Be Excellent To Each Other

Well, the police, seeing as they are the ones on the street, and have to deal with these incidents and their nasty consequences face to face.

Yes, me, too.

Next step, thought crime. /Daily Mail.

That's works fine in a truly equal society where people don't kill each other because they look a bit different. But we don't live in that society and the extra deterrent is so people know that there is zero tolerance to discrimination.

Should we trust the police to decide who gets that extra protection in a fair and unbiased fashion?

You're talking about policing rather than sentencing.

Anyway, who else is going to police the police?

*waits for Homer meme*

I have been since twenty to three.

How does that remotely follow? That only makes sense if people are more likely to kill someone because they're racist or whatever, and will simultaneously be more likely to be deterred by a higher sentence (the two, of course, not sitting well together). I'm not sure there's any evidence that's actually true.

I'd rather no one killed anyone, and we had sentencing that reflected that.

Two thoughts just struck me- I have a very special weakness for those wee little sausages you put on sticks, and I really want to be the sort of person who applies for jobs advertised in the Economist.

Sorry, I thought you were responding to my post above yours about sentencing for hate crimes. Carry on.

I'm a little too tired today to debate that in full, but sentencing is supposed to act as a deterrent, you'll have to concede that. Whether it does in practice - probably not since all crime still exists.

In any event, sentencing is not black and white. You don't get X years for Crime A; Y for Crime B.

If you line up Crime A as attracting a punishment of X years then you'll have mitigating features that will reduce the sentence then you have aggravating features that will increase the sentence. Racial (or otherwise) motivation is clearly an aggravating factor.

If someone attacks another because of their race or whatever, then a sharper punishment ought follow because it's abhorrent, socially unacceptable etc etc etc.

I wasn't arguing that - I was arguing that the idea that if one sort of crime is worse due to a fundamentally irrational motivation then that would mean that a higher sentence would logically not act as a greater deterrent against those irrational fuckheads.

It is for racially aggravated assault, oho.


Yes, I'm aware of how sentencing works.


Is it more or less abhorrent than assaulting someone because they spilt their pint?

I genuinely don't see why the motivation makes one crime "worse" than another. Guy A attacks Guy B over Guy B looking at Guy A's bird funny (he did no such thing) and puts him in hospital leaving him without the use of his legs. Guy Z attacks Guy Y because he's black and puts him in hospital and leaves him without the use of his legs. Why should the latter crime have a higher penalty, when the effect on the victim is the same? Why is the former victim's pain and suffering worth less deterrence?

They're both fucking horrible crimes, and to say "well, one victim was black/gay/female therefore it's worse" is just wrong. Because the flipside is that the other "non aggravated" victim wasn't worth as much bother.

As far as I'm aware the measures being taken by Manchester police isn't changing the sentencing at all. It's simply recording whether the person being attacked is a member of a subculture to determine if that was a motivating factor.

Yep, that was my understanding as well. Very sensible thing to do. You can't police properly without knowing where the various risks lie.

Excellent. Hoo-hah over.

I WANT TO ARGUE BORING TECHNICAL LAW STUFF WITH SATURNALIAN LIKE THE MASSIVE TEDE I AM.

Ahem

But . What if, in manchester police's eyes, some sub cultures are more equal than others? As i mentioned 7 hours previous.

What if we all lived on the moon in space bears and shot at each other with mind cannon fists?

Sentencing isn't compensatory punishment for the victim.

If you break someone's legs after getting drunk you'll get the punishment and the adjustments for the circumstances.

If you break someone's legs because they're black then you're a special kind of danger to the public.

Of course, if you're a loon who breaks people's legs cause you're a dangerous irrational psychopath, well, you'll probably get a steep punishment anyway for being a loon.

It's Friday, man, and The Walking Dead finale is on in 15 minutes.

Did you learn all about QOWCS though?

You know full well that wasn't what I was getting at, chap.


All of which is within the judge's discretion within sentencing, and quite rightly so. However, there doesn't need to be a special crime for the one category.

I've got several episodes to catch up on, and am instead watching the Adjustment Bureau and then more of Happy Endings (it's great!)


I learnt what the acronym stood for, which was enough for me.

We should totally do that. But the fists should be made from marshmallow.

Speaking about attacks on minorities, I find it terrifying how the local buses now have posters on them about reporting and recognising disability hate crime. I mean, that was all practically unknown, or at least extremely rare, just 3 or 4 years ago.

Yes but everybody on disability benefits are lazy shirkers who are scamming the system. The papers tell me everyday. And I watch Saints or Scroungers on BBC TV too.

Should the police get to decide to treat the mods or the rockers more favorably? Two sub cultures in society.

I've got a 20 year old nephew with severe disabilities so know and have known quite a few people who are disabled or who are related to disabled people, through his schools. Disability hate crime is not new.

It's definitely not, but the extent of it certainly is.

Again, I don't know if that's true. Have you got some figures showing that absolute numbers of offences have gone up (rather than number of reported offences going up due to greater awareness etc)? This is a genuine question, rather than me being argumentative.

The police in Manchester aren't treating anyone more favourably. They're recording whether the victim of violent crime is a member of a subculture. It's not altering the way they're dealing with crime on a day to day basis at all. They're not providing armed guards for goths. They're not cracking down on roving bands of football fans. They're simply establishing motive.

FFS, why does HIGNFY take longer than everything else to get up on iplayer? Tonight's episode of Not Fucking Going Fucking Out is already on there FFS.

How could anyone have those sorts of figures, though? By definition, the figure would be the number of reported offences, surely?

IIRC, the British Crime Survey does just that. However, it would still leave it open to question whether things were recorded or recognised as specifically being crime X motivated by hatred of disabled people rather than just crime X.

It's not extra protection. The goth/emo has already been attacked. It just gets logged as a hate crime. I suppose, after a few years, they will test the statistical significance and make some suggestions based on that.

The question is not 'what they shout while they stamp on someone'; it's 'the reason they are stamping on someone in the first place'.

Just started watching Arrested Development.

Man it's good. Why did I wait so long to watch it.

I don't think I'd even heard of it until I got it as a Christmas present back in 2011.

Well, it sort of may be. "Fuck you you fucking goth freak" would be a give away. I think you know what I meant - I was using "what they shout" as a crude example of the "the reason".

Fuck my hat if throwing a Golden Dawn MP into the sea isn't the most beautiful act...

I was walking into Shipley to buy some more chemicals and rags when a car slowed down. It was a Hyundai Coupe had three young lads in it.They expressed their liking of my rucksack in street patois over the noise of their syncopated music in It was an uplifting moment on a sunny day.

"Oy Mitchell, you have a nancy bag you unfunny wanker".

Cock. Just dropped my phone on the floor. Screen cracked.

What was it? Some are surprisingly cheap and simple to fix.

Galaxy S2. This isn't one of those, is it?

New tv got, it's very lovely

Nope. 70 quid for the parts by the look of it.

Lovely. Ta. I shall check it out.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-22051197

Shouldn't be a safety concern though, as there's usually at least two pilots on board in the cockpit, sometimes three - right?