Wolf-whistling and any comment perceived as sexist could become hate crimes in London, police warn.
As reported by Breitbart, London’s Metropolitan Police Force have revealed they have been consulting with other police forces to crack down on “gender-based hate crime” after similar behavior was criminalized in other parts of the country.
Nottinghamshire Police were the first ones in the U.K. to record “misogyny” as a hate crime, having done so last year – criminalizing complimenting, texting, and catcalling women in certain contexts. A spokesman for Scotland Yard said:
We have been speaking to other forces about their experiences of the practicalities of recording gender-based hate crime and will use this, along with feedback from our partners, to inform any future changes to MPS policy.
For incidents in the U.K. to be considered “hate crimes”, the alleged victim must only “perceive” the incident to be so and it was confirmed by Crown Prosecution Service that there’s “no evidence” needed to report and record hate crimes.
Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton spoke on criminalizing perceived sexism:
Issues such as on-street behaviour that people feel should be accepted as part of the interaction of daily life actually has a detrimental and damaging impact. Sexual harassment of a woman or a girl at a bus stop by a male might be some things that some women feel they are just going to have to accept, that no-one’s going to do anything about it. The debate in policing now is moving much more to identify those issues in the same way as we would other types of incident or crime, establishing if a crime has been committed or not.
Hamilton continues…
Even if a crime hasn’t been committed the debate now is similar to hate crime incidents. Should we be taking action of some variety to address the behavior before it escalates into a crime and also most importantly to try and restore some confidence to the victim and make them feel that what happened to them is being addressed somewhere?
In their plight to make cat-calling illegal, it seems that Metropolitan Police will also “address behavior before it escalates into a crime” – which sounds more like thought-policing than addressing toxic behavior…
