Hate crime levels are rising in England and Wales. How bad is it where you live?
The Bureau sent Freedom of Information Requests to every police force in England and Wales, asking them to provide complete outcome data for all hate crimes recorded in 2014/15 and, separately, 2015/16.
Forty police forces responded to our request. Because of discrepancies in their recording systems, particularly among smaller forces, we weren’t able to perform detailed comparisons of each of them. However, we are able to map changes in recorded hate crime at a regional level.
There are significant regional differences, but the vast majority have seen increases in recorded hate crime. West Yorkshire, which has a large Muslim population, has seen the greatest rise, with recorded hate crimes up 69% from the previous year. Out of the 40 respondents, six forces have seen a fall. To see how your region compares, hover your mouse over the map and click for the data.
The data obtained by the Bureau revealed that the chances of police or prosecutors taking action against hate crime offenders have plummeted over the last year. Victims of hate crime now have only a one in four chance of seeing a perpetrator charged, cautioned or dealt with in some other way by the police – down from one in three in the previous year.
Official explanations for the drop vary, with some forces blaming cuts, and others lack of cooperation from victims.
A note on methodology: Some forces responded with outome data for hate crimes broken into strands (racist, homophobic etc.) We have aggregated these strands to arrive at figures for all hate crime. Because a small number of hate crimes will be tagged with two or more hate crime indicators, our figures will be slightly larger than the total number of hate crimes but it should not dramatically effect the percentage change. We did not receive adequate responses from Essex, Suffolk and South Yorkshire forces, so there is no data for those areas on the map.
