1 Introduction
1.1 OVERVIEW
This publication provides information on the number of hate crimes recorded by the police in England
and Wales in 2015/16. Additionally, information on levels of hate crime around the time of the EU
Referendum which took place on the 23 June 2016 is presented in Annex A. This includes data that
have not been reconciled with police forces.
Additional information on the number of hate crimes reported by respondents to the Crime Survey for
England and Wales (CSEW) was last published in Hate crime, England and Wales, 2014/15 for
combined survey years 2012/13, 2013/14 and 2014/15. Due to the low volume of hate crime incidents
in the sample survey, the figures are not sufficiently robust to report for a single year of the CSEW.
The analysis has not been updated this year to avoid an overlap in the years included in the threeyear dataset.
Hate crimes recorded by the police
Hate crime is defined as ‘any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to
be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic.’ This
common definition was agreed in 2007 by the police, Crown Prosecution Service, Prison Service (now
the National Offender Management Service) and other agencies that make up the criminal justice
system. There are five centrally monitored strands of hate crime:
race or ethnicity;
religion or beliefs;
sexual orientation;
disability; and
transgender identity.
Hate crimes are a subset of notifiable crimes that are recorded by the police and make up around two
per cent of such crimes (excluding fraud, based on police recorded crime figures for 2015/16, see
Crime in England and Wales, Year Ending March 2016).
In the process of recording a crime, police can flag an offence as being motivated by one or more of
the five monitored strands2 listed above (for example, an offence can be motivated by hostility towards
the victim’s race and religion). Figures in this bulletin show both how many hate crime offences the
police recorded, and how many motivating factors these offences covered (for more information see
Annex B).
Further information on how the police record hate crime can be found in the Hate Crime Operational
Guidance3 publication. Around five per cent of hate crime offences in 2015/16 are estimated to have
involved more than one motivating factor, the majority of these were hate crimes related to both race
and religion.4
Hate crimes and racially or religiously aggravated offences
There are some offences in the main police recorded crime collection which have a specific racially or
religiously motivated element. These are defined by statute and constitute a set of offences which are
distinct from their non-racially or religiously aggravated equivalents (the full list of these is shown in
2
Forces may collect wider hate crime data; these are not centrally monitored by the Home Office.
http://www.report-it.org.uk/files/hate_crime_operational_guidance.pdf
4
Estimation based upon data from 24 forces who supplied data to the Home Office Data Hub.
3
2