Hate crime: the Extra Factor

Following the concerns of Sir Ken McDonald, former head of the Crown Prosecution Service over the failure to recognise disability hate crime, Senior Policy Adviser with the CPS Nadine Tilbury says that something can be learned from Simon Cowell

In his farewell speech to the Bar Association, Sir Ken McDonald said he thought prosecutors in respect of disability hate crimes were where we were about ten years ago on race and homophobic hate crime. We’ve not appreciated that an essentially different approach is needed.

In the Crown Prosecution Service, we are now coming to understand that if a gay or black person is assaulted, the first question that will come to mind is: was this related to their orientation or race?

But when a disabled person is assaulted, this too often isn’t the first question that comes to mind. Instead prosecutors and police have tended to look first at the vulnerability aspect: it’s easier to rob someone who’s in a wheelchair or blind. And that’s where they stop. They don’t go on to think: is there something more?

In our training, we’re now beginning to address this discrepancy. We’ve outlined in detail the difference between a prosecution based on vulnerability as opposed to hostility.

What we’re doing is focussing minds to say: look for the hostility aspect.

In terms of our working with the police, it’s about shifting the focus from looking at the victim’s behaviour, doing with disability hate crime exactly what we did with domestic violence, and saying let’s examine the offender’s behaviour.

That makes it less about the victim having brought the assault on themselves and more about what is in fact entirely down to the offender, his behaviour, his accountability for his behaviour and any hostility element in the crime.

It’s like a mixture between the M&S adverts – this isn’t just crime, it’s hate crime – and Simon Cowell’s Extra Factor. It’s not just a robbery, there’s an extra factor.

For example, the perpetrator has a record of picking on people in wheelchairs; or he tipped the wheelchair over, which was unnecessary in order to effect a simple robbery. So it’s not just an assault, not just a robbery, but there’s an extra factor.

We hope that this approach will turn what might look like straightforward assault cases into hate-crime cases. And when this starts to filter through we hope the community will feel more confident in coming to the police and us and saying “I want you to look at this as a hostility case, a disability hate crime case.”

• Nadine Tilbury was talking to Ian Macrae