Police ‘fail to crack down’ on hate crimes against disabled

The charity, which is launching a three-year campaign against hate crime, said there was a “general lack of police understanding of disability hate crime” and an absence of a strategy to tackle it.

The report comes after Fiona Pilkington, 38, killed herself and her disabled daughter Francesca Hardwick, 18, in 2007 following years of abuse and harassment by a gang in Leicestershire.

Officers are not taking reports of such crimes seriously enough, risking “years of harassment and anti-social behaviour escalating into more serious incidents”, the charity said.

The Stand By Me campaign called for a dedicated officer within each force to deal with hate crime. Forces should also improve their systems to get “a better sense of the true scale of the problem”, Mencap said.

Half of those interviewed in a poll of more than 1,000 people said they believe those with disabilities are more likely to be the targets of abusive comments or aggressive behaviour than others.

Two thirds said they consider abusive comments such as name calling directed at someone with a disability as a hate crime, rising to three quarters when aggressive behaviour such as pushing or hitting was involved.

Mencap also highlighted the death of David Askew, 64, who collapsed and died last year after an incident when youths had reportedly thrown a wheelie bin around and tampered with his mother’s mobility scooter.

Mr Askew, who had learning difficulties, and his family were plagued by yobs on their council estate in Hattersley, Tameside, and had called police 88 times over six years.

Mark Goldring, Mencap’s chief executive, said: “When hate crime takes hold it stops people living their lives in the way they want to.

“The tragic deaths of Fiona Pilkington and Francecca Hardwick in 2007 and David Askew in 2010 are just two examples of where low-level harassment ignored by police was allowed to escalate into sustained abuse with fatal consequences.

“It is estimated that as many as nine out of 10 people with a learning disability are verbally harassed or exposed to violence due to their disability. Today’s report proves that police have not got to grips with disability hate crime, let alone crime against people with a learning disability.”

Police forces in Yorkshire, however, denied that they were failing to deal with the issue.

Det supt Richard Fewkes, from South Yorkshire Police, said: “We’ve done an awful lot of work in the last two years in terms of hate crime generally. There is a 10-point pledge that Mencap have put out, and we by and large meet all the criteria already. We make every effort to ensure that we offer quality of service to everyone that reports a crime to us, but we also take into account the needs of people that have disabilities or come from different backgrounds.

“In the last 12 months we’ve embarked on training officers in specialist interview techniques which take account of people who have got different needs in terms of how they communicate, or their mental capacity.”

Chief inspector Marianne Huison from West Yorkshire Police said that the force takes “issues of disability hate crime extremely seriously” and added: “Over the last year alone every front line officer has received disability hate crime training and we are currently embarking on a larger programme for all staff across the force.

“All this work is aimed at enabling people to better identify disability hate crime, the issues involved and how to report it.

“Our hate crime scrutiny panels also involve members of the local community who themselves have particular disabilities. These meetings help the police to assess how we respond to incidents and how we investigate.” A Home Office spokesman said: “Under this Government, and for the first time, police are recording hate crime data centrally.

“This will help the police to target resources more effectively and better protect victims.”

Comment: Page 10.