Public acts of hostility and harassment against disabled people are characterised in law as hate crime when they are accompanied by evidence of prejudice. But, rather than protecting and deterring, the offence of hate crime invites and depends on the identification of a person as different, thereby reinforcing culturally embedded ideas of normality and disability. As a result the law is based on disablist assumptions of disabled people as inferior. The law is also based on ideas and practice that presume ablebodiedness and thereby risks marginalising disabled people with whom the criminal justice system can find it difficult to work.