The Dundee Courier have this report today on the police/Scottish government Hate campaign.
Note the police response from Chief Superintendent John McKenzie: “It would be inappropriate to comment on a matter of personal correspondence. Police Scotland welcomes correspondence and communication with members of the public.”
It’s hard to believe both the inanity and the brass neck of that comment. First of all this is not ‘personal’ correspondence. It is not private. The police have made a public campaign which implies that hatred stems from ‘religious’ people and those who preach sermons. I have made a public response – my letter is public and the press are involved. Instead of answering the complaint the Chief Superintendent makes these two inane comments.
Firstly let me say to the Chief Super, that not to comment, when you are being accused of breaking your own rules on a matter of great public concern, is what is ‘inappropriate’. To fob of the press in this way is an action of a politician not a civil servant who is answerable to the public.
Secondly there is no point in ‘welcoming’ letters from the public if you are just going to throw them in the bin or answer them with platitudes and inanities. The fact is that your own law says that it is the perception of the ‘victim’ that turns something into a hate incident. I think that’s unworkable and illogical but you clearly don’t. So the question that the public need answered is why that law/principle only applies in some cases and why the police and government are exempt from their own laws? My perception, and that of many others, is that your poster campaign is motivated (at least in part) by hatred of religion – or at least those religious views which contradict the doctrines of the State. What gives you the right to determine that the perceptions of some are invalid but the perceptions of others get reported as hate incidents? In effect you are making a farce of the law and playing politics. You are determining that some groups are hate victims and others hate perpetrators.
The police should get on with solving crimes not creating them. Its time for you to get out of politics and do the job that you are paid to do. Stop funding and running political campaigns and using your overstretched officers for this purpose. Stop demonising and criminalising members of the public who disagree with the philosophy of the political elites. Get on with catching real criminals. Please….
The Political Police (part 2) and a Brilliant Letter
The Political Police and the Slide to an Authoritarian State
You can support The Quantum of the Wee Flea fundraiser by clicking the link Patron.podbean.com/theweeflea We are half way to our monthly target already!
This country needs someone resembling Donald Trump or Jair (now there’s an Old Testament name) Bolsonaro. Instead, it is governed by liberals & SJWs 🙁
God help us we don’t need another Donald Trump!!!
Please keep on keeping on David.
I absolutely agree with you 100% and will be writing to my MSP, The First Minister and the Police.
This poster campaign and also the current wholehearted political adoption and the promotion and now enforcement of “Feelings ideologies” such as the LBGTQ-XYZ is insanity in action.
Our children as young as 3 are being indoctrinated through our State ‘Education’ System. We need to wake up and speak out! (While we still can)
You should take this further. Write to the home office and the head of Scottish police about it.
You might also want to try getting the Telegraph newspaper involved; some of their joins lists have a low tolerance for this sort of nonsense and might run a story on it. Alison Person is one of their opinion writers and she might be interested. Previously she has written very strong words criticising Yorkshire Police over one one of the grooming scandals, so she might be interested in this.
If you can get a UK national paper on the case, the views of one superintendent will count for nothing. It would push the debate up to the highest level.
Thanks I will…
Alison Pearson
But yes she is excellent (not to everyone’s taste inevitably)
Sophie
We in the US are only a few steps behind you. Trump has temporarily stopped the down slide.
The law really has become an ass!
But on a more general level the whole premise of this campaign is wrong, as we Christians know. The “law” (God’s or societies) cannot make us good, it can only restrain evil to some extent. The law tells me to drive at no more than 30 mph through my village, and I comply. But in my head I am LEWIS HAMILTON!
Passing “anti-hate” legislation will not stop people hating. On the contrary all the evidence is that society is becoming exponentially more hateful, especially against those who challenge the current zeitgeist
But we Christians have good news:
“For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, GOD DID by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering”.
Romans 8
The Courier’s reporting is shoddy as well. Unless I’m missing something, you were reporting a hate “incident” not “crime”, and you’ve at no point defined a hate crime as an non-criminal incident.
The use of “marriage equality” is loaded as well – some of those awful religious people being opposed to “equality”. Perhaps marriage erasure would be a better term – it still exists but not recognised for what it is (like the way “woman” and “man” is heading!)
Can you start a campaign?? Online even
Three main points:
1 If the posters had been devised by another organisation or person, would the complaint have been recorded, would the posters have been removed, would there have been further action?
2 This amounts to a negation of a foundational principle of democracy, to a renunciation of the “rule of law”, as the police are placing themselves, above , beyond or outside the law.
