Just look at these numbers from this Evening Standard report in which London Mayor Sadiq Khan announces dramatically that:
“London today is more diverse than ever and I am incredibly proud that we don’t just accept our differences, but celebrate them. There is simply no place in our capital for hate crimes of any form, and we will not tolerate them. We must stand together, and anyone who witnesses or experiences abusive behaviour should report it to the police immediately.”
Nothing to object to there really other than that it is a pointless bit of virtue signalling. Oh yes, the numbers…
- More than 50 events are taking place across London stations,
- In the last three months, BTP officers have spoken to more than 5,000 people about whether they’ve seen or experienced any form of hate crime.
- Figures showed hate crime was an element in 5% of all crimes reported on London’s transport network.
It is hard to see, given the failings of human temperament – how so-called “hate crimes” could drop any lower! Only 5 in every 100 crimes reported on London’s transport system seem to have an element of “hate”. And when you consider that often the only thing that transforms a normal crime into a hate crime is the use of a rude and nasty word in relation to the victim’s perceived ‘identity’, this is pretty good going! London should be patting itself on the back. The Mayor should be praising the city’s public, not sending the Metropolitan Police out to harass them in their thousands on the off-chance that they might once have witnessed a hate crime.
A cynic might conclude that this was an expensive exercise and a desperate attempt to get the figures to rise so that the Mayor might more credibly lecture the peaceful and tolerant citizens of London from his pedestal in City Hall.
One announces a “crackdown” against something which has become endemic and out of control, not something which barely registers. Keep in mind that there are substantially fewer than ten crimes per million passenger journeys, acording to TfL’s own report.
As Douglas Murray pointed out in the Spectator yesterday:
A while ago an acquaintance of mine was on a late night train when some strangers tried to pick a fight with him. He was smartly dressed and this appeared to be the root of the ‘problem’. In the end the police were called and detained the attackers. They also discovered that the victim was gay. At which point the officers apparently spent a considerable amount of time trying to pressure the victim to say that the incident had been motivated by ‘homophobia’. He didn’t think it had been, not least because nothing about being gay had come up. He insisted on this and succeeded in stopping the hate-crime charges being logged, although it apparently required a lot of persistence to stop the police from doing so. For them, you see, that would have made it a better night’s work. Not just a mundane act of violence on a train, but a hate-crime. I would bet that the police are at this a fair amount. They have been told by their superiors to pursue this amorphous type of crime and so everybody of a certain sexual orientation, skin colour or religion will be encouraged to view and record things in such a manner. They will be aided by the fact that a lot of victims will understandably be more than happy to throw the book at anyone who has attacked them or been unpleasant in any way to them. Not everyone will hold out for the truth if the police themselves don’t seem that bothered about it.
The idea that the police are now actively engaged in “stop and research” in an effort to amplify this tiny issue is alarming.
How many officers are tied up in this absurd project, annoying members of the public – who apparently can’t be trusted to report crimes unprompted – or running these “50 seminars” in which the public is patronisingly “being taught how to spot hate crime on London’s Tubes and buses”?
Meanwhile, what dramatic public “crackdown” will be announced for genuine purveyors of criminal hatred?