BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY
Merseyside's race hate crimes won't be stopped by body cameras
Giving business owners technology to record assaults won't protect them. We must address the causes of bigotry, not film it
‘What does it say about the financial position of our police forces if they now don't have the resources to attend to the public's number one bugbear – antisocial crime?' Photograph: Jim Dyson/Getty
It is a question bedevilling every liberal democracy. People must be free to think as they choose, but how to police hate? We have laws that proscribe behaviours injurious to society, yet they can do little to affect the root causes of racism and sexism and discriminatory thinking. That's a job for parents and teachers, the authorities with the heft and reach to alter public perceptions. Sad to say, at grassroots level, that effort is proving difficult, and there are signs that we're giving up.
Consider the latest plan for policing hate in Merseyside. Staff in ethnic minority shops, notably Chinese and Indian takeaway restaurants who have been targeted by racists, will be kitted out with body cameras to record evidence of racially motivated crimes against them. A £35,000 grant will pay for 48 miniature cameras, charging stations and data storage units. Workers will wear lanyards around their necks, fitted with miniature cameras. As trouble starts, they hit the switch and the device lights up to indicate that it is recording.
It's a very modern solution to a very old problem, for in towns and cities up and down the land, yobs have long claimed the right to cause drunken mayhem in shops and restaurants run by visible minorities. Proprietors have long learned to endure the predilection as an occupational hazard. If this plan gives arrogant racist thugs pause for thought, few will be sorry about that.
But it says much that the shop and restaurant workers – who pay their taxes and business rates and are as entitled as anyone else to protection from the state – are effectively being obliged to self-police.
What next? Should women wear video cameras walking home late at night through the high street? Should the sensible wheelchair user stick a camera on a lapel before venturing out? The police need help from the public. And the public should be prudent about its own protection. But what does it say about the financial position of our police forces if they now don't have the resources to attend to the public's number one bugbear – antisocial crime?
So we're hamstrung in terms of enforcing the legislation. What of hearts and minds? What of persuasion? How can we deal with ritual yobbery? At its root it is born of ignorance and bigotry that society should be challenging. But we have stepped back from that too. It didn't take the coalition very long, for instance, to hack away at the network of anti-racist and community relations organisations that fought against this sort of behaviour.
As part of the clampdown on public spending and the war against so-called political correctness, funding streams were cut, priorities were changed. Some of that was orchestrated by central government, some by councils who currently face a funding gap of £5.8bn between March 2014 and March 2016, and were thus forced to reprioritise.
The Commission for Racial Equality was abolished. Its successor body speaks in whispers when it speaks at all. The result is a significant diminution of our ability to challenge the stereotyping and assumptions underpinning this behaviour. As we sowed, we reap.
There is a place for law enforcement. It is the place of last resort. And there is a place for technology. It might accord us more time, make us safer, allow us to use finite resources more efficiently. But the role for technology in the conduct of human affairs should not be primary, it should be complementary. Law and technology cannot, even taken together, act as substitutes for the reasonable demand that human beings act decently. That should be our default position.
Merseyside's cameras may reveal what hate crimes are occurring – and that's a good thing. But to truly address the problem, we need the will to go deeper and find out why they are.
The problem is the people who are suppose to pass fair judgement when racist are brought to justice by Black People they face people who are always white trying to give judgment on white racist who like them are white, this is where the problem comes in, never been Black, never been called a Nigger, never been told to go home were you came from even though you happen to have been born in this country, they find it impossible not to be bias towards the white Respondent :
The problem is the people who are suppose to pass fair judgement when racist are brought to justice by Black People they face people who are always white trying to give judgment on white racist who like them are white, this is where the problem comes in, never been Black, never been called a Nigger, never been told to go home were you came from even though you happen to have been born in this country, they find it impossible not to be bias towards the white Respondent :
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