3 There is a conflict of interest as they are in effect acting as “prosecutor and defendant”. in the same matter. There is no independence.
Well done David! Their lack of intellectual objectivity is rather disgusting. Pin them to the wall of accountability for their subjective bias. Unbelievable but not surprising these days. Really gaining steam over here across the pond as well.
Good response David. I very much appreciate you continuing to bang the drum on this and not letting it go. It feels such a relief to read your posts when so many stay silent
FYI. Email address for the Chief Superintendent if you don’t already have it:
John.McKenzie2@scotland.pnn.police.uk
________________________________
Very well said David, God bless you.
Sent from my iPhone
>
The police also responded to me yesterday, using a typed letter, sent recorded delivery, which can be read here:
Police Scotland’s decision not to record reports of its own hate incidents
https://johnallmanuk.wordpress.com/2018/10/31/police-scotlands-decision-not-to-record-reports-of-its-own-hate-incidents/
Key phrases: “… the circumstances will not be recorded as hate related and that no further action will be taken in respect of this matter. / I have provided the link below to the complaints process for Police Scotland …” BUt do please click through, to savour the entire correspondence.
Did they also suggest the complaints procedure to yourself, David? Is Superintendent Pettigrew dealing with you too? (An apt name, given that the Police seemed to be trying to treat our hate crime and incident reports as petty, but the #Hategate issue subsequently grew, not least by your own considerably press coverage and the insertion of Sarah Thornton’s oar, reported on the Today Programme this morning.)
“Police should focus on tackling burglaries and violent crime rather than worthy issues such as misogyny and wolf-whistling or historical allegations against dead people, one of the country’s most senior officers has said.
Sara Thornton, chairwoman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, called for a refocus on “core policing” in response to increasing violence and record-low conviction rates for crimes such as burglary.
She told a conference in central London that investigating gender-based hate incidents and allegations against those who had died were not “bad things to do” but added: “They just cannot be priorities for a service that is overstretched.”
Speaking out against proposals to class misogyny as a hate crime, Ms Thornton, the former chief constable of Thames Valley, said that limited resources…”
The Times
Says it all really!
An outbreak of common sense is often followed by an outbreak of morale – she’ll find plenty fans and as many enemies saying things like that!
The police are certainly in the back pocket of the LGBTs, there should be no favouritism in law and justice.
It is worthy of note that in Scotland and elsewhere in the EEU, the police often seem to be “in the back pocket of the LGBTs”, as you put it. Perhaps that is the motive for publishing hate posters against religious people in the first place. We know that LGBTs often hate us.
However, the poster, viewed in isolation, appears to be a hate poster against religious people in its own right, without that context, which I have avoided mentioning in my reports of the poster to the police as a hate crime itself.
The reason the police are giving for not even recording reports of the poster as a hate crime or a hate incident, has nothing to do with the police’s apparent clandestine, partisan allegiance to one side rather than the other in the raging culture war of LGBT doctrines. It is simply that they took the decision to publish the hate poster themselves, so it cannot (they argue) be the illegal hate poster it appears to be after all, because (in effect) they are the law. I am sticking to attacking that stance and avoiding mentioning LGBT first.
The police are NOT “the law”!
https://johnallmanuk.wordpress.com/2018/08/24/the-police-are-not-the-law/
This is not a mere personal matter as contended by:
“Chief Superintendent John McKenzie: “It would be inappropriate to comment on a matter of personal correspondence. Police Scotland welcomes correspondence and communication with members of the public.”
It is a matter of “public interest” in the true meaning of the phrase, not as is widely espoused today: it is a matter of public policy in relation to a crime or a pre- criminal activity.
Even if it were conceded that it is a matter of personal correspondence to which the principle of confidentiality applies. that duty confidentiality can be waived by the complainant and has by implication through the newspaper article
However, of deeper concern, there seems to be a lack of understanding by the Chief Superintendent and the framers of the law (as an aside, in answer to Goodfeldt above , the law is an ass so far as the law makers are asinine) as to the constituent parts of a crime:
1 actus reus – criminal act +
2 mens rea – criminal intent (of the defendant)
Generally, both are needed by a defendant for an offence to be committed.(there are exceptions for offences of strict liability, such as exceeding the speed limit).
If the police and the law categorise a hate incident as a non- crime, why are the Police involved at all, rather than some social science governmental quango?
And a “hate incident” seems to be at some distance and far different from “inchoate offences” and from “Public Order Offences. ”
What a mess.
