There’s a scene in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) that puts me in mind of Plato’s “Allegory of The Cave” (Republic c. 375 BCE). Matthew McConaughey, the successful, experienced trader instructs a young Leo DiCaprio in the truth about Wall Street:
McConaughey: The name of the game is moving the money from the client’s pocket to your pocket.
DiCaprio: But if you can make your client’s money at the same time, it’s advantageous to everyone, correct?
McConaughey: No.
He explains why: "So, if you’ve got a client who bought stock at 8 and now it’s at 16 and he’s all fucking happy, he wants to take in cash and liquidate, take his fucking money and run home. You don’t let him do that… cause that would make it real."
The allegory is enduring because its application is to be found wherever truth requires subverting. Truman Burbank is unaware that his entire life is a TV show. In Gaslight (1944), Ingrid Bergman is driven half-mad as the tension mounts between what she is told is true and what she knows is true. In The Wolf of Wall Street, city slickers mesmerise clients with growth charts and wealth indices to give the impression of riches without ever providing the means to take it to the store. Common to them all is the shadow master, whose skill is in suspending the belief of the onlooker to suit a malignant purpose. Reality must never intrude on the show.
The College of Policing is not a big fan of reality, much preferring to con the public with its endless “theatre of hate” than oversee any actual policing. Its response to the murder of a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, is all shadow and no substance. For starters, the murder occurred in 1993, the report into the police response was published in 1997, and yet it took until 2014 before the professional body overseeing the police service of England and Wales finally got round to implementing the findings.
Except, of course, what The College implemented was a shadow of the findings. In place of the call for increased police scrutiny came a doubling down on public scrutiny; the recommendation to believe communities was replaced with the requirement to believe any blue-haired activist with a grudge; the implied demand to protect women was replaced with a fanatical protection of gender identity; the 9 Protected Characteristics of The Equality Act were replaced with 5 Monitored Strands, and the requirement to consider subjective experience was replaced with the canonisation of perception. The police love perception as it is impervious to reality.
Perception is at the heart of what the police call a Non-Crime Hate Incident (or NCHI). An NCHI is defined as any incident which is perceived by the victim or anybody else to be motivated by hatred. No evidence of the hate element is required and perception is everything. No wonder they are fetishised: they provide means to judgment without trial.
Astonishing moves come with astonishing promises. NCHIs, it was claimed, would prove the innovative tool in preventing such everyday emotions as antagonism, unfriendliness, ill-will and dislike from escalating into the kind of tragedy that befell Stephen Lawrence. Also, it was claimed, they would lessen the risk of genocide.
Reader, do not adjust your glasses. At The High Court, the police claimed that recording me for tweeting, “I was assigned mammal at birth but I identify as fish. Don’t mis-species me, fuckers,” was a necessary intervention, without which I may have become the next Pol Pot.
Genocide narratives are quite en vogue. Last week, opposing counsel in the Forstater employment tribune appeal argued that an unwillingness to refer to a bearded man with the pronouns she/her is comparable to Holocaust promotion. Insofar as we have not had a recent genocide, one might argue that The College’s policy has been successful. But that is much like the argument for ringing the Anti-Tiger bell each morning.
Five years had passed between the stealthy introduction of NCHIs and these incidents being held up to scrutiny. Five years in which the police have quietly amassed over 120,000 of these wretched things an average of around 66 per day. We asked to see the evidence of veracity. According to figures published by The Home Office, since the launch of this initiative in 2014, hate crime has risen by 82%. [The Home Office report, Hate Crime England and Wales, 2019/20]. Rather than driving hate crime down, hard statistics show that Hate Crime has increased. But that is the problem with reality. It makes life awkward.
Freedom of Information Requests sent by Fair Cop to all forces across England and Wales reveal that the police don’t even attempt to analyse the link between NCHIs and Hate Crime, let alone employ them as a practical tool in crime prevention. The number of hate crimes assessed as having been prevented as a result of collecting NCHI is a fat, round zero.
The surprise is not that the policy has failed but that it was never meant to succeed. Section 11 of The Hate Crime Operational Guidance reads: “Targets that see success as reducing hate crime are not appropriate as they can be discouraging to staff.” In other words, Hate Crime is to The College of Policing what Lickable Wallpaper and the Chocolate River are to Willy Wonka. Success is defined as sustaining the supply rather than stopping it.
To that end, in October 2020, The College added sectarian religious fanatics, transvestites and Goths to its List of The Great Oppressed whilst extending the pool of potential suspects to include school children. This means that any 12-year-old objecting to Drag Queen Story Time because the guy in the dress looks as scary as Marilyn Manson becomes doubly eligible for an NCHI. That’s Trans hate and Goth hate. Two for the price of one...
What any of this has to do with Stephen Lawrence is anyone’s guess. Nevertheless, he remains the star of the Hate Show. Ask how retweeting a feminist verse on Twitter is worthy of police intervention and the answer comes back, “Because of Stephen Lawrence.” When a street preacher is hauled from his soapbox for reading from The Book of Genesis, it is “because of Stephen Lawrence.” When an 86 year old retired teacher writes a polite letter offering a view on abortion, he is served with an NCHI “because of Stephen Lawrence.” In The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, the answer to everything is 42. To the marketing sharks of the hate industry, the answer is ‘Stephen Lawrence’. In other words, his legacy is to have been transduced by the police into the primary marketing tool of its booming Hate Factory. There’s money in hate. And forgive me for saying so, but this is about as cynical as sticking his face on a bottle of Cillit Bang.
We perhaps wouldn’t mind if the repeated incantation of a murder victim’s name produced tangible results to the benefit of those who share his race. Since 2014, racially motivated hate crime has risen by 67%. But to focus on this is again to miss the point.
McConaughey: ‘You know what Fugazi is?
DiCaprio: Fugayzi. It’s a fake.
McConaughey: Fugayzi, fugazi. It's a woozy. It’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It is no matter. It’s not on the elemental chart. It’s not fucking real.
Living with fugazi is tough but, much like Sisyphus rolling his stone, one gets used to it. True torment comes with awareness of one’s condition, that what we were told is reality has no more substance than fairy dust. This is why we welcome The Home Secretary Priti Patel’s recent demand that The College of Policing ditches its loathsome policy of judgment without trial. Knowing full well that a Court of Appeal ruling against The College could drop any day, my guess is that she has taken pre-emptive action. She has looked beyond the shadows and seen the writing on the wall.