The State of Hate in the UK — December 2021

In the week before Christmas 2021, former police officer Harry Miller won a three-year legal struggle at the Court of Appeal, arguing against the recording by police of nebulous ‘non-crime hate incidents’, which are defined by the College of Policing as an incident ‘where it is established that a criminal offence has not taken place, but the victim or any other person perceives that the incident was motivated wholly or partially by hostility, it should be recorded and flagged as a non-crime hate incident.’ In ruling, Judge Dame Victoria Sharp asserted that such incidents are more about the perceived intent rather than the actual motivations, suggested that the police do not have the resources or capacity to deal with the enormous volume of such complaints and warned of ‘the chilling effect which this may have on the legitimate exercise of freedom of expression.’

Harry Miller was visited by Humberside Police after several of his tweets were reported as ‘transphobic’, one of which was ‘I was assigned mammal at birth, but my orientation is fish. Don’t mis-species me’. The judge in this case proved that there remains a semblance of balance on the scales of justice.

The case in question highlighted the absurdity of such public-funded police use of time in the context of severe questions being asked of the policing institute in the wake of Wayne Couzen’s murder of Sarah Everard, allegations of sexist and unprofessional culture within police forces and Cressida Dick’s broader leadership of the Met amid a flurry of recent, damning inquests.

At the same time, we are told that the UK is systemically racist; that Brexit empowered bigots, little Englanders and white supremacists; that the Conservative party encourages Islamophobia; that anti-immigration and nativism is on the march. So delving into the statistics on actual hate crimes may be instructive as to the state of Britain’s cultural attitudes as we turn into the third year of the 2020’s — who are the victims, the perpetrators, what are the trends, motivations and what lessons can we learn? (Note- page numbers given below refer to the Parliamentary Briefing paper published November 2021 which summarises police-recorded and Crime Survey of England and Wales data)

Volume of Hate Crimes

The first point of note is that contrary to much media hysteria — and indeed the headline item from the 2020–2021 Hate Crime Bulletin indicating a continuous YoY increase in police-recorded hate crimes — such incidents are actually continuing their long-term decline. As is pointed out multiple times, these increases and the scary looking graph they create, ‘have been driven by improvements in crime recording and a better identification of what constitutes a hate crime…(and) have been mainly driven by improvements in crime recording by the police.’ By contrast, the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), according to the ONS, ‘is a better indicator of long-term trends than police recorded crime. It is unaffected by changes in levels of reporting to the police or police recording practices’ and shows a significant decline since 2008/9 — ‘According to the CSEW, the estimated number of hate crime incidents experienced by adults aged 16 and over fell from 307,000 in the combined year ending March 2008/2009 surveys to 190,000 in the combined year ending March 2018/2019/2020 surveys, a fall of 38 per cent.’[1]

This declining trend is supported by CPS prosecution data which has declined significantly from both 2011/12 and 2015/16 peaks while the proportion of unsuccessful convictions also declines (see below). So to summarise the broad picture, more hate crimes are being reported to — and recorded by — the police every year, but actual victim and prosecution numbers from the CSEW and CPS suggest the real picture is one of declining hate crime incidents alongside an increasing proportion of successful convictions.

However, the police-recorded statistics do offer some interesting insights:

Religion — in 2016, the Home Office began collecting data on the religious affiliation of the victims. Two religions markedly stand out as victims — Islam constituting 45% of all religiously-motivated hate crimes and Judaism 22%. Perhaps this is not surprising given how often antisemitism and islamophobia are talked about, but when weighted for population (ONS’ 2018 figures suggest a Muslim population of 3,372,966, and a Jewish population of 336,965) — about 1 in 260 UK Jews experienced a hate crime in 2021 compared to 1 in 1250 Muslims, meaning a Jew is almost 5 times more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Muslim is. While neither makes for good reading, it does underline that Jews remain perhaps the most persecuted (certainly the most religiously persecuted) minority in the UK.

Annual Cycles — the Parliamentary Briefing paper monthly data shows the following (pg. 15): as noted, racially/religiously motivated hate crime tends towards a cyclical trend of peaking during summer months and fading over winter. Lines added to the graph to highlight notable events show a peak slightly before the EU referendum result after which it dropped, no seemingly clear relationship to the multiple terrorist incidents in 2017 and the highest recorded month of incidents during the BLM protests/vandalism over summer 2020 — an event which more than twice as many UK BAME citizens said did more harm than good for racial tension in an Opinium poll (a majority of every polled demographic agreed)

Victims — Profile

Race still consists of the bulk of hate crimes — despite ‘Antiblackness’ being touted as the predominant form of discrimination, the CSEW data shows that ‘Asian/British Asian’ and ‘Other’ ethnic groups (which includes Arabs) face the highest levels of racial hate crime victimisation. The Black ethnic grouping did see a modest increase in the most recent data available, likely driven by the spike during the 2020 BLM protests, as noted above. Still, the percentage of victims has fallen significantly for all non-white ethnic groups since 2007–2009.

In London, ‘those of Black ethnicity constituted the largest proportion (30%) of all victims to have suffered racist hate crime followed by those of Asian and White-North European ethnicity (25% each)’ (pg. 26)

The main characteristics that correlate with likelihood of being a victim of a hate crime are given in Appendix Table 11 of the 2019–20 Hate Crime Statistics. These are age (16–24), Gender (male), Ethnic group (‘Other’), Religion (Muslim, but Jewish not included in data), Marital status (Separated), Employment status (long-term sick or unemployed), Occupation (not classified or never worked/long-term unemployed) and Disabled.

