getting away with murder - Birmingham Disability Resource Centre

Eliminate casual and institutional disablism• The Department of Health should revise the No Secrets guidance to introduce astatutory duty on local authorities to safeguard disabled adults and workproactively with the police and other statutory agencies to stop and prevent hatecrime. Guidance should include information on how to safeguard “vulnerable”adults in a way that respects and supports disabled people’s autonomy, their rightto live independently and make their own decisions.• Do not use the word “vulnerable” as a synonym for “disabled”, study the legaldefinition of the term carefully, and use it correctly.• Do not use the word “bullying” to describe attacks on disabled people, and do notrefer to disabled people having the “mental age of…”. Such terms infantilisedisabled people and mask the seriousness of the crimes committed against them.• In developing their Disability Equality schemes all local authorities and policeforces should work with local disabled people to identify specific actions to tacklecrime, including hate crime, against disabled people.• The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) should use its powers toconduct a formal investigation into the recording, investigation and prosecution ofdisability hate crime and the support provided to disabled people to enable them toget redress through the criminal justice system.• Social workers and associated professionals should ensure that in implementingpolicies on safeguarding vulnerable adults they respect the autonomy and rights ofdisabled people to live independently.• The police should state publicly, when commencing an investigation, if the case isbeing treated as a disability hate crime.• Journalists should report incidents of disability hate crime to help raise publicawareness of the issue.Ensure disabled people have equal access to justice• The Home Office should work with disabled people and the police to developspecific guidance for police, prosecutors and judges on identifying crimes that aremotivated by hostility, and how to distinguish these from crimes motivated byvulnerability.• The Home Office should introduce Statutory Performance Indicators (SPIs) forcrimes against disabled people and disability targeted hate crime. The SPIs shouldinclude the collection of data on the volume of crimes against disabled people, thevolume of disability targeted hate crime, sanctioned detection rates for disabilitytargeted hate crime, disabled victim satisfaction rates and comparisons of sanctiondetection rates between disabled and non-disabled victims.• The Home Office should revise its legal definition of a ‘vulnerable person’ so itdoes not assume that disabled people are innately vulnerable.• The Home Office should commission a review of all violent deaths of disabledpeople by a criminologist, to see if a perpetrator analysis or offender profile(s) canbe constructed for disablist crime. Betsy Stanko’s work on rape offender profilingfor the Metropolitan Police revolutionised the Police’s understanding of rape andtheir ability to tackle it. A similar approach is needed for disability hate crime.• The Home Office should consider giving judges power to use sentencingprovisions on disability hate and vulnerability together in cases where the crimewas motivated by both vulnerability and hostility.60