And to borrow from book by Lukianoff & Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind (how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure”, this is just one outworking of coddling in the UK. (Perhaps state-Mammy-Mutti Coddling of FM Sturgeon is apt after all), for It’s all part of what they term “concept creep” and subjective emotional reasoning to expand the meaning of hate speech and a “call-out culture (where) almost anything that is interpreted by anyone as having a negative impact on vulnerable members of the community-regardless of intent can be call hate speech.”
There is shown here in this drift towards (or rather a confluence of the waters of philosophical and identity politics into foaming white -water- rapids over the last decade) what has been described by Lord Jonathan Sacks as both a moral and pathological dualism and a categorisation of people into “good”v “bad/evil.”
Supporting this dualism is framework of “bureaucracy safetyism” and a new culture of expansive and expanding vulnerability, which exponentially generates victimisation leading to a moral dependence on groups an individuals who have been “slighted” who come to rely on external authorities (such as pressure groups, organisations even the state) to resolve their problems. Ultimately this leads to a withering away, “atrophy,”of other forms of conflict management.
Buttressing and underpinning the dualisms and the framework is the yearning or “quest” for justice. Here the authors focus on “Social justice(SJ)” a moral philosophy for a fair and just society.
SJ comprises “intuitive” notions of justice which relies on a combination of “distributive justice” ( a perception that people get what they deserve) and “procedural justice”- a perception that the rules and processes are fair and trustworthy.
NOTE the authors are not Christians. It can be seen how the emphasis on SJ is based on intuition and perception x 2). But the idea of fairness contains a greater or lesser degree of objectivity. Although fairness is spoken in terms of “equity”, it practically amounts to equality of outcomes even though if there is an outcome gap between people of groups or individuals there is no correlation to the outcome proving that there is evidence of bias, systematic or individual, otherwise.
Where does all this take us? It takes us to a place where arguments may be made, discussions take place from a common view, starting point, on terms that thinking secular society may understand. A helpful list of “Distorted automatic thoughts” is set out in the appendix of the book much of which can be seen in modern discourse and which can be used as a simple form of discourse analysis and self-analysis of our own contributions.
Would these posters be considered a hate crime if the phrase “end of Sermon” was replaced with the phrase “end of Khutbah?”
You ask whether these posters would be considered a hate crime if the phrase “end of Sermon” was replaced with the phrase “end of Khutbah”. Considered by whom? I alrady consider the display of these posters to be the crime of incitement to hatred of religious people motivated by hatred of them. I have reported the posters on this basis, using the wording published here:
Police Scotland’s hate crime
https://johnallmanuk.wordpress.com/2018/10/04/police-scotlands-own-hate-crime/
(It goes without saying that a hate crime is a type of hate incident.)
David does not consider displaying the hate posters to be a hate crime, but rather what is called in police jargon a “non-crime hate incident”, for reasons I’ll leave it to David to explain.
A police inspector called John McKenzie has written to David, to me, and to several others, as published in many places on this blog, and also here, on mine:
Police Scotland try to wriggle out of hate crime bust
https://johnallmanuk.wordpress.com/2018/10/11/police-scotland-tries-to-wriggle-out-of-a-hate-crime-bust/
A police superintendent, has written to me saying that the police had super intentions when publishing the hate poster and that for THAT reason he refuses to record the this as a hate incident.
Police Scotland decides not to record its own hate incidents
https://johnallmanuk.wordpress.com/2018/10/31/police-scotlands-decision-not-to-record-reports-of-its-own-hate-incidents/
I already think displaying the posters was a hate crime. Exchanging the word sermon for the word “Kutbah” wouldn’t likely upgrade the hate poster in David’s mind, from a non-crime hate incident to hate crime. This change wouldn’t undermine either the rationale (such as it is) offered by Inspector McKenzie’s and Superintendent Pettigrew’s for not counting the hate poster (which by now could have been reported hundreds of times by religious people who rightly feel intimidated, as intended) as a formal “hate incident”. So we’ll probably never be able to find out how many of us have reported the hate poster as a hate incident or hate crime, unless we challenge that decision.
The rationale of the police is that they are the law, so it is impossible for anything they do, for their own purposes, to amount to breaking the law. Ironically, or perhaps providentially, this story broke just after I’d posted a story about my own life, entitled “The police are NOT ‘the law’!”
In short, changing the work “sermon” to “Kutbah” would appear irrelevant to the entrenched positions of all parties and the reasons they give for taking the positions they do.