After talking to different police units in the work that we are doing, one of the biggest barriers in charging someone with a hate crime is the requirement of having Attorney General consent for that to be considered a hate crime. We've asked for some transparency around what is considered a hate crime and what is given Attorney General consent and what is not given Attorney General consent.
As the Anti-Hate Community Leaders Group, we have not advocated for removing that requirement to have Attorney General consent, but to have some more transparency and an annual reporting mechanism of what has been given consent and what has not, so the community can have a better understanding of how that system works. When we have transparency around something, better and consistent principles will be applied to what is considered a hate crime and what is not.
I totally hear you, MP Shin, that there are people who go in to report a hate crime and they are told that, unfortunately, they are not able to consider [Technical difficulty—Editor] right now for any crime to be considered a hate crime.
It's looking back at some of those gaps and those policies to see how we can eliminate some of those gaps and how to make the process more transparent. Community groups like CASSA can then [Technical difficulty—Editor] and educate the community on what they need to do to report hate crimes and what factors they need to fulfill before they go to the police and report hate crimes.
The other thing that was discussed this morning was that third party reporting is so important. As we know, a lot of communities don't have a lot of trust in law enforcement. The Muslim community, especially with Muslim women, are afraid of being shamed and victim-blamed. That is a real thing. We need to really see how we can improve that entire system of reporting, so that communities have better trust in law enforcement when they report hate crimes. If they're not comfortable reporting it to law enforcement, there should be third party mechanisms, like organizations that are doing close work with the community already.
We work with a lot of organizations. Given some resources, they would be more than happy to take on that role to take hate incident reports from their communities because they already have the trust from the community. They would take that and then they would funnel that to the police.
I think a lot of measures can be done to support that process.