Statistics released last October showed that disability hate crimes against children rose 150% in two years, while disability hate crimes overall rose 53%. This came as no surprise to any disabled people, I suspect, given the relentless, daily grind where we see our friends, peers and colleagues experience abuse and harassment, when we’re not experiencing it ourselves.
Every day, in online disability support groups and on social media, I see reports from disabled people of abuse they have experienced. Whether someone yelled at them in the street, or left an abusive message on their car when it was parked in an accessible parking space, or whether a fellow customer in a shop complained about the ‘freebies’ they imagine they receive as a disabled person, disability-based abuse can be dramatic or it can be mundane. Sometimes it involves keeping somebody prisoner in a shed and sometimes it’s being followed down the street by a grumbling man but, either way, it has an effect on a person’s sense of safety and wellbeing and it is intrusive to our lives.
And it would not happen if we were not disabled.
That is the nature of hate crime. In the same period that disability hate crime went up by 53%, hate crimes against trans people also leapt up by 45%, while 78% of all hate crimes were racially motivated. Any member of these and other marginalised groups knows how life in modern Britain can be turned against us, and something else we have in common is that we may not trust the police to deal with our complaints appropriately.
A damning report
This has been verified by research published by the Disability News Service this week, which has shown that “The work of police officers on more than half of their disability hate crime investigations has been found to be ‘unacceptable’, according to a new report by two watchdogs”.
It is no surprise to hear that police forces in England and Wales are dealing with disability hate crime poorly, but to hear that they are poor in more than half of cases is really spectacularly bad. That is not a mistake or an error or an occasional case of bad judgement, this is an attitude and behaviour that is entrenched in the police force that seems almost designed to let disabled people down when they have been the victims of a crime.
As the Disability News Service reports, “The report says officers are failing to “flag” cases as disability hate crimes on police computer systems and are also failing to refer many cases to the CPS for possible prosecution, while there are delays in the investigation process and a lack of effective supervision.
“It also says that police officers are failing to carry out risk assessments on victims of disability hate crime in many of the cases the inspectors sampled, and that they often fail to draw up risk management plans.”
The report went on to detail avoidable delays, only 77% of cases having all reasonable lines of enquiry explored, and 43% lacking an investigation plan. 57% of the cases looked at were deemed ‘substandard’, with just under half of those described as ‘inadequate’.
One area that the report shows as lacking is police approaching the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) with cases, instead offering less serious ‘community resolutions’. The CPS itself was described as ‘excellent’ and ‘improved’, however, with prosecutors showing much greater awareness of the relevant parts of law.
Do we report?
There are degrees of crime, and there are degrees of targeted hate crime. Many of us find ourselves unsure whether a one-off aggression or regular but low-level abuse would ‘qualify’ as hate crime, and some disabled people experience hate crime with such regularity that it barely even registers with them that it is happening. This can particularly be the case with learning disabled people and with those with mental ill-health. ‘Mate crime’ is a particular risk with these groups of people, too, and while it may seem clear from the outside that this is dangerous and pernicious, when it is happening to you it may not be so obvious.
So when do we step forward to report and when do we write it off as a bad day? Sure, the man abused and kept in a shed was experiencing a hate crime but what about the woman who refuses to offer her seat on the tube because ‘there’s nothing wrong with you!’. What about the person who’s rude about you using disabled parking? What about the shout of ‘Scrounger!’ as you get in your wheelchair?
Even in clear-cut cases, many disabled people were already wary of going to the police. We often don’t feel like we would be taken seriously, and we don’t know if we can explain the real impact of what has happened to a most-likely non-disabled officer with no specialist training or awareness.
What this report has shown is that our wariness was right, and that the police needs to take drastic action if they are to gain our trust. We deserve justice like every other minority group and, like every other minority group, we are scared that the police service in this country does not care.
Photo: Roger Blackwell