Crime reporter(wp/es):
Racist offenders in London are escaping punishment for hate crimes because police are failing to pursue their cases properly, a top prosecutor has warned.
Ed Beltrami, one of London’s two chief crown prosecutors, said he feared officers were often too busy to investigate racist crimes adequately or to do the necessary paperwork to enable the hate aspect of an offence to be included in a charge.
He said that despite public reports of abuse and racist incidents presenting a “much bigger problem” in recent years, there had been no increase in the number of cases referred to prosecutors for charging decisions.
Mr Beltrami added that the failure of police to investigate the racist aspect of a crime meant that an offender’s history of similar conduct — and therefore the “much more serious” threat they posed — remained hidden.
The comments will alarm anti-racism campaigners and politicians who have called for strong penalties to be imposed on those who commit offences motivated by hate. The pressure for robust action has increased after hate crimes reported to police rose by 17 per cent in England and Wales in the 12 months to the end of March last year. There were 94,068 offences, of which three quarters were racially motivated hate crimes.
Metropolitan Police statistics show that race and religious hate crimes have risen over the past four years in London, with 1,500 offences recorded in November last year, compared with about 1,000 in the same month in 2014.
In an interview with the Evening Standard, Mr Beltrami said: “There are incidents, a terrorist incident or whatever it is, you read that there has been all sorts of fall-off from that — people being abused, incidents at mosques — but it never seems to affect our numbers of cases coming through. I’m absolutely sure that things are reported but they don’t come to us. There seems to be a blockage.
“Police are under pressure, they have resourcing issues, and I think some things fall off the table a bit more quickly than they might were they in a better position.
“I’ve spoken to many community groups and you get the impression of a much bigger problem than what is coming through to me.” Any crime motivated by racial prejudice can attract an additional prison sentence on top of the penalty imposed for the principal offence.
Mr Beltrami said that police were often failing to alert prosecutors to a potential racial element in a case, and were instead pressing ahead with charging decisions themselves.
The prosecutor said: “The rule is with hate crime cases — racially aggravated, homophobic, all the rest of it — the police have to come to us for a charging decision.
“That causes the police a problem because it’s more hassle for them to put the papers together to come to us and we then make a decision. So what you find is that the police won’t charge it as a racially aggravated thing, they just charge it as a common assault. So it bypasses the system.
“What I’m also finding is that sometimes the rush [to charge] means that the investigation hasn’t been as thorough as it might be.
“You get one isolated incident of somebody being abusive to somebody else on racial grounds, and it’s charged as such ... whereas if you took more time you might find that it’s been going on for several months — that it’s a much more serious thing.
“The police just want to get it charged and get on with it because they are busy. I think we miss things that way.”
Mr Beltrami said that despite his criticisms, he did not want to blame the Met because they were overloaded with other tasks. He added: “I’m making the point that they are quite stretched and it has a knock-on effect for us and criminal justice as a whole.”
The Met insisted it was pursuing racist offenders and was “committed to tackling hate crime in all its forms”.
It added: “Where there is evidence that a racially aggravating factor exists, this will be investigated thoroughly and a charging decision sought where appropriate.”
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