A man has been landed with a police record for ‘racial hatred’ for whistling the Bob The Builder theme tune at his neighbour.
Officers in Bedfordshire recorded the incident as a non-crime hate incident, which will remain on file for six years and could be disclosed to prospective employers.
Few other details about the ‘crime’ are known, but it is just one of the bizarre cases unearthed by an investigation into the controversial practice of recording ‘hate incidents’ even if no law has been broken.
Others include a swimming teacher in West Yorkshire given a police record after a child’s mother claimed her son had been allowed to bang his head against the side of the pool ‘due to his ethnicity’, and a gay man who alleged he had been ripped off by a drug dealer because of his sexuality.
In Norfolk, a Portuguese national said an unknown person had deliberately left a burger bun on their driveway ‘due to their ethnicity’.
Under the Hate Crime Operational Guidelines, adopted in 2014, forces are required to record any actions deemed to be motivated by an element of hate, even if there is no evidence to prove them.
In total, 10,840 non-crime hate incidents were logged last year, bringing the total in the past five years to 120,000 – but Freedom of Information requests sent to 43 police forces in England and Wales failed to identify a single crime that had been solved as a result.
Campaigners have called for the ‘Orwellian’ system to be scrapped, claiming a police record could jeopardise a person’s career even if they were not charged with a crime.
‘The police have completely lost the plot,’ said Harry Miller, a former police officer from pressure group Fair Cop.
OK, even after watching the opening and looking at the words I can't see just what would be the 'trigger' that would make this a 'hate incident', unless someone objects to the 'skin color' of the main characters (or the fact that the only 'character of color' – dark – is a scarecrow who means to do well but is still totally inept) and are getting their knickers in a twist over that... Which means that, any day now, someone is going to go totally berserk over the fact that 'The Simposons' are drawn with yellow skin and are thus somehow offensive to Asians.
On the other hand, I did see this line from the OP – "Under the Hate Crime Operational Guidelines, adopted in 2014, forces are required to record any actions deemed to be motivated by an element of hate, even if there is no evidence to prove them."(emphasis mine). So people can just make up shit and the "Hate Crime" squad has to treat it as valid, no matter how patently ridiculous it actually is.
All i can assume is that sometime over the past thirty or forty years each and every resident of earth has been transported from our home planet and we are now living on 'Bizarro World'. -"BB"-
Re: Bob the racist
Posted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 6:03 pm
by Scooter
Of course it makes no sense devoid of any other context, but then it's the Daily Mail, peddling half truths to foment faux outrage.
Re: Bob the racist
Posted: Mon Jul 19, 2021 6:29 am
by Gob
OK< so can you see ANY circumstance where "whistling the Bob The Builder theme tune" could be construed as "racist"?
Re: Bob the racist
Posted: Mon Jul 19, 2021 1:48 pm
by Scooter
I can see a circumstance where whistling the tune was attached to blatantly racist comments/behaviour which was not reported on in order to make the entire incident look ridiculous.
Re: Bob the racist
Posted: Mon Jul 19, 2021 2:10 pm
by Big RR
Perhaps (who knows?), but i am unsure why (if this is indeed the law) police are required to log/report non crime "hate" incidents as described. It makes them more like nursery school teachers ("come on everyone, get along") than those who investigate crimes and enforce the law. Like it or not, everyone is not going to get along, and some people will hate/dislike others because of ethnicity, or religion, or political affiliation, or sexual orientation or, ... ; and IMHO keeping such a log is not going to change a thing. By all means investigate and prosecute crimes,(and punish those who commit them), but keeping a list of "mean" people who upset others seems to be a pretty poor use of the police resources.
I can see a circumstance where whistling the tune was attached to blatantly racist comments/behaviour which was not reported on in order to make the entire incident look ridiculous.
Not possible, if there were "racist comments/behaviour" then it would have been reported as a criminal hate incident.
When racist or religious hate incidents become criminal offences, they are known as hate crimes. Any criminal offence can be a racist or religious hate crime, if the offender targeted you because of their prejudice or hostility based on race or religion.
