Racially Motivated Crime

I would like to ask how many racially motivated crimes were recorded in the most recent year and for the year 1999? I would also like to ask what the sanction detection rate was for both of those years for racially motivated crime. For both years please provide the overall sanction detection rate for ALL crimes. Please provide the exact number and the percentage for all sets of figures.

If you don't have figures for as far back as 1999 please provide it for the closest year. If you don't have racially motivated as a category please provide “hate” crime or however you label similar crimes.

Can I ask as before for the figures for the most recent year. With regard to the figures for 1999, I realise this not going to be possible and as I need a comparison year I would like to ask for figures from 2007. So to clarify I would like two years of figures, one the most recent calendar year and the other for 2007.

In accordance with section 1(1) (b) of the Act our response is provided below;

Please find below our researchers response to your FOI request regarding racially motivated crimes. I thought it might be useful to leave the researchers comments in as it helps explain the figures.

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I first looked at crimes which are classified as Racially aggravated or Racially or religiously aggravated in 2007 and 2010. The numbers and sanction detection rates are shown in the table below -

There is an obvious caveat with the above in that not all of these crimes are categorised as solely racially aggravated - some have the 'or religiously' epithet too. That said I think the evidence suggests that the great majority of crimes with the dual title were in fact racially motivated. I included the Hate Crime flag in my searches and found -

2007 - 499 crimes overall of which 41 were classified as racially or religiously aggravated. Of these 26 had a racist flag and 2 had both a racist and faith hate flag. 13 had no flag.

2010 - 382 crimes overall of which 267 were classified as racially or religiously aggravated. Of these 130 had a racist flag and 1 had a faith hate flag. There were none with both flags. 136 had no flag at all. If the one crime with the faith hate flag were excluded the total of racially motivated crimes for 2010 would be 381 and the sanction detection rate 40.4%.

The request also asked for Sanction Detection rates for ALL crimes in the 2007 and 2010 calendar years. The results were -

The request mentioned searching for Hate Crimes if racially motivated were not available. I thought it might help to give you these figures too as a comparison.

The results below are of a search for all crimes where a Racist hate crime flag was set in 2007 and 2010 -

The caveat with these is that although they include crimes which were not categorised as racially or racially/religiously aggravated, but had a racist aspect, the use of the flag cannot be taken as standard (although usage has improved since 2007).

Please note the following:

Police forces in the United Kingdom are routinely required to provide crime statistics to government bodies and the recording criteria is set nationally. However, the systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the crime data. It should be noted that for these reasons this force's response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with any other response you may receive.