It’s pretty easy to make a moral and religious challenge to the entire concept of ‘hate crimes’. For those of us living in countries based on Judaeo-Christian morality, we can see that the idea of ‘hate crimes’ goes very much against the idea that the scales of justice should not be warped, that, according to the Bible, every man and woman should be judged equally. There should be no favour or penalty given to a person because they are rich and well connected nor because they are poor and friendless. In legal cultures based on Judaeo-Christian principles, whilst they have never been perfect, they have often strove, especially in more recent centuries and by those who are enlightened, to treat and judge people by the content of their character and nothing else. ‘Hate crime’ laws undermine this principle. They undermine it because they create groups with ‘protected characteristics’ based on skin colour, gender, sexuality, gender expression and religion. These were the very things and the very same specialist protections for certain groups, that post Enlightenment jurists and legal scholars worked to rid the judicial system of.
But as well as being a corrosive burn to the concept of equal justice, ‘hate crime’ laws also cost the public purse an inordinate amount of money. Every pound, dollar or euro spent on investigating so-called ‘hate crimes’ is money that could and should have been spent on other areas of policing and justice. Every complaint of ‘hurty words’ or claim, whether true or untrue, that someone was physically attacked because of their race/gender whatever, is money badly and inappropriately spent. It should make no difference if someone was punched in the face because of their ‘protected characteristic’, what matters is that they were punched in the face per se. A punch in the face is as equally damaging for a gay black man for example as it is for a straight white man. Yet because of ‘hate crime’ laws, more money and more resources would be poured into the first case than it would be the latter. This is primarily because one victim possesses ‘protected characteristics’ whilst the second would not.
A good example of policing resources being wasted on a ‘nothingburger’ because those targeted by graffiti could claim that it was against their ‘protected characteristics’ comes from a recent story from Coventry in the English Midlands. According to the Coventry Telegraph newspaper the words ‘White Lives Matter’ were scrawled with what looks like spray paint onto the grass in a park. Despite the council spending extra money on mowing this grass in order to remove the ‘offending’ text, this incident spawned a FOUR month police investigation that ended with the police shelving the case as they could not identify a perpetrator.
Whilst I accept that there were probably not police officers set to this task continuously for four months, without doubt a lot of police resources were wasted on this case. If this was any other case of vandalism of a park I very much doubt that those who oversee said park would be able to rouse the police from their beds to take a look. Of course this is vandalism, which is a crime, but did it really need so many specialist police resources thrown at it along with extra resources from the local authority? I don’t believe that it did. In any event what is wrong with saying ‘White Lives Matter’? Is it any different from saying Black Lives Matter or Female Lives Matter or All Lives Matter, personally I don’t believe it does. We are after all, all human and to say otherwise is to deny some humans their humanity.
How much did Warwickshire Police spend on all this guff only to do what they would do with any other vandalism case which is say ‘sorry we can’t identify any perpetrator’? How much did the investigation itself and the witness appeal along with policing the left wing lunatics who turned up to protest about graffiti that had already been removed at great cost to the local taxpayer no doubt?
You can bet your bottom dollar that any other incident of park vandalism would have been consigned to the round floor mounted filing cabinet in a lot shorter a period than four months. I would guess the police would have washed their hands of a general vandalism case in four days if not less. I was only because there was some whiner with or on behalf of those with a ‘protected characteristic’ that ensured that so many resources were wasted on a case that really wasn’t worth wasting money on.
Civilised nations need police and justice systems in order to function. Any reasonable person can see that. But these systems of justice and policing need to be honest and impartial and equitable. I fail to see how spending so much money and time on investigating the White Lives Matter graffiti fits in with policing in an honest, impartial and equitable way. It is a monstrous waste especially as from what I’ve seen and read over the years, the Coventry area has a very great number of policing and crime challenges facing it.
