Mick Hartley

Police are now driving around in lovely rainbow-coloured Pride cars:

The great awokening of the British constabulary has got to be the most curious and infuriating part of our culture war. While knife crime continues to rise, an inordinate amount of police time now seems to be taken up by various virtue-signalling initiatives.

Take the rise of ‘rainbow cars’. For some time now members of the public have been bemused to see cop cars patrolling their neighbourhoods emblazoned in the LGBT flag. Now the LGBT+ lead of the National Police Chiefs Council has felt the need to make an Instagram post explaining it all to us.

In the video, deputy chief constable Julie Cooke — complete with rainbow lanyard and miniature rainbow flag in the background — informs us that such schemes aren’t expensive and that the cars help ‘give confidence to our LGBT+ community, but also to other under-represented groups’ in coming forward to report hate crimes. She even dubs them ‘hate-crime cars’.

Cooke seems to think that long-running suspicions towards police among certain sections of society — not just LGBT people but also all ‘under-represented groups’ — can be addressed by an inexpensive, gay-friendly paint job. Of course the police should try to maintain good relationships with minority groups, but this is a dumb and patronising way to do it.

But more importantly, such shallow attempts at community outreach represent a broader threat to the freedoms of all citizens, whether you’re gay or straight, white or black. For as has become clear in recent years, the ‘hate crimes’ the police are so doggedly pursuing often just amount to ‘offensive’ speech.

But there's one area where police aren't doing so well. Can you guess?

Domestic abuse prosecutions have halved in three years and forces are failing to use measures designed to protect victims, watchdogs have said. Women are subject to an “epidemic” of violence and abuse and officers are not seeking enough protection orders or ensuring that breaches are punished, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), the Independent Office for Police Conduct and the College of Policing warned a in joint report.

The report said that in one case a drunk man had called police to say he was at his partner’s address and needed to be arrested. The call handler included in the incident log that the man was subject to pre-charge bail conditions that prevented him from contacting his partner. The detail was not written in the appropriate section, meaning officers were not made aware.

They arrived at the scene but left without making any arrests. The man was arrested the next day after he was found on top of the woman strangling her and saying he was trying to kill her.

The report, prompted by a complaint from the charity Centre for Women’s Justice, found a series of failures to safeguard victims by placing alleged abusers on police bail with strict conditions or deploying injunctions and other civil measures designed to prevent violence.

The report reveals that domestic abuse prosecutions have collapsed by 50 per cent. In 2017 18 per cent of reported cases led to prosecution, compared with only 9 per cent last year.

Restraining orders are granted in less than a quarter of domestic abuse prosecutions. Women have been increasingly turning to civil injunctions, which have increased by 48 per cent from 2010 to 2019.

Nogah Ofer, a solicitor with the charity, welcomed the findings but said the recommendations were too vague. “Two women a week are still being killed and many women live in fear,” she said.

Perhaps the police have been informed by their Stonewall advisers that such crimes against "cis-women" aren't really worth bothering with when there's all this hate being directed at the trans community – like these awful gender-critical women saying that trans women aren't really women.