Prejudice-motivated crime strategy
Victoria Police launched its Prejudice-Motivated Crime Strategy at Melbourne Town Hall on July 8.
According to the pamphlet launched by VicPol (the Strategy itself remains an internal police document), prejudice-motivated crime is defined as 鈥渁 criminal act which is wholly or partly motivated by prejudice or hatred towards a person or a group because of a particular characteristic, such as sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, race, sex, age, disability, homelessness鈥�.
This will be considered an aggravating factor in sentencing.
The Acting Assistant Commissioner of Victoria Police, Superintendent Tracy Linford, emceed the launch, which was well-attended by representatives from a number of communities.
In her introduction, she listed leaders of the communities attending 鈥� with the exception of the GLBTI community. She pointed out that police intelligence on prejudice-motivated crimes has been hampered because reporting 鈥渇orms haven鈥檛 been able to collect the data that we鈥檝e needed鈥�.
This was reiterated by Acting Chief Commissioner Ken Lay, who said that, in collecting and analysing data, VicPol was 鈥渟tarting from a low base鈥�.
There were two key areas to the Strategy: 鈥渋ncreasing the knowledge of our members and decreasing the number of [prejudice-motivated] crimes鈥�. Lay stated that 鈥渨e should not, and will not, tolerate this kind of behaviour鈥�; 鈥渆veryone has the right to feel safe鈥�; and there are 鈥渟ome people in the community that we need to continue to build a level of trust with鈥�.
The Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission ran an online survey which found the process of reporting prejudice-motivated crime was 鈥渄aunting, scary and impossible鈥�. Commissioner Helen Szoke suggested that, according to the survey, sometimes prejudice-motivated crime was 鈥渆xcused as opportunistic, whereas people know it鈥檚 against them due to a particular attribute they have鈥�.
Many community members don鈥檛 yet feel comfortable walking into any police station to report such a crime. Previous research found significant GLBTI underreporting rates for heterosexist violence and abuse.
For this reason it is disappointing, from our community鈥檚 perspective, that the Victoria Police pamphlet includes only instructions to report crimes to police stations, or to Crime Stoppers, mentioning nothing about GLLOs.
Commissioner Szoke pointed out that 鈥渢hird-party reporting mechanisms [are] a very important part of the Strategy鈥�, probably referring to our ability to report prejudice-motivated crimes to the Anti-Violence Project, with the information then being passed on to Victoria Police.
By Barbary Clarke, convenor of the VGLRL鈥檚 Policy Working Grou. Clarke is doing a PhD on women and life-threatening illness.