There are two main types of racist and religious hate crime:
racially or religiously aggravated offences under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998
any other offences for which the sentence can be increased under the Criminal Justice Act 2003 if they are classed as a hate crime
In both cases, when a criminal offence is classed as a racist or religious hate crime, the judge can impose a tougher sentence on the offender.
Re: Bob the racist
Posted: Mon Jul 19, 2021 2:49 pm
by Scooter
I'm saying that the reporting in the Daily Mail could have deliberately omitted more salient details from the actual report.
Re: Bob the racist
Posted: Mon Jul 19, 2021 3:45 pm
by Gob
The Hate Crime Operational Guidelines, which came into force in 2014, instruct police officers to record any actions which may have been motivated by an element of hate – even if there is no evidence to prove them.
Don't you think that's a recipe for disaster? Or is it OK as it means people can accuse others of racism?
Re: Bob the racist
Posted: Mon Jul 19, 2021 4:01 pm
by Scooter
Police takes reports of all sorts of incidents without any evidence to support them, unless and until they deem them significant enough to investigate them as crimes and then collect evidence to support them. The reports remain in existence regardless.
Police takes reports of all sorts of incidents without any evidence to support them, unless and until they deem them significant enough to investigate them as crimes and then collect evidence to support them. The reports remain in existence regardless.
Do they then place people, guilty of no crime, on a national database which; "If a potential employer asks for a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check" could lose you your job?
Re: Bob the racist
Posted: Mon Jul 19, 2021 5:19 pm
by Scooter
Again, there would be all manner of police records of incidents that could potentially be subject to such searches, depending on what the law allows.
Re: Bob the racist
Posted: Mon Jul 19, 2021 6:00 pm
by Big RR
Perhaps, but I would think many would be discretionary and/or not available to the public. This record is required by law to be kept and, if Gob is correct, can be accessed publicly. That is a danger.
Re: Bob the racist
Posted: Tue Jul 20, 2021 2:31 am
by rubato
"Under the Hate Crime Operational Guidelines, adopted in 2014, forces are required to record any actions deemed to be motivated by an element of hate, even if there is no evidence to prove them."
wtf! Insane.
Besides, most of the skilled tradesmen have been driven back to Czech or Poland by Brexit along with truck drivers and agricultural workers.
yrs,
rubato
Re: Bob the racist
Posted: Tue Jul 20, 2021 2:56 am
by Joe Guy
Maybe some black guy was whistling that tune at a neighbor who is a white building contractor and it offended him because it hurt his feelings and made him feel like a stereotypical white cartoon character.
Again, there would be all manner of police records of incidents that could potentially be subject to such searches, depending on what the law allows.
Not the question I asked though.
I'll try again; Do they then place people, guilty of no crime, on a national database which; "If a potential employer asks for a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check" could lose you your job?
Re: Bob the racist
Posted: Tue Jul 20, 2021 1:22 pm
by Scooter
To my knowledge there are records other than criminal convictions that would be accessible for those purposes. If you are suggesting that these records of incidents "motivated by an element of hate" are unique in that regard, I believe you would be mistaken.
Re: Bob the racist
Posted: Tue Jul 20, 2021 1:49 pm
by Big RR
I'm not sure Scooter; many reports and the filing of them are discretionary with the officers. E.g., they respond to drunk being loud in his house and say, keep it down, if we have to come back again someone is going downtown. No record, no arrest, nothing which can be accessed. But if the cops come to a house where the neighbor says "he looked at me in a racist sort of way", they are required (by law) to file a report which is then accessible. No crime was committed, no investigation was made, but this unsupported allegation(s) become(s) part of a public record "even if there is no evidence to prove them". I find that dangerous and unsupportable.
It might be different if the records were maintained in confidence unless needed for investigation or prosecution of a related crime, but that does not appear to be the case here. This is kind of like making high school internet trashing part of an official government record and can seriously damage reputations of purely innocent people.
