Hate crime? Manchester’s mad for it
by Gary Oliver, The Conservative Woman:
A DATE for your diary: this year’s National Hate Crime Awareness Week begins on October 12. No doubt you are thinking: ‘Must I wait a further eight long months before celebrating the UK’s hate crime legislation? Is there not something I can do before then to encourage more reporting of hate crime?’
Those who cannot last until autumn should immediately head for Greater Manchester. Not content with being part of the national event in October, from today the city and surrounding area is staging its own Hate Crime Awareness Week (HCAW) – an annual event which began in 2012. When it comes to raising awareness of hate crime in Greater Manchester, the locals evidently are, as they say, mad for it.
Manchester was in fact widely praised for having been, in 2013, the first police force voluntarily to extend the list of protected personal characteristics to cover alternative subcultures. The protected group is reported to include goths, emos and punks, but six years later still does not extend to social conservatives.
A promotional video for this year’s HCAW closes with a young woman asserting that in Greater Manchester ‘we all stand together’– a laudable sentiment, albeit one which prompts the viewer involuntarily to reprise Paul McCartney’s Frog Chorus.
The film also includes the deputy mayor for policing and crime vowing ‘I won’t stand by’. Unfortunately, singling out hate crime reinforces the perception that, for police in Greater Manchester and elsewhere, expressions of unfashionable opinion and utterances of politically incorrect thought now trump all other offences.
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