Police recorded hate crime
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has attributed recent increases in some categories of police
recorded crime to improvements in police recording rather than a real increase in offences.6 For
example, there was a 27 per cent increase in the overall number of police recorded violence against
the person offences between 2014/15 and 2015/16 while the Crime Survey for England and Wales
estimates for violent crime showed no significant change in levels of violence compared with the
previous survey year.
Additionally, work undertaken by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and published in July 2015
indicated little change in the level of violent incidents coming to the attention of the police at the same
time that the number of recorded offences was increasing. As a third (33%) of police recorded hate
crime is for violence against the person offences, any changes in recording practices affecting levels
of overall violence may be a factor in the trend in overall hate crime. An additional cause of the rise in
hate crime may be an improved identification of motivating factors behind an offence, with police
forces more robustly monitoring and recording hate crime since the Paris attacks in 2015.
There has been some evidence and anecdotal reports7 to suggest that the increases in race and
religious hate crimes may be partly due to higher levels of hate crime following specific highly
publicised incidents (or trigger events8,9). These are discussed in more detail below.
Race and religious hate crimes
The number of race hate crimes increased by 15 per cent (up 6,557, to 49,419 offences; Table 2)
between 2014/15 and 2015/16. Over the same period, religious hate crime increased by 34 per cent
(up 1,107 to 4,400 offences; Table 2).
As mentioned in the Introduction, the police have the option to record some offences as racially or
religiously aggravated. While not