David Gillon

New UK hate crime figures, sigh

2025-10-09T17:24:51Z

The new hate crime figures are out, apparently disability hate crime is slightly down. Am I being cynical in assuming that's probably because some of the haters are too busy committing hate crimes against muslims and/or jews and/or anyone who doesn't look like them?

Trans hate crime is also slightly down, but I'd presume that would be people feeling even less safe to report it, rather than an actual reduction.

The figures exclude the Met, the biggest force in the country because they're busy adopting a new crime reporting tool - so give us their figures as a separate entry, don't just exclude them entirely. *headdesk*

Somewhat embarrassingly for the police/Home Office, the Office for Statistics Regulation is still insisting they include a caveat to say their data is actually pretty crap.

What comes through when considering that the figures cover the period of the Stockport-related race riots is that the figures, even if recorded as intended, are utterly incapable of recording mass events like riots. If 300 people are chanting racist slogans and throwing bricks, but the police only arrest 3 of them, then only 3 crimes would be reported. It's definitely working as intended, but is working as intended what they actually intended?

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When Othering Reduces us to Monsters to be Slain

2016-07-18T18:55:22Z

Horrific story in the Guardian with three deaf women in Haiti murdered for allegedly being 'lougarous'. Trigger warning for a horrific disability hate crime.

Link to story

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UKIP, you couldn't make it up - number 187 in a continuing series

2015-01-27T22:49:03Z

Latest *headdesk* on the UKIP front is a parliamentary candidate found to have posted online that gays are 'fascist perverts' and 'paedophiles':

UKIP candidate: Gay people are ‘fascist perverts’ and ‘paedophiles’

The article is in Pink News, so their focus is understandable, but I think a mainstream news organisation might have led with the fact that he was posting online in the forums of the BNP's website, and defending the EDL when he made the remarks.

This is someone who has supposedly been through UKIP's enhanced background checking to ensure he's never been a BNP supporter or the like. If it misses something as blatant as him posting on the BNP website, then you have to wonder just what sort of an enhanced checking process they've come up with - I'm picturing something along the lines of those forms they hand out on US-bound flight asking if you're entering the country for the purpose of the overthrow of the state, cos they always work....

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Link: Remembering the Holocaust

2015-01-27T21:51:27Z

It's often forgotten, or was never learnt, that disabled people were the first group singled out for systematic killing during the Holocaust in Aktion T4, that's something we should never allow ourselves to forget. I was trying to think of something appropriate to write, but Katharine Quarmby has saved me the effort by putting up the section of her book Scapegoat that discusses the T4 programme as her blog post for today:

Remembering the Holocaust – and the disabled victims who died in the T4 programme

(BTW, Scapegoat: why we are failing disabled people (Portobello, 2011), is an absolutely fantastic, if horrendously chilling, study of disability hate crime in the UK).

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