampant, violent, and underreported. When reported, it was often dismissed by an institutionally racist force. A culture of fear also inhibited witnesses from giving evidence.
It made sense to develop a system in which victim perceptions of racism are taken seriously; and in which absence of evidence doesn’t necessarily automatically imply elimination from records. But that doesn’t really apply to the Miller case.
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