The percentage of those worried about being a victim of a hate crime (Appendix Table 19 from above source) is highest for Asian and Black respondents (16% and 13% respectively). Interestingly, the ‘Other’ ethnic group has the second-lowest concern (5%) behind White respondents, despite figures above demonstrating they are most likely to be victims.

Islamophobia and Antisemitism in London

London data on religiously-motivated hate crimes suggest Islamophobic incidents peaked in 2017–18, coinciding with several terrorist incidents, and has been declining ever since:

By contrast, antisemitic incidents in London are increasing modestly (see above — London contains the vast majority of the UK’s Jewish population). The Community Security Trust (CST) who record anti-Jewish incidents in the UK show significant increases since 2015 (with a slight drop in 2020), while data from the first 6 months of 2021 were the highest ever recorded for a January-June period (1,308 incidents — which is almost 80% of 2020’s entire annual total above) — there is a clear correlation between the public salience of Israel-Palestine conflicts and antisemitic incidents.

‘The CST also notes the number of antisemitic incidents is likely to be significantly higher than those reported to the police and the CST. A 2018 survey of Jewish experiences and perceptions of antisemitism in the EU found that 76% of British Jews who experienced antisemitic harassment over the previous five years did not report it to the police or any other organisation.’ (pg. 33)

Offenders by Ethnicity

This data is particularly revealing and suggests a developing proportional change in who is perpetrating hate crime incidents (based on conviction data). As the chart below suggests, between 2013 and 2020, the convictions for racial/religiously aggravated hate crimes are increasing slightly YoY among the Black and Asian ethnic groupings, while Whites still make up the majority (80%) of hate crime perpetrators.

ONS population estimates of the UK’s ethnic demography from 2019 are White (84.8%), Asian (8%) Black (3.5%), Mixed (1.8%) and Other (1.9%). Despite the Black ethnic group not changing much as a proportion of population between the 2011 Census and 2019 estimates (3.3% to 3.5%), in 2020, they disproportionately committed religious/racial hate crimes at a rate more than 2.5 times that of their population, and despite having a population more than half the size of the Asian demographic, are convicted of more hate crimes. This could be spun as more evidence of a systemically racist justice system over-convicting the Black population, except the conviction rates (pg. 43) are lower than that for Whites and Asians in every year 2013–2020.

Scotland

Lastly, the data from Scotland reveals an interesting shift in type of hate crimes being committed. Over the last 6 years in England and Wales, the proportion of each type of hate crime (Race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, transgender) has remained relatively consistent, with a slight increase in homosexual hate crimes as a proportion of the total (12% in 2015/16 to 15% in 2020/21 — pg. 11)

In Scotland however, this trend is magnified at a much higher rate. Charged hate crimes centred on sexual orientation accounted for 8% of all hate crimes in 2010/11 and 29% in 2020/21 (see chart below). While actual incidents of race and religious hate crimes decreased over the period, the numbers for hate crimes involving disability and sexual orientation have increased massively (albeit from a lower base), from 48 to 448 and 452 to 1,580 respectively.

From a racial perspective, Pakistanis, closely followed by Blacks were the predominant victims of hate crimes recorded by police in Scotland, at 18% and 17% of total victims respectively.

Conclusion

So what summaries can be drawn from the data? Hate crimes are being reported more and more often every year to the police, but CSEW and CPS conviction data suggest actual hate crimes are falling YoY and are at much lower levels than in 2008/09. Perhaps this disconnect is linked to the flawed conflation of ‘microaggressions’ with hate or social media comments being increasingly reported to police. While the EU referendum correlated with a rise in hate crimes, it is not clear whether there is a direct link or whether the cyclical nature of hate crime spikes (peaking every summer) is an explanation — particularly as hate crimes had peaked just prior to the referendum result and continued their downward trajectory. Similarly, BLM protests occurred in summertime, but the peak was both higher and longer sustained than the annual cyclical norm, suggesting it may have exerted influence on an increase in hate crimes and supports a UK poll where all polled demographics responded that the BLM movement had done more to damage racial relations than help them.

On a per capita basis, Asians and the ‘Other’ ethnic group are the most likely to be victims of racial hate crimes, and Blacks are increasingly most likely to be convicted of perpetrating racial/religious hate crimes, at a rate 2.5 times that of their population size. Religious hate crimes target Muslims most often but when weighted for population, Jews are by far more likely (5x that of Muslims) to be victims, and while Islamophobic incidents are decreasing in London in recent years, incidents against Jews are increasing. This is particularly relevant, as Judaism is omitted as a category from most of the religious hate crime statistics given in other summaries (for example, last year’s summary here) without any seeming explanation.

Scotland witnesses a different trend, where increasingly hate crimes are constituted of attacks based on the victim’s sexual orientation and disability, incidents of which are going up in absolute terms for both types.

The data suggests that hate crime is still prevalent and disproportionately affects minorities, but continues to slowly decrease over time. More work should be done to understand the victim’s characteristics and associated likelihood of being attacked, to provide better support and focus on the socioeconomic and demographic conditions that seemingly make hate crime more likely in particular instances. More disaggregation to understand the ‘Other’ ethnic grouping more accurately would also be useful. Similar work should look at characteristics of perpetrators to identify the conditions (and can therefore offer more targeted mitigation strategies such as education) that make them more likely to commit hate crimes. Conviction data is available by ethnicity but beyond that there is nowhere near the same level of granular recorded criteria for perpetrators as exists for victims. In Scotland, work should be undertaken to understand why sexual-orientation/disability-motivated hate crimes are increasing; whether it is due to a change in police recording, or a more empowered atmosphere for reporting, or in the worst-case is being driven by increased homophobia/anti-disability sentiments.

[1] CSEW is produced every few years and so uses aggregates of multiple year-end data for its estimates