Why do police like to categorise and label things? One reason is that it’s a way – sometimes the only way – of managing risk, a big part of policing.

One example is the domestic abuse checklist, which anyone who has received a follow-up visit from a police officer following a “domestic” will be familiar with. This involves giving yes/no answers to 20+ questions around the past behaviour of the abusing party – whether they were violent, exhibited jealous or controlling behaviour, made threats, and so on. The number of “yes” answers determines the risk level of the incident and the way that police respond to it – whether the victim is offered a panic alarm for instance, or referred to a legal advisor specialising in non-molestation orders. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s a systematic and reliable way of quantifying the risk to the victim and offering the right support to the right people.

The problem with categories and labels is when they start to dictate the service given by the police – a case of the tail wagging the dog. This has tended to happen with hate crime. Back around 2004, the police service recognised six categories or “strands” of diversity – these being race, gender, sexual orientation, religion and belief, disability and age. Of these, race tended to be taken the most seriously (diversity training used to be called “race and diversity”, as if race belonged in a category all to itself). A few years later, diversity strands were renamed as “protected characteristics” and expanded to nine – the additions were pregnancy and maternity, gender reassignment, and marriage and civil partnership. These are enshrined in the Equality Act 2010.

Of course, with the six categories becoming nine, the only thing that has changed is the police’s understanding and response to hate crime. Hate crime itself is the same as it always was – and herein lies the problem with trying to categorise it. Hate crime is about being marginalised, attacked or abused due to being different. The most obvious way of being different is the colour of your skin – perhaps the reason why the police have tended to focus on racially-motivated crime, which is still more common than other forms of hate crime. However, looking different – and being made to suffer for it – isn’t only about race.

In 2007, Sophie Lancaster, a young woman in her early 20’s, was with her boyfriend when they were attacked by a group of males in their mid-teens. Sophie suffered severe head injuries in the attack, went into a coma and later died. It was later revealed that the attack was motivated by Sophie’s appearance – she was part of the goth subculture.

This was a classic example of hate crime – Sophie was attacked because of the way she looked, and being part of a minority subculture. The problem was that at the time, no police forces were set up to recognise this form of hate crime. Because it didn’t fit into any of the nine protected characteristics, as far as the police were concerned it wasn’t a hate-related incident.

In our tweets this week, we have mentioned Sophie’s death as an example of the importance of neurodiversity in the police service – recognising difference in all its forms, including difference of thought, rather than trying to assign labels to it. This means recognising the strengths of staff affected by autism rather than putting them into the “disabled” category, and recognising incidents like the murder of Sophie Lancaster as being motived by hatred despite them not fitting into a protected characteristic tickbox.

To end this post on a positive note, Greater Manchester Police, the Force investigating Sophie’s murder, was the first to recognise subculture (or lifestyle choice) as a category of hate crime – an acceptance that clothes, makeup hair or pretty much anything can cause someone to be a victim of crime. We hope that other Forces will follow GMP’s lead.