British Muslims laud new rules for reporting hate crimes

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Thursday 15 Oct 2015 - 16:57 Makkah mean time-2-1-1437 (Image from google) London, (IINA) - Members of British Muslim groups have welcomed the government's new rules to record data of hate crimes against Muslims separately, shortly after reporting a 71 percent hike in physical, verbal and online Islamophobic crimes, OnIslam reported. According to new government rules, police forces across England and Wales will be obliged to separately record data on hate crimes against Muslims. This technique is followed when recording anti-Semitic attacks. “We have been campaigning for uniformity in the recording processes in forces in England and Wales for some time now and whilst we support victims of anti-Muslim hatred and map, measure and monitor anti-Muslim hatred, this should be parallel with and in partnership with police forces," Fiyaz Mughal, director of Tell MAMA, which monitors attacks on Muslims in the UK, told Al Arabiya News on Wednesday. “Police forces usually receive cases which are more around the aggressive end of anti-Muslim hatred... So we warmly welcome the announcement from the Prime Minister David Cameron and this announcement also sucks the oxygen out of those groups who promote a narrative that the Government or Britain is against Muslims - it is not,” he added. Mughal praised the new rules, saying it will “ensure all forces categorize anti-Muslim hate.” According to Tell MAMA, in the past three-and-a-half-years the organization has supported more than 4,500 victims of Islamophobic attacks, resulting in what it says were hundreds of arrests. A South Yorkshire Police spokesman told the Mirror newspaper in 2013 that its crime-management system did not “facilitate the recording of anti-Muslim hate crime separately to other forms of religious hate crimes.” The spokesman added that the system solely relied “on what information is entered by the inputter recording the crime.” On the other side, welcoming the new rules many Muslim leaders were reluctant to praise them before seeing its effect in practice. SM/IINA