Tens of thousands of offences go unreported Less than two out of 10 allegations investigated Police accused of
Andrew Bolland.Photo courtesy pcstanleywmp.wordpress.com
making statistics look good.
Community news. Tens of thousands of race hate crimes are unreported every year, disturbing new figures reveal, as community leaders warn they do not have faith in the police to investigate such offences. Less than a fifth of race hate complaints are investigated by police. An official government study shows that proportion of hate crimes being recorded by police in England and Wales has fallen by almost 20 per cent in the last three years.
Less than a fifth of allegations of racial or religiously motivated crimes are now investigated by officers, and fewer than one in three of these results in court proceedings let alone convictions.
Campaigners claimed the discrepancy showed the police were “no longer looking” for hate crime and were more interested in showing that recorded crime was falling than encouraging victims to come forward.
“There is pressure on the police not to look for these crimes,” said Fiyaz Mughal, who runs the anti- Muslim violence helpline Mama.
“Who would want to be a chief constable or police and crime commission reporting increased rates of racially aggravated crime? All they want to do is reduce crime levels.”
The Home Office report compared data gathered from the annual Crime Survey – which estimates the total extent of crime in the UK – with actual incidents reported to police.
Based on two years of data it found that there were an estimated 278,000 hate crimes a year – of which 154,000 had an element of racial motivation.
But official police figures recorded only 42,236 hate crime offences in the last year and just 30,000 racially aggravated crimes – 15 per cent of the total reported in the crime survey.
Fiyaz Mughai OBE. Photo courtesy www.obv.org.uk
The statisticians who compiled the report said that it was possible that some crimes – which the victim believed to be racially motivated – were not being assessed as such by police.
Race charities said the discrepancy was also due to ethnic minority groups not having confidence in the criminal justice system and not reporting race hate crimes in the first place.
“I don’t believe that hate crime is falling, despite what the recorded crime figures suggest,” Andrew Bolland, partnership manager at the charity Stop Hate.
Jon Burnett, a researcher at the educational charity the Institute for Race Relations, said he believed the discrepancy was probably due to a combination of factors.
“We know from our work that many hate crimes do not get reported because of experience or perception that the police will not thoroughly investigate them.”
Assistant Chief Constable Drew Harris, the national policing lead for hate crime, admitted: “There is a significant difference between police recorded hate crime and the Crime Survey because hate crime is still massively under-reported.”
Crime prevention minister Norman Baker tried to reassure victims that they would get support if they came forward. “We are working with the police to increase reporting.” Article courtesy: www.newspaperdirect.com |
