THE sentencing of a teenager who racially abused and threatened doctors and nurses at Dorset County Hospital1 has been welcomed as partners aim to raise awareness of hate crimes. Billy Wiedenbruch, 19, has been jailed after a ‘horrible’ incident at the Dorchester2 hospital at the weekend where he abused staff and made threats to attack them. It comes as the Crown Prosecution Service asks for community views to help shape future policy to improve the response to racially and religiously aggravated hate crime, and homophobic and transphobic hate crime.
In the Wessex region the CPS said it had prosecuted 529 racially and religiously aggravated hate crimes between June 2015 and June 2016, with 86.4 per cent resulting in a conviction – a conviction rate above the national average. Breaking the figures down for Dorset, there were 97 cases with a 82.5 per cent conviction rate. For the same period, the CPS prosecuted 82 homophobic and transphobic hate crimes across Wessex, with 92.7 per cent resulting in a conviction, providing the highest conviction rate nationally for a CPS Area for victims.
In the Dorset area there were 11 cases with a 81.8 per cent conviction rate. Steve Hoolohan, Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor, CPS Wessex (Hampshire and Isle of Wight, Dorset and Wiltshire) said: Hate crime has a huge impact not only on the victim but on the wider communities, and has no place in our society. We are looking at our policy on prosecuting these crimes and actively seeking the views of communities to help us shape our policies.”
The CPS said Wiedenbruch attended Dorset County Hospital as a patient on Saturday where he was “racially abusive to doctors, nurses and security staff also making threats to assault them”. He was kept in custody over the weekend and appeared before Weymouth Magistrates Court yesterday where he pleaded guilty to a Section 4A Public Order Act 1986 charge of causing harassment, alarm and distress.
Widenbruch was sentenced to 10 weeks imprisonment. The magistrates indicated that had this not been a hate crime the sentence would have been only eight weeks. Mr Hoolohan added: “We would like to thank the staff at Dorset County Hospital for their support and swift reporting of this horrible incident. Both the manner and speed in which the court dealt with this matter can leave no-one in any doubt of how seriously these types of offences are taken by the Criminal Justice System as a whole .
A spokesperson for Dorset County Hospital said: We take any incidents of abuse against our staff extremely seriously and we operate a zero tolerance policy.
We are grateful for the positive working relationship we have with local police which ensures a swift response to support our staff when required.
References
- ^ Dorset County Hospital (www.dorsetecho.co.uk)
- ^ Dorchester (www.dorsetecho.co.uk)
