Annex A- Hate crime and the EU Referendum
On Thursday 23 June 2016, the EU referendum took place and the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Following this result, information released by the National Police Chiefs’ Council( NPCC), which covers Northern Ireland as well as England and Wales, showed that there had been an increase in the level of reported and recorded hate crime. This Annex provides information on the level of police recorded hate crime around the time of the EU Referendum as notified to the Home Office. Data for July 2016 onwards are provisional but have been presented in this Annex in response to the interest in hate crime following the referendum result.
As stated in the introduction, there are five centrally monitored strands of hate crime:
� race or ethnicity;
� religion or beliefs;
� sexual orientation;
� disability; and
� transgender identity.
The College of Policing has provided operational guidance( published in 2014) to police forces around hate crime, including information on what can be covered by race hate crime. 17 The guidance states:
“ Race hate crime can include any group defined by race, colour, nationality or ethnic or national origin, including countries within the UK, and Gypsy or Irish Travellers. It automatically includes a person who is targeted because they are an asylum seeker or refugee as this is intrinsically linked to their ethnicity and origins. Policy and legislation takes a‘ human rights’ approach and covers majority as well as minority groups.”
This means that crimes with a xenophobic element( such as graffiti targeting certain nationalities) can be recorded as race hate crimes by the police.
Following the EU Referendum, the NPCC requested weekly returns from police forces across England, Wales, and Northern Ireland to measure the level of hate crime in a timely way. The NPCC released a series of reports based on these figures, the last of which was published on 7 September. This report stated that following a sharp increase in July, the level of hate crime reports per week in England and Wales and Northern Ireland had been declining in August – to a level seen in earlier 2016( although levels were higher than seen in 2015). Due to this, the NPCC have now ended their weekly collection of hate crime data.
For further information, please see: http:// news. npcc. police. uk / releases / tackling-hate-crime-remains-apriority.
As mentioned in the Introduction, the police have the option to record some offences as racially or religiously aggravated( see Table 1). While not covering all hate crime offences, in practice the majority of race or religious hate crimes that the police record will come under one of these aggravated offence codes. Therefore, if there has been an increase in hate crime following the EU Referendum, we would also expect to see an increase in the number of racially or religiously aggravated offences over the same time period.
The data the Home Office receives from the police in the main police recorded crime return for these racially or religiously aggravated offences are available on a monthly basis 18, allowing the level of these offences to be shown around the time of the EU Referendum.
17 See http:// www. report-it. org. uk / files / hate _ crime _ operational _ guidance. pdf
17